Yaqi Wang

Ruilong Dan, Yunxiang Li, Yijie Wang et al.

Precise and rapid categorization of images in the B-scan ultrasound modality is vital for diagnosing ocular diseases. Nevertheless, distinguishing various diseases in ultrasound still challenges experienced ophthalmologists. Thus a novel contrastive disentangled network (CDNet) is developed in this work, aiming to tackle the fine-grained image categorization (FGIC) challenges of ocular abnormalities in ultrasound images, including intraocular tumor (IOT), retinal detachment (RD), posterior scleral staphyloma (PSS), and vitreous hemorrhage (VH). Three essential components of CDNet are the weakly-supervised lesion localization module (WSLL), contrastive multi-zoom (CMZ) strategy, and hyperspherical contrastive disentangled loss (HCD-Loss), respectively. These components facilitate feature disentanglement for fine-grained recognition in both the input and output aspects. The proposed CDNet is validated on our ZJU Ocular Ultrasound Dataset (ZJUOUSD), consisting of 5213 samples. Furthermore, the generalization ability of CDNet is validated on two public and widely-used chest X-ray FGIC benchmarks. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed CDNet, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in the FGIC task. Code is available at: https://github.com/ZeroOneGame/CDNet-for-OUS-FGIC .

Weiwei Cui, Yaqi Wang, Yilong Li et al.

Accurate tooth volume segmentation is a prerequisite for computer-aided dental analysis. Deep learning-based tooth segmentation methods have achieved satisfying performances but require a large quantity of tooth data with ground truth. The dental data publicly available is limited meaning the existing methods can not be reproduced, evaluated and applied in clinical practice. In this paper, we establish a 3D dental CBCT dataset CTooth+, with 22 fully annotated volumes and 146 unlabeled volumes. We further evaluate several state-of-the-art tooth volume segmentation strategies based on fully-supervised learning, semi-supervised learning and active learning, and define the performance principles. This work provides a new benchmark for the tooth volume segmentation task, and the experiment can serve as the baseline for future AI-based dental imaging research and clinical application development.

Weiwei Cui, Yaqi Wang, Qianni Zhang et al.

3D tooth segmentation is a prerequisite for computer-aided dental diagnosis and treatment. However, segmenting all tooth regions manually is subjective and time-consuming. Recently, deep learning-based segmentation methods produce convincing results and reduce manual annotation efforts, but it requires a large quantity of ground truth for training. To our knowledge, there are few tooth data available for the 3D segmentation study. In this paper, we establish a fully annotated cone beam computed tomography dataset CTooth with tooth gold standard. This dataset contains 22 volumes (7363 slices) with fine tooth labels annotated by experienced radiographic interpreters. To ensure a relative even data sampling distribution, data variance is included in the CTooth including missing teeth and dental restoration. Several state-of-the-art segmentation methods are evaluated on this dataset. Afterwards, we further summarise and apply a series of 3D attention-based Unet variants for segmenting tooth volumes. This work provides a new benchmark for the tooth volume segmentation task. Experimental evidence proves that attention modules of the 3D UNet structure boost responses in tooth areas and inhibit the influence of background and noise. The best performance is achieved by 3D Unet with SKNet attention module, of 88.04 \% Dice and 78.71 \% IOU, respectively. The attention-based Unet framework outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on the CTooth dataset. The codebase and dataset are released.

Yilong Li, Yaqi Wang, Huiyu Zhou et al.

In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised cancer segmentation framework for histology images. The framework involves an effective contrastive learning scheme for extracting distinctive visual representations for segmentation. The encoder is a Deep U-Net (DU-Net) structure that contains an extra fully convolution layer compared to the normal U-Net. A contrastive learning scheme is developed to solve the problem of lacking training sets with high-quality annotations on tumour boundaries. A specific set of data augmentation techniques are employed to improve the discriminability of the learned colour features from contrastive learning. Smoothing and noise elimination are conducted using convolutional Conditional Random Fields. The experiments demonstrate competitive performance in segmentation even better than some popular supervised networks.

Yaqi Wang, Yifan Zhang, Xiaodiao Chen et al.

Computer-aided design (CAD) tools are increasingly popular in modern dental practice, particularly for treatment planning or comprehensive prognosis evaluation. In particular, the 2D panoramic X-ray image efficiently detects invisible caries, impacted teeth and supernumerary teeth in children, while the 3D dental cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) is widely used in orthodontics and endodontics due to its low radiation dose. However, there is no open-access 2D public dataset for children's teeth and no open 3D dental CBCT dataset, which limits the development of automatic algorithms for segmenting teeth and analyzing diseases. The Semi-supervised Teeth Segmentation (STS) Challenge, a pioneering event in tooth segmentation, was held as a part of the MICCAI 2023 ToothFairy Workshop on the Alibaba Tianchi platform. This challenge aims to investigate effective semi-supervised tooth segmentation algorithms to advance the field of dentistry. In this challenge, we provide two modalities including the 2D panoramic X-ray images and the 3D CBCT tooth volumes. In Task 1, the goal was to segment tooth regions in panoramic X-ray images of both adult and pediatric teeth. Task 2 involved segmenting tooth sections using CBCT volumes. Limited labelled images with mostly unlabelled ones were provided in this challenge prompt using semi-supervised algorithms for training. In the preliminary round, the challenge received registration and result submission by 434 teams, with 64 advancing to the final round. This paper summarizes the diverse methods employed by the top-ranking teams in the STS MICCAI 2023 Challenge.

Chengyu Wu, Chengkai Wang, Yaqi Wang et al.

Esophageal cancer is one of the most common types of cancer worldwide and ranks sixth in cancer-related mortality. Accurate computer-assisted diagnosis of cancer progression can help physicians effectively customize personalized treatment plans. Currently, CT-based cancer diagnosis methods have received much attention for their comprehensive ability to examine patients' conditions. However, multi-modal based methods may likely introduce information redundancy, leading to underperformance. In addition, efficient and effective interactions between multi-modal representations need to be further explored, lacking insightful exploration of prognostic correlation in multi-modality features. In this work, we introduce a multi-modal heterogeneous graph-based conditional feature-guided diffusion model for lymph node metastasis diagnosis based on CT images as well as clinical measurements and radiomics data. To explore the intricate relationships between multi-modal features, we construct a heterogeneous graph. Following this, a conditional feature-guided diffusion approach is applied to eliminate information redundancy. Moreover, we propose a masked relational representation learning strategy, aiming to uncover the latent prognostic correlations and priorities of primary tumor and lymph node image representations. Various experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/wuchengyu123/MMFusion.

Chengyu Wu, Yatao Zhang, Yaqi Wang et al.

Survival prediction for esophageal squamous cell cancer (ESCC) is crucial for doctors to assess a patient's condition and tailor treatment plans. The application and development of multi-modal deep learning in this field have attracted attention in recent years. However, the prognostically relevant features between cross-modalities have not been further explored in previous studies, which could hinder the performance of the model. Furthermore, the inherent semantic gap between different modal feature representations is also ignored. In this work, we propose a novel autoencoder-based deep learning model to predict the overall survival of the ESCC. Two novel modules were designed for multi-modal prognosis-related feature reinforcement and modeling ability enhancement. In addition, a novel joint loss was proposed to make the multi-modal feature representations more aligned. Comparison and ablation experiments demonstrated that our model can achieve satisfactory results in terms of discriminative ability, risk stratification, and the effectiveness of the proposed modules.

Yaqi Wang, Zhi Li, Chengyu Wu et al.

Orthopantomogram (OPGs) and Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) are vital for dentistry, but creating large datasets for automated tooth segmentation is hindered by the labor-intensive process of manual instance-level annotation. This research aimed to benchmark and advance semi-supervised learning (SSL) as a solution for this data scarcity problem. We organized the 2nd Semi-supervised Teeth Segmentation (STS 2024) Challenge at MICCAI 2024. We provided a large-scale dataset comprising over 90,000 2D images and 3D axial slices, which includes 2,380 OPG images and 330 CBCT scans, all featuring detailed instance-level FDI annotations on part of the data. The challenge attracted 114 (OPG) and 106 (CBCT) registered teams. To ensure algorithmic excellence and full transparency, we rigorously evaluated the valid, open-source submissions from the top 10 (OPG) and top 5 (CBCT) teams, respectively. All successful submissions were deep learning-based SSL methods. The winning semi-supervised models demonstrated impressive performance gains over a fully-supervised nnU-Net baseline trained only on the labeled data. For the 2D OPG track, the top method improved the Instance Affinity (IA) score by over 44 percentage points. For the 3D CBCT track, the winning approach boosted the Instance Dice score by 61 percentage points. This challenge confirms the substantial benefit of SSL for complex, instance-level medical image segmentation tasks where labeled data is scarce. The most effective approaches consistently leveraged hybrid semi-supervised frameworks that combined knowledge from foundational models like SAM with multi-stage, coarse-to-fine refinement pipelines. Both the challenge dataset and the participants' submitted code have been made publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/ricoleehduu/STS-Challenge-2024), ensuring transparency and reproducibility.

Yang Ding, Can Han, Sijia Du et al.

Real-time acquisition of accurate scene depth is essential for automated robotic minimally invasive surgery. Stereo matching with binocular endoscopy can provide this depth information. However, existing stereo matching methods, designed primarily for natural images, often struggle with endoscopic images due to fuzzy tissue boundaries and typically fail to meet real-time requirements for high-resolution endoscopic image inputs. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{RRESM}, a real-time stereo matching method tailored for endoscopic images. Our approach integrates a 3D Mamba Coordinate Attention module that enhances cost aggregation through position-sensitive attention maps and long-range spatial dependency modeling via the Mamba block, generating a robust cost volume without substantial computational overhead. Additionally, we introduce a High-Frequency Disparity Optimization module that refines disparity predictions near tissue boundaries by amplifying high-frequency details in the wavelet domain. Evaluations on the SCARED and SERV-CT datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art matching accuracy with a real-time inference speed of 42 FPS. The code is available at https://github.com/Sonne-Ding/RRESM.

Taicheng Guo, Xiuying Chen, Yaqi Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide array of tasks. Due to the impressive planning and reasoning abilities of LLMs, they have been used as autonomous agents to do many tasks automatically. Recently, based on the development of using one LLM as a single planning or decision-making agent, LLM-based multi-agent systems have achieved considerable progress in complex problem-solving and world simulation. To provide the community with an overview of this dynamic field, we present this survey to offer an in-depth discussion on the essential aspects of multi-agent systems based on LLMs, as well as the challenges. Our goal is for readers to gain substantial insights on the following questions: What domains and environments do LLM-based multi-agents simulate? How are these agents profiled and how do they communicate? What mechanisms contribute to the growth of agents' capacities? For those interested in delving into this field of study, we also summarize the commonly used datasets or benchmarks for them to have convenient access. To keep researchers updated on the latest studies, we maintain an open-source GitHub repository, dedicated to outlining the research on LLM-based multi-agent systems.

Jingxiong Li, Yaqi Wang, Shuai Wang et al.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is one of the most destructive pandemic after millennium, forcing the world to tackle a health crisis. Automated lung infections classification using chest X-ray (CXR) images could strengthen diagnostic capability when handling COVID-19. However, classifying COVID-19 from pneumonia cases using CXR image is a difficult task because of shared spatial characteristics, high feature variation and contrast diversity between cases. Moreover, massive data collection is impractical for a newly emerged disease, which limited the performance of data thirsty deep learning models. To address these challenges, Multiscale Attention Guided deep network with Soft Distance regularization (MAG-SD) is proposed to automatically classify COVID-19 from pneumonia CXR images. In MAG-SD, MA-Net is used to produce prediction vector and attention from multiscale feature maps. To improve the robustness of trained model and relieve the shortage of training data, attention guided augmentations along with a soft distance regularization are posed, which aims at generating meaningful augmentations and reduce noise. Our multiscale attention model achieves better classification performance on our pneumonia CXR image dataset. Plentiful experiments are proposed for MAG-SD which demonstrates its unique advantage in pneumonia classification over cutting-edge models. The code is available at https://github.com/JasonLeeGHub/MAG-SD.

Haojia Sun, Yaqi Wang, Shuting Zhang

We designed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system to provide large language models with relevant documents for answering domain-specific questions about Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). We extracted over 1,800 subpages using a greedy scraping strategy and employed a hybrid annotation process, combining manual and Mistral-generated question-answer pairs, achieving an inter-annotator agreement (IAA) score of 0.7625. Our RAG framework integrates BM25 and FAISS retrievers, enhanced with a reranker for improved document retrieval accuracy. Experimental results show that the RAG system significantly outperforms a non-RAG baseline, particularly in time-sensitive and complex queries, with an F1 score improvement from 5.45% to 42.21% and recall of 56.18%. This study demonstrates the potential of RAG systems in enhancing answer precision and relevance, while identifying areas for further optimization in document retrieval and model training.

Yaqi Wang, Haipei Xu

Recently, as Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive emerging capabilities and gained widespread popularity, research on LLM-based search agents has proliferated. In real-world situations, users often input contextual and highly personalized queries to chatbots, challenging LLMs to capture context and generate appropriate answers. However, much of the prior research has not focused specifically on authentic human-machine dialogue scenarios. It also ignores the important balance between response quality and computational cost by forcing all queries to follow the same agent process. To address these gaps, we propose a Strategy-Router Search Agent (SRSA), routing different queries to appropriate search strategies and enabling fine-grained serial searches to obtain high-quality results at a relatively low cost. To evaluate our work, we introduce a new dataset, Contextual Query Enhancement Dataset (CQED), comprising contextual queries to simulate authentic and daily interactions between humans and chatbots. Using LLM-based automatic evaluation metrics, we assessed SRSA's performance in terms of informativeness, completeness, novelty, and actionability. To conclude, SRSA provides an approach that resolves the issue of simple serial searches leading to degenerate answers for lengthy and contextual queries, effectively and efficiently parses complex user queries, and generates more comprehensive and informative responses without fine-tuning an LLM.

Peiying Zhang, Xingzhe Huang, Yaqi Wang et al.

Natural language processing (NLP) task has achieved excellent performance in many fields, including semantic understanding, automatic summarization, image recognition and so on. However, most of the neural network models for NLP extract the text in a fine-grained way, which is not conducive to grasp the meaning of the text from a global perspective. To alleviate the problem, the combination of the traditional statistical method and deep learning model as well as a novel model based on multi model nonlinear fusion are proposed in this paper. The model uses the Jaccard coefficient based on part of speech, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) and word2vec-CNN algorithm to measure the similarity of sentences respectively. According to the calculation accuracy of each model, the normalized weight coefficient is obtained and the calculation results are compared. The weighted vector is input into the fully connected neural network to give the final classification results. As a result, the statistical sentence similarity evaluation algorithm reduces the granularity of feature extraction, so it can grasp the sentence features globally. Experimental results show that the matching of sentence similarity calculation method based on multi model nonlinear fusion is 84%, and the F1 value of the model is 75%.

Yunxiang Li, Jingxiong Li, Ruilong Dan et al.

Accurate segmentation is a crucial step in medical image analysis and applying supervised machine learning to segment the organs or lesions has been substantiated effective. However, it is costly to perform data annotation that provides ground truth labels for training the supervised algorithms, and the high variance of data that comes from different domains tends to severely degrade system performance over cross-site or cross-modality datasets. To mitigate this problem, a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method named dispensed Transformer network (DTNet) is introduced in this paper. Our novel DTNet contains three modules. First, a dispensed residual transformer block is designed, which realizes global attention by dispensed interleaving operation and deals with the excessive computational cost and GPU memory usage of the Transformer. Second, a multi-scale consistency regularization is proposed to alleviate the loss of details in the low-resolution output for better feature alignment. Finally, a feature ranking discriminator is introduced to automatically assign different weights to domain-gap features to lessen the feature distribution distance, reducing the performance shift of two domains. The proposed method is evaluated on large fluorescein angiography (FA) retinal nonperfusion (RNP) cross-site dataset with 676 images and a wide used cross-modality dataset from the MM-WHS challenge. Extensive results demonstrate that our proposed network achieves the best performance in comparison with several state-of-the-art techniques.

Hao Peng, Guofeng Tong, Zheng Li et al.

In this paper, we investigate the combination of voxel-based methods and point-based methods, and propose a novel end-to-end two-stage 3D object detector named SGNet for point clouds scenes. The voxel-based methods voxelize the scene to regular grids, which can be processed with the current advanced feature learning frameworks based on convolutional layers for semantic feature learning. Whereas the point-based methods can better extract the geometric feature of the point due to the coordinate reservations. The combination of the two is an effective solution for 3D object detection from point clouds. However, most current methods use a voxel-based detection head with anchors for final classification and localization. Although the preset anchors cover the entire scene, it is not suitable for point clouds detection tasks with larger scenes and multiple categories due to the limitation of voxel size. In this paper, we propose a voxel-to-point module (VTPM) that captures semantic and geometric features. The VTPM is a Voxel-Point-Based Module that finally implements 3D object detection in point space, which is more conducive to the detection of small-size objects and avoids the presets of anchors in inference stage. In addition, a Confidence Adjustment Module (CAM) with the center-boundary-aware confidence attention is proposed to solve the misalignment between the predicted confidence and proposals in the regions of the interest (RoI) selection. The SGNet proposed in this paper has achieved state-of-the-art results for 3D object detection in the KITTI dataset, especially in the detection of small-size objects such as cyclists. Actually, as of September 19, 2021, for KITTI dataset, SGNet ranked 1st in 3D and BEV detection on cyclists with easy difficulty level, and 2nd in the 3D detection of moderate cyclists.

Yibao Sun, Giussepi Lopez, Yaqi Wang et al.

Cancer segmentation in whole-slide images is a fundamental step for viable tumour burden estimation, which is of great value for cancer assessment. However, factors like vague boundaries or small regions dissociated from viable tumour areas make it a challenging task. Considering the usefulness of multi-scale features in various vision-related tasks, we present a structure-aware scale-adaptive feature selection method for efficient and accurate cancer segmentation. Based on a segmentation network with a popular encoder-decoder architecture, a scale-adaptive module is proposed for selecting more robust features to represent the vague, non-rigid boundaries. Furthermore, a structural similarity metric is proposed for better tissue structure awareness to deal with small region segmentation. In addition, advanced designs including several attention mechanisms and the selective-kernel convolutions are applied to the baseline network for comparative study purposes. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed structure-aware scale-adaptive networks achieve outstanding performance on liver cancer segmentation when compared to top ten submitted results in the challenge of PAIP 2019. Further evaluation on colorectal cancer segmentation shows that the scale-adaptive module improves the baseline network or outperforms the other excellent designs of attention mechanisms when considering the tradeoff between efficiency and accuracy.

Yibao Sun, Xingru Huang, Yaqi Wang et al.

The classification of histopathological images is of great value in both cancer diagnosis and pathological studies. However, multiple reasons, such as variations caused by magnification factors and class imbalance, make it a challenging task where conventional methods that learn from image-label datasets perform unsatisfactorily in many cases. We observe that tumours of the same class often share common morphological patterns. To exploit this fact, we propose an approach that learns similarity-based multi-scale embeddings (SMSE) for magnification-independent histopathological image classification. In particular, a pair loss and a triplet loss are leveraged to learn similarity-based embeddings from image pairs or image triplets. The learned embeddings provide accurate measurements of similarities between images, which are regarded as a more effective form of representation for histopathological morphology than normal image features. Furthermore, in order to ensure the generated models are magnification-independent, images acquired at different magnification factors are simultaneously fed to networks during training for learning multi-scale embeddings. In addition to the SMSE, to eliminate the impact of class imbalance, instead of using the hard sample mining strategy that intuitively discards some easy samples, we introduce a new reinforced focal loss to simultaneously punish hard misclassified samples while suppressing easy well-classified samples. Experimental results show that the SMSE improves the performance for histopathological image classification tasks for both breast and liver cancers by a large margin compared to previous methods. In particular, the SMSE achieves the best performance on the BreakHis benchmark with an improvement ranging from 5% to 18% compared to previous methods using traditional features.

Yunxiang Li, Guodong Zeng, Yifan Zhang et al.

Accurate evaluation of the treatment result on X-ray images is a significant and challenging step in root canal therapy since the incorrect interpretation of the therapy results will hamper timely follow-up which is crucial to the patients' treatment outcome. Nowadays, the evaluation is performed in a manual manner, which is time-consuming, subjective, and error-prone. In this paper, we aim to automate this process by leveraging the advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence, to provide an objective and accurate method for root canal therapy result assessment. A novel anatomy-guided multi-branch Transformer (AGMB-Transformer) network is proposed, which first extracts a set of anatomy features and then uses them to guide a multi-branch Transformer network for evaluation. Specifically, we design a polynomial curve fitting segmentation strategy with the help of landmark detection to extract the anatomy features. Moreover, a branch fusion module and a multi-branch structure including our progressive Transformer and Group Multi-Head Self-Attention (GMHSA) are designed to focus on both global and local features for an accurate diagnosis. To facilitate the research, we have collected a large-scale root canal therapy evaluation dataset with 245 root canal therapy X-ray images, and the experiment results show that our AGMB-Transformer can improve the diagnosis accuracy from 57.96% to 90.20% compared with the baseline network. The proposed AGMB-Transformer can achieve a highly accurate evaluation of root canal therapy. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to perform automatic root canal therapy evaluation and has important clinical value to reduce the workload of endodontists.

Yunxiang Li, Yifan Zhang, Yaqi Wang et al.

As the most economical and routine auxiliary examination in the diagnosis of root canal treatment, oral X-ray has been widely used by stomatologists. It is still challenging to segment the tooth root with a blurry boundary for the traditional image segmentation method. To this end, we propose a model for high-resolution segmentation based on polynomial curve fitting with landmark detection (HS-PCL). It is based on detecting multiple landmarks evenly distributed on the edge of the tooth root to fit a smooth polynomial curve as the segmentation of the tooth root, thereby solving the problem of fuzzy edge. In our model, a maximum number of the shortest distances algorithm (MNSDA) is proposed to automatically reduce the negative influence of the wrong landmarks which are detected incorrectly and deviate from the tooth root on the fitting result. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach not only reduces Hausdorff95 (HD95) by 33.9% and Average Surface Distance (ASD) by 42.1% compared with the state-of-the-art method, but it also achieves excellent results on the minute quantity of datasets, which greatly improves the feasibility of automatic root canal therapy evaluation by medical image computing.

Yaqi Wang, Lingling Sun, Yifang Zhang et al.

Analysis of dental radiographs is an important part of the diagnostic process in daily clinical practice. Interpretation by an expert includes teeth detection and numbering. In this project, a novel solution based on adaptive histogram equalization and convolution neural network (CNN) is proposed, which automatically performs the task for dental x-rays. In order to improve the detection accuracy, we propose three pre-processing techniques to supplement the baseline CNN based on some prior domain knowledge. Firstly, image sharpening and median filtering are used to remove impulse noise, and the edge is enhanced to some extent. Next, adaptive histogram equalization is used to overcome the problem of excessive amplification noise of HE. Finally, a multi-CNN hybrid model is proposed to classify six different locations of dental slices. The results showed that the accuracy and specificity of the test set exceeded 90\%, and the AUC reached 0.97. In addition, four dentists were invited to manually annotate the test data set (independently) and then compare it with the labels obtained by our proposed algorithm. The results show that our method can effectively identify the X-ray location of teeth.

Dailin Lv, Wuteng Qi, Yunxiang Li et al.

The worldwide spread of pneumonia caused by a novel coronavirus poses an unprecedented challenge to the world's medical resources and prevention and control measures. Covid-19 attacks not only the lungs, making it difficult to breathe and life-threatening, but also the heart, kidneys, brain and other vital organs of the body, with possible sequela. At present, the detection of COVID-19 needs to be realized by the reverse transcription-polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR). However, many countries are in the outbreak period of the epidemic, and the medical resources are very limited. They cannot provide sufficient numbers of gene sequence detection, and many patients may not be isolated and treated in time. Given this situation, we researched the analytical and diagnostic capabilities of deep learning on chest radiographs and proposed Cascade-SEMEnet which is cascaded with SEME-ResNet50 and SEME-DenseNet169. The two cascade networks of Cascade - SEMEnet both adopt large input sizes and SE-Structure and use MoEx and histogram equalization to enhance the data. We first used SEME-ResNet50 to screen chest X-ray and diagnosed three classes: normal, bacterial, and viral pneumonia. Then we used SEME-DenseNet169 for fine-grained classification of viral pneumonia and determined if it is caused by COVID-19. To exclude the influence of non-pathological features on the network, we preprocessed the data with U-Net during the training of SEME-DenseNet169. The results showed that our network achieved an accuracy of 85.6\% in determining the type of pneumonia infection and 97.1\% in the fine-grained classification of COVID-19. We used Grad-CAM to visualize the judgment based on the model and help doctors understand the chest radiograph while verifying the effectivene.

Hanxiao Zhang, Jingxiong Li, Mali Shen et al.

Segmentation of brain tumors and their subregions remains a challenging task due to their weak features and deformable shapes. In this paper, three patterns (cross-skip, skip-1 and skip-2) of distributed dense connections (DDCs) are proposed to enhance feature reuse and propagation of CNNs by constructing tunnels between key layers of the network. For better detecting and segmenting brain tumors from multi-modal 3D MR images, CNN-based models embedded with DDCs (DDU-Nets) are trained efficiently from pixel to pixel with a limited number of parameters. Postprocessing is then applied to refine the segmentation results by reducing the false-positive samples. The proposed method is evaluated on the BraTS 2019 dataset with results demonstrating the effectiveness of the DDU-Nets while requiring less computational cost.

Guilherme Aresta, Teresa Araújo, Scotty Kwok et al.

Breast cancer is the most common invasive cancer in women, affecting more than 10% of women worldwide. Microscopic analysis of a biopsy remains one of the most important methods to diagnose the type of breast cancer. This requires specialized analysis by pathologists, in a task that i) is highly time- and cost-consuming and ii) often leads to nonconsensual results. The relevance and potential of automatic classification algorithms using hematoxylin-eosin stained histopathological images has already been demonstrated, but the reported results are still sub-optimal for clinical use. With the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in automatic classification, the Grand Challenge on BreAst Cancer Histology images (BACH) was organized in conjunction with the 15th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (ICIAR 2018). A large annotated dataset, composed of both microscopy and whole-slide images, was specifically compiled and made publicly available for the BACH challenge. Following a positive response from the scientific community, a total of 64 submissions, out of 677 registrations, effectively entered the competition. From the submitted algorithms it was possible to push forward the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy (87%) in automatic classification of breast cancer with histopathological images. Convolutional neuronal networks were the most successful methodology in the BACH challenge. Detailed analysis of the collective results allowed the identification of remaining challenges in the field and recommendations for future developments. The BACH dataset remains publically available as to promote further improvements to the field of automatic classification in digital pathology.