Yuanyuan Wang

Mengyun Qiao, Berke Doga Basaran, Huaqi Qiu et al.

Cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death globally, is an age-related disease. Understanding the morphological and functional changes of the heart during ageing is a key scientific question, the answer to which will help us define important risk factors of cardiovascular disease and monitor disease progression. In this work, we propose a novel conditional generative model to describe the changes of 3D anatomy of the heart during ageing. The proposed model is flexible and allows integration of multiple clinical factors (e.g. age, gender) into the generating process. We train the model on a large-scale cross-sectional dataset of cardiac anatomies and evaluate on both cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets. The model demonstrates excellent performance in predicting the longitudinal evolution of the ageing heart and modelling its data distribution. The codes are available at https://github.com/MengyunQ/AgeHeart.

Tongda Xu, Qian Zhang, Yanghao Li et al.

We propose conditional perceptual quality, an extension of the perceptual quality defined in \citet{blau2018perception}, by conditioning it on user defined information. Specifically, we extend the original perceptual quality $d(p_{X},p_{\hat{X}})$ to the conditional perceptual quality $d(p_{X|Y},p_{\hat{X}|Y})$, where $X$ is the original image, $\hat{X}$ is the reconstructed, $Y$ is side information defined by user and $d(.,.)$ is divergence. We show that conditional perceptual quality has similar theoretical properties as rate-distortion-perception trade-off \citep{blau2019rethinking}. Based on these theoretical results, we propose an optimal framework for conditional perceptual quality preserving compression. Experimental results show that our codec successfully maintains high perceptual quality and semantic quality at all bitrate. Besides, by providing a lowerbound of common randomness required, we settle the previous arguments on whether randomness should be incorporated into generator for (conditional) perceptual quality compression. The source code is provided in supplementary material.

Yuanyuan Wang, Zhaohong Deng, Qiongdan Lou et al.

Traditional segmentation methods for colonic polyps are mainly designed based on low-level features. They could not accurately extract the location of small colonic polyps. Although the existing deep learning methods can improve the segmentation accuracy, their effects are still unsatisfied. To meet the above challenges, we propose a hybrid network called Fusion-Transformer-HardNetMSEG (i.e., Fu-TransHNet) in this study. Fu-TransHNet uses deep learning of different mechanisms to fuse each other and is enhanced with multi-view collaborative learning techniques. Firstly, the Fu-TransHNet utilizes the Transformer branch and the CNN branch to realize the global feature learning and local feature learning, respectively. Secondly, a fusion module is designed to integrate the features from two branches. The fusion module consists of two parts: 1) the Global-Local Feature Fusion (GLFF) part and 2) the Dense Fusion of Multi-scale features (DFM) part. The former is built to compensate the feature information mission from two branches at the same scale; the latter is constructed to enhance the feature representation. Thirdly, the above two branches and fusion modules utilize multi-view cooperative learning techniques to obtain their respective weights that denote their importance and then make a final decision comprehensively. Experimental results showed that the Fu-TransHNet network was superior to the existing methods on five widely used benchmark datasets. In particular, on the ETIS-LaribPolypDB dataset containing many small-target colonic polyps, the mDice obtained by Fu-TransHNet were 12.4% and 6.2% higher than the state-of-the-art methods HardNet-MSEG and TransFuse-s, respectively.

Yuanyuan Wang, Yang Zhang, Zhiyong Wu et al.

Data augmentation is vital to the generalization ability and robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) models. Existing augmentation methods for speaker verification manipulate the raw signal, which are time-consuming and the augmented samples lack diversity. In this paper, we present a novel difficulty-aware semantic augmentation (DASA) approach for speaker verification, which can generate diversified training samples in speaker embedding space with negligible extra computing cost. Firstly, we augment training samples by perturbing speaker embeddings along semantic directions, which are obtained from speaker-wise covariance matrices. Secondly, accurate covariance matrices are estimated from robust speaker embeddings during training, so we introduce difficultyaware additive margin softmax (DAAM-Softmax) to obtain optimal speaker embeddings. Finally, we assume the number of augmented samples goes to infinity and derive a closed-form upper bound of the expected loss with DASA, which achieves compatibility and efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed approach can achieve a remarkable performance improvement. The best result achieves a 14.6% relative reduction in EER metric on CN-Celeb evaluation set.

Wenhao Liao, Sineng Yan, Youqian Zhang et al.

Autonomous vehicles rely on camera-based perception systems to comprehend their driving environment and make crucial decisions, thereby ensuring vehicles to steer safely. However, a significant threat known as Electromagnetic Signal Injection Attacks (ESIA) can distort the images captured by these cameras, leading to incorrect AI decisions and potentially compromising the safety of autonomous vehicles. Despite the serious implications of ESIA, there is limited understanding of its impacts on the robustness of AI models across various and complex driving scenarios. To address this gap, our research analyzes the performance of different models under ESIA, revealing their vulnerabilities to the attacks. Moreover, due to the challenges in obtaining real-world attack data, we develop a novel ESIA simulation method and generate a simulated attack dataset for different driving scenarios. Our research provides a comprehensive simulation and evaluation framework, aiming to enhance the development of more robust AI models and secure intelligent systems, ultimately contributing to the advancement of safer and more reliable technology across various fields.

Zixia Zhou, Yuanyuan Wang, Boudewijn P. F. Lelieveldt et al.

t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) is a well-established visualization method for complex high-dimensional data. However, the original t-SNE method is nonparametric, stochastic, and often cannot well prevserve the global structure of data as it emphasizes local neighborhood. With t-SNE as a reference, we propose to combine the deep neural network (DNN) with the mathematical-grounded embedding rules for high-dimensional data embedding. We first introduce a deep embedding network (DEN) framework, which can learn a parametric mapping from high-dimensional space to low-dimensional embedding. DEN has a flexible architecture that can accommodate different input data (vector, image, or tensor) and loss functions. To improve the embedding performance, a recursive training strategy is proposed to make use of the latent representations extracted by DEN. Finally, we propose a two-stage loss function combining the advantages of two popular embedding methods, namely, t-SNE and uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP), for optimal visualization effect. We name the proposed method Deep Recursive Embedding (DRE), which optimizes DEN with a recursive training strategy and two-stage losse. Our experiments demonstrated the excellent performance of the proposed DRE method on high-dimensional data embedding, across a variety of public databases. Remarkably, our comparative results suggested that our proposed DRE could lead to improved global structure preservation.

Zhaohan Xiong, Qing Xia, Zhiqiang Hu et al.

Segmentation of cardiac images, particularly late gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) widely used for visualizing diseased cardiac structures, is a crucial first step for clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, direct segmentation of LGE-MRIs is challenging due to its attenuated contrast. Since most clinical studies have relied on manual and labor-intensive approaches, automatic methods are of high interest, particularly optimized machine learning approaches. To address this, we organized the "2018 Left Atrium Segmentation Challenge" using 154 3D LGE-MRIs, currently the world's largest cardiac LGE-MRI dataset, and associated labels of the left atrium segmented by three medical experts, ultimately attracting the participation of 27 international teams. In this paper, extensive analysis of the submitted algorithms using technical and biological metrics was performed by undergoing subgroup analysis and conducting hyper-parameter analysis, offering an overall picture of the major design choices of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and practical considerations for achieving state-of-the-art left atrium segmentation. Results show the top method achieved a dice score of 93.2% and a mean surface to a surface distance of 0.7 mm, significantly outperforming prior state-of-the-art. Particularly, our analysis demonstrated that double, sequentially used CNNs, in which a first CNN is used for automatic region-of-interest localization and a subsequent CNN is used for refined regional segmentation, achieved far superior results than traditional methods and pipelines containing single CNNs. This large-scale benchmarking study makes a significant step towards much-improved segmentation methods for cardiac LGE-MRIs, and will serve as an important benchmark for evaluating and comparing the future works in the field.

Wenjun Yan, Yuanyuan Wang, Shengjia Gu et al.

Convolutional neural network (CNN), in particular the Unet, is a powerful method for medical image segmentation. To date Unet has demonstrated state-of-art performance in many complex medical image segmentation tasks, especially under the condition when the training and testing data share the same distribution (i.e. come from the same source domain). However, in clinical practice, medical images are acquired from different vendors and centers. The performance of a U-Net trained from a particular source domain, when transferred to a different target domain (e.g. different vendor, acquisition parameter), can drop unexpectedly. Collecting a large amount of annotation from each new domain to retrain the U-Net is expensive, tedious, and practically impossible. In this work, we proposed a generic framework to address this problem, consisting of (1) an unpaired generative adversarial network (GAN) for vendor-adaptation, and (2) a Unet for object segmentation. In the proposed Unet-GAN architecture, GAN learns from Unet at the feature level that is segmentation-specific. We used cardiac cine MRI as the example, with three major vendors (Philips, Siemens, and GE) as three domains, while the methodology can be extended to medical images segmentation in general. The proposed method showed significant improvement of the segmentation results across vendors. The proposed Unet-GAN provides an annotation-free solution to the cross-vendor medical image segmentation problem, potentially extending a trained deep learning model to multi-center and multi-vendor use in real clinical scenario.

Wenjun Yan, Yuanyuan Wang, Zeju Li et al.

Quantitative assessment of left ventricle (LV) function from cine MRI has significant diagnostic and prognostic value for cardiovascular disease patients. The temporal movement of LV provides essential information on the contracting/relaxing pattern of heart, which is keenly evaluated by clinical experts in clinical practice. Inspired by the expert way of viewing Cine MRI, we propose a new CNN module that is able to incorporate the temporal information into LV segmentation from cine MRI. In the proposed CNN, the optical flow (OF) between neighboring frames is integrated and aggregated at feature level, such that temporal coherence in cardiac motion can be taken into account during segmentation. The proposed module is integrated into the U-net architecture without need of additional training. Furthermore, dilated convolution is introduced to improve the spatial accuracy of segmentation. Trained and tested on the Cardiac Atlas database, the proposed network resulted in a Dice index of 95% and an average perpendicular distance of 0.9 pixels for the middle LV contour, significantly outperforming the original U-net that processes each frame individually. Notably, the proposed method improved the temporal coherence of LV segmentation results, especially at the LV apex and base where the cardiac motion is difficult to follow.