WASABI: A Metric for Evaluating Morphometric Plausibility of Synthetic Brain MRIsBahram Jafrasteh, Wei Peng, Cheng Wan et al.
Generative models enhance neuroimaging through data augmentation, quality improvement, and rare condition studies. Despite advances in realistic synthetic MRIs, evaluations focus on texture and perception, lacking sensitivity to crucial anatomical fidelity. This study proposes a new metric, called WASABI (Wasserstein-Based Anatomical Brain Index), to assess the anatomical realism of synthetic brain MRIs. WASABI leverages \textit{SynthSeg}, a deep learning-based brain parcellation tool, to derive volumetric measures of brain regions in each MRI and uses the multivariate Wasserstein distance to compare distributions between real and synthetic anatomies. Based on controlled experiments on two real datasets and synthetic MRIs from five generative models, WASABI demonstrates higher sensitivity in quantifying anatomical discrepancies compared to traditional image-level metrics, even when synthetic images achieve near-perfect visual quality. Our findings advocate for shifting the evaluation paradigm beyond visual inspection and conventional metrics, emphasizing anatomical fidelity as a crucial benchmark for clinically meaningful brain MRI synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/BahramJafrasteh/wasabi-mri.
Multi-Scale Progressive Fusion Network for Single Image DerainingKui Jiang, Zhongyuan Wang, Peng Yi et al.
Rain streaks in the air appear in various blurring degrees and resolutions due to different distances from their positions to the camera. Similar rain patterns are visible in a rain image as well as its multi-scale (or multi-resolution) versions, which makes it possible to exploit such complementary information for rain streak representation. In this work, we explore the multi-scale collaborative representation for rain streaks from the perspective of input image scales and hierarchical deep features in a unified framework, termed multi-scale progressive fusion network (MSPFN) for single image rain streak removal. For similar rain streaks at different positions, we employ recurrent calculation to capture the global texture, thus allowing to explore the complementary and redundant information at the spatial dimension to characterize target rain streaks. Besides, we construct multi-scale pyramid structure, and further introduce the attention mechanism to guide the fine fusion of this correlated information from different scales. This multi-scale progressive fusion strategy not only promotes the cooperative representation, but also boosts the end-to-end training. Our proposed method is extensively evaluated on several benchmark datasets and achieves state-of-the-art results. Moreover, we conduct experiments on joint deraining, detection, and segmentation tasks, and inspire a new research direction of vision task-driven image deraining. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/kuihua/MSPFN}.