Bin Li

Jialiang Zhuang, Bin Li, Yun Zhang et al.

Blood pressure (BP) monitoring is vital in daily healthcare, especially for cardiovascular diseases. However, BP values are mainly acquired through the contact sensing method, which is inconvenient and unfriendly to continuous BP measurement. Hence, we propose an efficient end-to-end network to estimate the BP values from a facial video to achieve remote BP measurement in daily life. In this study, we first derived a Spatial-temporal map of a short-time (~15s) facial video. According to the Spatial-temporal map, we then regressed the BP ranges by a designed blood pressure classifier and simultaneously calculated the specific value by a blood pressure calculator in each BP range. In addition, we also developed an innovative oversampling training strategy to handle the unbalanced data distribution problem. Finally, we trained the proposed network on a private dataset ASPD and tested it on the popular dataset MMSE-HR. As a result, the proposed network achieved a state-of-the-art MAE of 12.35 mmHg and 9.5 mmHg on systolic and diastolic BP measurements, which is better than the recent works. It concludes that the proposed method has excellent potential for camera-based BP monitoring in real-world scenarios.

Hongwei Zhao, Chengtao Peng, Lei Liu et al.

Segmentation of multiple anatomical structures is of great importance in medical image analysis. In this study, we proposed a $\mathcal{W}$-net to simultaneously segment both the optic disc (OD) and the exudates in retinal images based on the multi-task learning (MTL) scheme. We introduced a class-balanced loss and a multi-task weighted loss to alleviate the imbalanced problem and to improve the robustness and generalization property of the $\mathcal{W}$-net. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach by applying five-fold cross-validation experiments on two public datasets e\_ophtha\_EX and DiaRetDb1. We achieved F1-score of 94.76\% and 95.73\% for OD segmentation, and 92.80\% and 94.14\% for exudates segmentation. To further prove the generalization property of the proposed method, we applied the trained model on the DRIONS-DB dataset for OD segmentation and on the MESSIDOR dataset for exudate segmentation. Our results demonstrated that by choosing the optimal weights of each task, the MTL based $\mathcal{W}$-net outperformed separate models trained individually on each task. Code and pre-trained models will be available at: \url{https://github.com/FundusResearch/MTL_for_OD_and_exudates.git}.

Haoyang Liu, Jie Wang, Wanbo Zhang et al.

Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is one of the most popular mathematical formulations with numerous applications. In practice, improving the performance of MILP solvers often requires a large amount of high-quality data, which can be challenging to collect. Researchers thus turn to generation techniques to generate additional MILP instances. However, existing approaches do not take into account specific block structures -- which are closely related to the problem formulations -- in the constraint coefficient matrices (CCMs) of MILPs. Consequently, they are prone to generate computationally trivial or infeasible instances due to the disruptions of block structures and thus problem formulations. To address this challenge, we propose a novel MILP generation framework, called Block Structure Decomposition (MILP-StuDio), to generate high-quality instances by preserving the block structures. Specifically, MILP-StuDio begins by identifying the blocks in CCMs and decomposing the instances into block units, which serve as the building blocks of MILP instances. We then design three operators to construct new instances by removing, substituting, and appending block units in the original instances, enabling us to generate instances with flexible sizes. An appealing feature of MILP-StuDio is its strong ability to preserve the feasibility and computational hardness of the generated instances. Experiments on the commonly-used benchmarks demonstrate that using instances generated by MILP-StuDio is able to significantly reduce over 10% of the solving time for learning-based solvers.

Jianyi Peng, Fan Lu, Bin Li et al.

Image-to-point cloud cross-modal Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a challenging task where the query is an RGB image, and the database samples are LiDAR point clouds. Compared to single-modal VPR, this approach benefits from the widespread availability of RGB cameras and the robustness of point clouds in providing accurate spatial geometry and distance information. However, current methods rely on intermediate modalities that capture either the vertical or horizontal field of view, limiting their ability to fully exploit the complementary information from both sensors. In this work, we propose an innovative initial retrieval + re-rank method that effectively combines information from range (or RGB) images and Bird's Eye View (BEV) images. Our approach relies solely on a computationally efficient global descriptor similarity search process to achieve re-ranking. Additionally, we introduce a novel similarity label supervision technique to maximize the utility of limited training data. Specifically, we employ points average distance to approximate appearance similarity and incorporate an adaptive margin, based on similarity differences, into the vanilla triplet loss. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Lei Liu, Zhongyi Yu, Hong Wang et al.

In recent years, Neural Operators(NO) have gradually emerged as a popular approach for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). However, their application to large-scale engineering tasks suffers from significant computational overhead. And the fact that current models impose a uniform computational cost while physical fields exhibit vastly different complexities constitutes a fundamental mismatch, which is the root of this inefficiency. For instance, in turbulence flows, intricate vortex regions require deeper network processing compared to stable flows. To address this, we introduce a framework: Skip-Block Routing (SBR), a general framework designed for Transformer-based neural operators, capable of being integrated into their multi-layer architectures. First, SBR uses a routing mechanism to learn the complexity and ranking of tokens, which is then applied during inference. Then, in later layers, it decides how many tokens are passed forward based on this ranking. This way, the model focuses more processing capacity on the tokens that are more complex. Experiments demonstrate that SBR is a general framework that seamlessly integrates into various neural operators. Our method reduces computational cost by approximately 50% in terms of Floating Point Operations (FLOPs), while still delivering up to 2x faster inference without sacrificing accuracy.

Yinxuan Huang, Chengmin Gao, Bin Li et al.

Given the complexities inherent in visual scenes, such as object occlusion, a comprehensive understanding often requires observation from multiple viewpoints. Existing multi-viewpoint object-centric learning methods typically employ random or sequential viewpoint selection strategies. While applicable across various scenes, these strategies may not always be ideal, as certain scenes could benefit more from specific viewpoints. To address this limitation, we propose a novel active viewpoint selection strategy. This strategy predicts images from unknown viewpoints based on information from observation images for each scene. It then compares the object-centric representations extracted from both viewpoints and selects the unknown viewpoint with the largest disparity, indicating the greatest gain in information, as the next observation viewpoint. Through experiments on various datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our active viewpoint selection strategy, significantly enhancing segmentation and reconstruction performance compared to random viewpoint selection. Moreover, our method can accurately predict images from unknown viewpoints.

Jiaqi Xu, Bin Li, Bo Lu et al.

Autonomous surgical execution relieves tedious routines and surgeon's fatigue. Recent learning-based methods, especially reinforcement learning (RL) based methods, achieve promising performance for dexterous manipulation, which usually requires the simulation to collect data efficiently and reduce the hardware cost. The existing learning-based simulation platforms for medical robots suffer from limited scenarios and simplified physical interactions, which degrades the real-world performance of learned policies. In this work, we designed SurRoL, an RL-centered simulation platform for surgical robot learning compatible with the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). The designed SurRoL integrates a user-friendly RL library for algorithm development and a real-time physics engine, which is able to support more PSM/ECM scenarios and more realistic physical interactions. Ten learning-based surgical tasks are built in the platform, which are common in the real autonomous surgical execution. We evaluate SurRoL using RL algorithms in simulation, provide in-depth analysis, deploy the trained policies on the real dVRK, and show that our SurRoL achieves better transferability in the real world.

Shulong Li, Panpan Xu, Bin Li et al.

To predict lung nodule malignancy with a high sensitivity and specificity, we propose a fusion algorithm that combines handcrafted features (HF) into the features learned at the output layer of a 3D deep convolutional neural network (CNN). First, we extracted twenty-nine handcrafted features, including nine intensity features, eight geometric features, and twelve texture features based on grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) averaged from thirteen directions. We then trained 3D CNNs modified from three state-of-the-art 2D CNN architectures (AlexNet, VGG-16 Net and Multi-crop Net) to extract the CNN features learned at the output layer. For each 3D CNN, the CNN features combined with the 29 handcrafted features were used as the input for the support vector machine (SVM) coupled with the sequential forward feature selection (SFS) method to select the optimal feature subset and construct the classifiers. The fusion algorithm takes full advantage of the handcrafted features and the highest level CNN features learned at the output layer. It can overcome the disadvantage of the handcrafted features that may not fully reflect the unique characteristics of a particular lesion by combining the intrinsic CNN features. Meanwhile, it also alleviates the requirement of a large scale annotated dataset for the CNNs based on the complementary of handcrafted features. The patient cohort includes 431 malignant nodules and 795 benign nodules extracted from the LIDC/IDRI database. For each investigated CNN architecture, the proposed fusion algorithm achieved the highest AUC, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity scores among all competitive classification models.

Bin Chen, Wei Guo, Bin Li et al.

An automatic classification method has been studied to effectively detect and recognize Electrocardiogram (ECG). Based on the synchronizing and orthogonal relationships of multiple leads, we propose a Multi-branch Convolution and Residual Network (MBCRNet) with three kinds of feature fusion methods for automatic detection of normal and abnormal ECG signals. Experiments are conducted on the Chinese Cardiovascular Disease Database (CCDD). Through 10-fold cross-validation, we achieve an average accuracy of 87.04% and a sensitivity of 89.93%, which outperforms previous methods under the same database. It is also shown that the multi-lead feature fusion network can improve the classification accuracy over the network only with the single lead features.