Ken Herrmann

Alexander Jaus, Constantin Seibold, Simon Reiß et al.

Pathological structures in medical images are typically deviations from the expected anatomy of a patient. While clinicians consider this interplay between anatomy and pathology, recent deep learning algorithms specialize in recognizing either one of the two, rarely considering the patient's body from such a joint perspective. In this paper, we develop a generalist segmentation model that combines anatomical and pathological information, aiming to enhance the segmentation accuracy of pathological features. Our Anatomy-Pathology Exchange (APEx) training utilizes a query-based segmentation transformer which decodes a joint feature space into query-representations for human anatomy and interleaves them via a mixing strategy into the pathology-decoder for anatomy-informed pathology predictions. In doing so, we are able to report the best results across the board on FDG-PET-CT and Chest X-Ray pathology segmentation tasks with a margin of up to 3.3% as compared to strong baseline methods. Code and models will be publicly available at github.com/alexanderjaus/APEx.

Hamza Kalisch, Fabian Hörst, Ken Herrmann et al.

Lesion segmentation in PET/CT imaging is essential for precise tumor characterization, which supports personalized treatment planning and enhances diagnostic precision in oncology. However, accurate manual segmentation of lesions is time-consuming and prone to inter-observer variability. Given the rising demand and clinical use of PET/CT, automated segmentation methods, particularly deep-learning-based approaches, have become increasingly more relevant. The autoPET III Challenge focuses on advancing automated segmentation of tumor lesions in PET/CT images in a multitracer multicenter setting, addressing the clinical need for quantitative, robust, and generalizable solutions. Building on previous challenges, the third iteration of the autoPET challenge introduces a more diverse dataset featuring two different tracers (FDG and PSMA) from two clinical centers. To this extent, we developed a classifier that identifies the tracer of the given PET/CT based on the Maximum Intensity Projection of the PET scan. We trained two individual nnUNet-ensembles for each tracer where anatomical labels are included as a multi-label task to enhance the model's performance. Our final submission achieves cross-validation Dice scores of 76.90% and 61.33% for the publicly available FDG and PSMA datasets, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/hakal104/autoPETIII/ .

Jonas Nasimzada, Jens Kleesiek, Ken Herrmann et al.

Recognizing pain in video is crucial for improving patient-computer interaction systems, yet traditional data collection in this domain raises significant ethical and logistical challenges. This study introduces a novel approach that leverages synthetic data to enhance video-based pain recognition models, providing an ethical and scalable alternative. We present a pipeline that synthesizes realistic 3D facial models by capturing nuanced facial movements from a small participant pool, and mapping these onto diverse synthetic avatars. This process generates 8,600 synthetic faces, accurately reflecting genuine pain expressions from varied angles and perspectives. Utilizing advanced facial capture techniques, and leveraging public datasets like CelebV-HQ and FFHQ-UV for demographic diversity, our new synthetic dataset significantly enhances model training while ensuring privacy by anonymizing identities through facial replacements. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained on combinations of synthetic data paired with a small amount of real participants achieve superior performance in pain recognition, effectively bridging the gap between synthetic simulations and real-world applications. Our approach addresses data scarcity and ethical concerns, offering a new solution for pain detection and opening new avenues for research in privacy-preserving dataset generation. All resources are publicly available to encourage further innovation in this field.