Qian Wang

Yan Kong, Sheng Wang, Jiangdong Cai et al.

Accurate detection of vulvovaginal candidiasis is critical for women's health, yet its sparse distribution and visually ambiguous characteristics pose significant challenges for accurate identification by pathologists and neural networks alike. Our eye-tracking data reveals that areas garnering sustained attention - yet not marked by experts after deliberation - are often aligned with false positives of neural networks. Leveraging this finding, we introduce Gaze-DETR, a pioneering method that integrates gaze data to enhance neural network precision by diminishing false positives. Gaze-DETR incorporates a universal gaze-guided warm-up protocol applicable across various detection methods and a gaze-guided rectification strategy specifically designed for DETR-based models. Our comprehensive tests confirm that Gaze-DETR surpasses existing leading methods, showcasing remarkable improvements in detection accuracy and generalizability.

Sheng Wang, Zixu Zhuang, Xi Ouyang et al.

Recent self-supervised contrastive learning methods greatly benefit from the Siamese structure that aims to minimizing distances between positive pairs. These methods usually apply random data augmentation to input images, expecting the augmented views of the same images to be similar and positively paired. However, random augmentation may overlook image semantic information and degrade the quality of augmented views in contrastive learning. This issue becomes more challenging in medical images since the abnormalities related to diseases can be tiny, and are easy to be corrupted (e.g., being cropped out) in the current scheme of random augmentation. In this work, we first demonstrate that, for widely-used X-ray images, the conventional augmentation prevalent in contrastive pre-training can affect the performance of the downstream diagnosis or classification tasks. Then, we propose a novel augmentation method, i.e., FocusContrast, to learn from radiologists' gaze in diagnosis and generate contrastive views for medical images with guidance from radiologists' visual attention. Specifically, we track the gaze movement of radiologists and model their visual attention when reading to diagnose X-ray images. The learned model can predict visual attention of the radiologists given a new input image, and further guide the attention-aware augmentation that hardly neglects the disease-related abnormalities. As a plug-and-play and framework-agnostic module, FocusContrast consistently improves state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods of SimCLR, MoCo, and BYOL by 4.0~7.0% in classification accuracy on a knee X-ray dataset.