Jing Zhang

Guanghao Zhu, Jing Zhang, Juanxiu Liu et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has shown considerable potential in medical image segmentation, primarily leveraging consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling. However, many SSL approaches only pay attention to low-level consistency and overlook the significance of pseudo-label reliability. Therefore, in this work, we propose an adversarial self-training consistency framework (AstMatch). Firstly, we design an adversarial consistency regularization (ACR) approach to enhance knowledge transfer and strengthen prediction consistency under varying perturbation intensities. Second, we apply a feature matching loss for adversarial training to incorporate high-level consistency regularization. Additionally, we present the pyramid channel attention (PCA) and efficient channel and spatial attention (ECSA) modules to improve the discriminator's performance. Finally, we propose an adaptive self-training (AST) approach to ensure the pseudo-labels' quality. The proposed AstMatch has been extensively evaluated with cutting-edge SSL methods on three public-available datasets. The experimental results under different labeled ratios indicate that AstMatch outperforms other existing methods, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Our code will be available at https://github.com/GuanghaoZhu663/AstMatch.

Jing Zhang, Xiaowei Yu, Yanjun Lyu et al.

Understanding brain disorders is crucial for accurate clinical diagnosis and treatment. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising approach to interpreting medical images with the support of text descriptions. However, previous research has primarily focused on 2D medical images, leaving richer spatial information of 3D images under-explored, and single-modality-based methods are limited by overlooking the critical clinical information contained in other modalities. To address this issue, this paper proposes Brain-Adapter, a novel approach that incorporates an extra bottleneck layer to learn new knowledge and instill it into the original pre-trained knowledge. The major idea is to incorporate a lightweight bottleneck layer to train fewer parameters while capturing essential information and utilize a Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) strategy to align multimodal data within a unified representation space. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in integrating multimodal data to significantly improve the diagnosis accuracy without high computational costs, highlighting the potential to enhance real-world diagnostic workflows.

Jing Zhang, Xiaowei Yu, Tong Chen et al.

The Lewy body dementia (LBD) is the second most common neurodegenerative dementia after Alzheimer's disease (AD). Early differentiation between AD and LBD is crucial because they require different treatment approaches, but this is challenging due to significant clinical overlap, heterogeneity, complex pathogenesis, and the rarity of LBD. While recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) demonstrate powerful learning capabilities and offer new hope for accurate diagnosis, existing methods primarily focus on designing "neural-level networks". Our work represents a pioneering effort in modeling system-level artificial neural network called BrainNet-MoE for brain modeling and diagnosing. Inspired by the brain's hierarchical organization of bottom-up sensory integration and top-down control, we design a set of disease-specific expert groups to process brain sub-network under different condition, A disease gate mechanism guides the specializa-tion of expert groups, while a transformer layer enables communication be-tween all sub-networks, generating a comprehensive whole-brain represen-tation for downstream disease classification. Experimental results show superior classification accuracy with interpretable insights into how brain sub-networks contribute to different neurodegenerative conditions.

Jing Zhang, Yanjun Lyu, Xiaowei Yu et al.

Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is an advanced technique for capturing the dynamic changes of neural activities, and can be very useful in the studies of brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). Yet, existing studies have not fully leveraged the sequential information embedded within dFC that can potentially provide valuable information when identifying brain conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that jointly learns the embedding of both spatial and temporal information within dFC based on the transformer architecture. Specifically, we first construct dFC networks from rs-fMRI data through a sliding window strategy. Then, we simultaneously employ a temporal block and a spatial block to capture higher-order representations of dynamic spatio-temporal dependencies, via mapping them into an efficient fused feature representation. To further enhance the robustness of these feature representations by reducing the dependency on labeled data, we also introduce a contrastive learning strategy to manipulate different brain states. Experimental results on 345 subjects with 570 scans from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method for MCI (Mild Cognitive Impairment, the prodromal stage of AD) prediction, highlighting its potential for early identification of AD.

Zhengyang Yu, Zhaoyuan Yang, Jing Zhang

Recent text-to-image personalization methods have shown great promise in teaching a diffusion model user-specified concepts given a few images for reusing the acquired concepts in a novel context. With massive efforts being dedicated to personalized generation, a promising extension is personalized editing, namely to edit an image using personalized concepts, which can provide a more precise guidance signal than traditional textual guidance. To address this, a straightforward solution is to incorporate a personalized diffusion model with a text-driven editing framework. However, such a solution often shows unsatisfactory editability on the source image. To address this, we propose DreamSteerer, a plug-in method for augmenting existing T2I personalization methods. Specifically, we enhance the source image conditioned editability of a personalized diffusion model via a novel Editability Driven Score Distillation (EDSD) objective. Moreover, we identify a mode trapping issue with EDSD, and propose a mode shifting regularization with spatial feature guided sampling to avoid such an issue. We further employ two key modifications to the Delta Denoising Score framework that enable high-fidelity local editing with personalized concepts. Extensive experiments validate that DreamSteerer can significantly improve the editability of several T2I personalization baselines while being computationally efficient.

Xiaowei Yu, Jing Zhang, Tong Chen et al.

Lewy Body Disease (LBD) is a common yet understudied form of dementia that imposes a significant burden on public health. It shares clinical similarities with Alzheimer's disease (AD), as both progress through stages of normal cognition, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia. A major obstacle in LBD diagnosis is data scarcity, which limits the effectiveness of deep learning. In contrast, AD datasets are more abundant, offering potential for knowledge transfer. However, LBD and AD data are typically collected from different sites using different machines and protocols, resulting in a distinct domain shift. To effectively leverage AD data while mitigating domain shift, we propose a Transferability Aware Transformer (TAT) that adapts knowledge from AD to enhance LBD diagnosis. Our method utilizes structural connectivity (SC) derived from structural MRI as training data. Built on the attention mechanism, TAT adaptively assigns greater weights to disease-transferable features while suppressing domain-specific ones, thereby reducing domain shift and improving diagnostic accuracy with limited LBD data. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of TAT. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore domain adaptation from AD to LBD under conditions of data scarcity and domain shift, providing a promising framework for domain-adaptive diagnosis of rare diseases.

Minheng Chen, Chao Cao, Tong Chen et al.

The 3-hinge gyrus (3HG) is a newly defined folding pattern, which is the conjunction of gyri coming from three directions in cortical folding. Many studies demonstrated that 3HGs can be reliable nodes when constructing brain networks or connectome since they simultaneously possess commonality and individuality across different individual brains and populations. However, 3HGs are identified and validated within individual spaces, making it difficult to directly serve as the brain network nodes due to the absence of cross-subject correspondence. The 3HG correspondences represent the intrinsic regulation of brain organizational architecture, traditional image-based registration methods tend to fail because individual anatomical properties need to be fully respected. To address this challenge, we propose a novel self-supervised framework for anatomical feature embedding of the 3HGs to build the correspondences among different brains. The core component of this framework is to construct a structural similarity-enhanced multi-hop feature encoding strategy based on the recently developed Kolmogorov-Arnold network (KAN) for anatomical feature embedding. Extensive experiments suggest that our approach can effectively establish robust cross-subject correspondences when no one-to-one mapping exists.