Ying Wang

Yuhao Mo, Chu Han, Yu Liu et al. · pku

Ultrasonography is an important routine examination for breast cancer diagnosis, due to its non-invasive, radiation-free and low-cost properties. However, the diagnostic accuracy of breast cancer is still limited due to its inherent limitations. It would be a tremendous success if we can precisely diagnose breast cancer by breast ultrasound images (BUS). Many learning-based computer-aided diagnostic methods have been proposed to achieve breast cancer diagnosis/lesion classification. However, most of them require a pre-define ROI and then classify the lesion inside the ROI. Conventional classification backbones, such as VGG16 and ResNet50, can achieve promising classification results with no ROI requirement. But these models lack interpretability, thus restricting their use in clinical practice. In this study, we propose a novel ROI-free model for breast cancer diagnosis in ultrasound images with interpretable feature representations. We leverage the anatomical prior knowledge that malignant and benign tumors have different spatial relationships between different tissue layers, and propose a HoVer-Transformer to formulate this prior knowledge. The proposed HoVer-Trans block extracts the inter- and intra-layer spatial information horizontally and vertically. We conduct and release an open dataset GDPH&SYSUCC for breast cancer diagnosis in BUS. The proposed model is evaluated in three datasets by comparing with four CNN-based models and two vision transformer models via five-fold cross validation. It achieves state-of-the-art classification performance with the best model interpretability. In the meanwhile, our proposed model outperforms two senior sonographers on the breast cancer diagnosis when only one BUS image is given.

Ying Wang, Ye Yuan, Xin Luo

An undirected weighted graph (UWG) is frequently adopted to describe the interactions among a solo set of nodes from real applications, such as the user contact frequency from a social network services system. A graph convolutional network (GCN) is widely adopted to perform representation learning to a UWG for subsequent pattern analysis tasks such as clustering or missing data estimation. However, existing GCNs mostly neglects the latent collaborative information hidden in its connected node pairs. To address this issue, this study proposes to model the node collaborations via a symmetric latent factor analysis model, and then regards it as a node-collaboration module for supplementing the collaboration loss in a GCN. Based on this idea, a Node-collaboration-informed Graph Convolutional Network (NGCN) is proposed with three-fold ideas: a) Learning latent collaborative information from the interaction of node pairs via a node-collaboration module; b) Building the residual connection and weighted representation propagation to obtain high representation capacity; and c) Implementing the model optimization in an end-to-end fashion to achieve precise representation to the target UWG. Empirical studies on UWGs emerging from real applications demonstrate that owing to its efficient incorporation of node-collaborations, the proposed NGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art GCNs in addressing the task of missing weight estimation. Meanwhile, its good scalability ensures its compatibility with more advanced GCN extensions, which will be further investigated in our future studies.

Chuang Zhu, Wenkai Chen, Ting Peng et al.

Deep learning-based histopathology image classification is a key technique to help physicians in improving the accuracy and promptness of cancer diagnosis. However, the noisy labels are often inevitable in the complex manual annotation process, and thus mislead the training of the classification model. In this work, we introduce a novel hard sample aware noise robust learning method for histopathology image classification. To distinguish the informative hard samples from the harmful noisy ones, we build an easy/hard/noisy (EHN) detection model by using the sample training history. Then we integrate the EHN into a self-training architecture to lower the noise rate through gradually label correction. With the obtained almost clean dataset, we further propose a noise suppressing and hard enhancing (NSHE) scheme to train the noise robust model. Compared with the previous works, our method can save more clean samples and can be directly applied to the real-world noisy dataset scenario without using a clean subset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in both the synthetic and real-world noisy datasets. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/bupt-ai-cz/HSA-NRL/.

Feng Xu, Chuang Zhu, Wenqi Tang et al.

Objectives: To develop and validate a deep learning (DL)-based primary tumor biopsy signature for predicting axillary lymph node (ALN) metastasis preoperatively in early breast cancer (EBC) patients with clinically negative ALN. Methods: A total of 1,058 EBC patients with pathologically confirmed ALN status were enrolled from May 2010 to August 2020. A DL core-needle biopsy (DL-CNB) model was built on the attention-based multiple instance-learning (AMIL) framework to predict ALN status utilizing the DL features, which were extracted from the cancer areas of digitized whole-slide images (WSIs) of breast CNB specimens annotated by two pathologists. Accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, and areas under the ROC curve (AUCs) were analyzed to evaluate our model. Results: The best-performing DL-CNB model with VGG16_BN as the feature extractor achieved an AUC of 0.816 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.758, 0.865) in predicting positive ALN metastasis in the independent test cohort. Furthermore, our model incorporating the clinical data, which was called DL-CNB+C, yielded the best accuracy of 0.831 (95%CI: 0.775, 0.878), especially for patients younger than 50 years (AUC: 0.918, 95%CI: 0.825, 0.971). The interpretation of DL-CNB model showed that the top signatures most predictive of ALN metastasis were characterized by the nucleus features including density ($p$ = 0.015), circumference ($p$ = 0.009), circularity ($p$ = 0.010), and orientation ($p$ = 0.012). Conclusion: Our study provides a novel DL-based biomarker on primary tumor CNB slides to predict the metastatic status of ALN preoperatively for patients with EBC. The codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/bupt-ai-cz/BALNMP

Xiaoying Yuan, Tingfa Xu, Xincong Liu et al.

In the realm of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking, Siamese-based approaches have gained traction due to their optimal balance between efficiency and precision. However, UAV scenarios often present challenges such as insufficient sampling resolution, fast motion and small objects with limited feature information. As a result, temporal context in UAV tracking tasks plays a pivotal role in target location, overshadowing the target's precise features. In this paper, we introduce MT-Track, a streamlined and efficient multi-step temporal modeling framework designed to harness the temporal context from historical frames for enhanced UAV tracking. This temporal integration occurs in two steps: correlation map generation and correlation map refinement. Specifically, we unveil a unique temporal correlation module that dynamically assesses the interplay between the template and search region features. This module leverages temporal information to refresh the template feature, yielding a more precise correlation map. Subsequently, we propose a mutual transformer module to refine the correlation maps of historical and current frames by modeling the temporal knowledge in the tracking sequence. This method significantly trims computational demands compared to the raw transformer. The compact yet potent nature of our tracking framework ensures commendable tracking outcomes, particularly in extended tracking scenarios.

Fudan Zheng, Mengfei Li, Ying Wang et al.

Automatic radiology report generation is booming due to its huge application potential for the healthcare industry. However, existing computer vision and natural language processing approaches to tackle this problem are limited in two aspects. First, when extracting image features, most of them neglect multi-view reasoning in vision and model single-view structure of medical images, such as space-view or channel-view. However, clinicians rely on multi-view imaging information for comprehensive judgment in daily clinical diagnosis. Second, when generating reports, they overlook context reasoning with multi-modal information and focus on pure textual optimization utilizing retrieval-based methods. We aim to address these two issues by proposing a model that better simulates clinicians' perspectives and generates more accurate reports. Given the above limitation in feature extraction, we propose a Globally-intensive Attention (GIA) module in the medical image encoder to simulate and integrate multi-view vision perception. GIA aims to learn three types of vision perception: depth view, space view, and pixel view. On the other hand, to address the above problem in report generation, we explore how to involve multi-modal signals to generate precisely matched reports, i.e., how to integrate previously predicted words with region-aware visual content in next word prediction. Specifically, we design a Visual Knowledge-guided Decoder (VKGD), which can adaptively consider how much the model needs to rely on visual information and previously predicted text to assist next word prediction. Hence, our final Intensive Vision-guided Network (IVGN) framework includes a GIA-guided Visual Encoder and the VKGD. Experiments on two commonly-used datasets IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR demonstrate the superior ability of our method compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.

Mu Liu, MingChen Sun YingJi Li, Ying Wang

Recently, spatial-temporal forecasting technology has been rapidly developed due to the increasing demand for traffic management and travel planning. However, existing traffic forecasting models still face the following limitations. On one hand, most previous studies either focus too much on real-world geographic information, neglecting the potential traffic correlation between different regions, or overlook geographical position and only model the traffic flow relationship. On the other hand, the importance of different time slices is ignored in time modeling. Therefore, we propose a Fusion Matrix Prompt Enhanced Self-Attention Spatial-Temporal Interactive Traffic Forecasting Framework (FMPESTF), which is composed of spatial and temporal modules for down-sampling traffic data. The network is designed to establish a traffic fusion matrix considering spatial-temporal heterogeneity as a query to reconstruct a data-driven dynamic traffic data structure, which accurately reveal the flow relationship of nodes in the traffic network. In addition, we introduce attention mechanism in time modeling, and design hierarchical spatial-temporal interactive learning to help the model adapt to various traffic scenarios. Through extensive experimental on six real-world traffic datasets, our method is significantly superior to other baseline models, demonstrating its efficiency and accuracy in dealing with traffic forecasting problems.

Shenwang Jiang, Jianan Li, Ying Wang et al.

Corrupted labels and class imbalance are commonly encountered in practically collected training data, which easily leads to over-fitting of deep neural networks (DNNs). Existing approaches alleviate these issues by adopting a sample re-weighting strategy, which is to re-weight sample by designing weighting function. However, it is only applicable for training data containing only either one type of data biases. In practice, however, biased samples with corrupted labels and of tailed classes commonly co-exist in training data. How to handle them simultaneously is a key but under-explored problem. In this paper, we find that these two types of biased samples, though have similar transient loss, have distinguishable trend and characteristics in loss curves, which could provide valuable priors for sample weight assignment. Motivated by this, we delve into the loss curves and propose a novel probe-and-allocate training strategy: In the probing stage, we train the network on the whole biased training data without intervention, and record the loss curve of each sample as an additional attribute; In the allocating stage, we feed the resulting attribute to a newly designed curve-perception network, named CurveNet, to learn to identify the bias type of each sample and assign proper weights through meta-learning adaptively. The training speed of meta learning also blocks its application. To solve it, we propose a method named skip layer meta optimization (SLMO) to accelerate training speed by skipping the bottom layers. Extensive synthetic and real experiments well validate the proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging benchmarks.