Jianfeng Cao

Hongzheng Yang, Cheng Chen, Meirui Jiang et al.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) has increasingly been an important topic to efficiently tackle the cross-domain distribution shift at test time for medical images from different institutions. Previous TTA methods have a common limitation of using a fixed learning rate for all the test samples. Such a practice would be sub-optimal for TTA, because test data may arrive sequentially therefore the scale of distribution shift would change frequently. To address this problem, we propose a novel dynamic learning rate adjustment method for test-time adaptation, called DLTTA, which dynamically modulates the amount of weights update for each test image to account for the differences in their distribution shift. Specifically, our DLTTA is equipped with a memory bank based estimation scheme to effectively measure the discrepancy of a given test sample. Based on this estimated discrepancy, a dynamic learning rate adjustment strategy is then developed to achieve a suitable degree of adaptation for each test sample. The effectiveness and general applicability of our DLTTA is extensively demonstrated on three tasks including retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) segmentation, histopathological image classification, and prostate 3D MRI segmentation. Our method achieves effective and fast test-time adaptation with consistent performance improvement over current state-of-the-art test-time adaptation methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/med-air/DLTTA.

Jiesi Hu, Yanwu Yang, Zhiyu Ye et al.

The rise of In-Context Learning (ICL) for universal medical image segmentation has introduced an unprecedented demand for large-scale, diverse datasets for training, exacerbating the long-standing problem of data scarcity. While data synthesis offers a promising solution, existing methods often fail to simultaneously achieve both high data diversity and a domain distribution suitable for medical data. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{SynthICL}, a novel data synthesis framework built upon domain randomization. SynthICL ensures realism by leveraging anatomical priors from real-world datasets, generates diverse anatomical structures to cover a broad data distribution, and explicitly models inter-subject variations to create data cohorts suitable for ICL. Extensive experiments on four held-out datasets validate our framework's effectiveness, showing that models trained with our data achieve performance gains of up to 63\% in average Dice and substantially enhanced generalization to unseen anatomical domains. Our work helps mitigate the data bottleneck for ICL-based segmentation, paving the way for robust models. Our code and the generated dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/jiesihu/Neuroverse3D.

Jiesi Hu, Jianfeng Cao, Yanwu Yang et al.

In-context learning (ICL) offers a promising paradigm for universal medical image analysis, enabling models to perform diverse image processing tasks without retraining. However, current ICL models for medical imaging remain limited in two critical aspects: they cannot simultaneously achieve high-fidelity predictions and global anatomical understanding, and there is no unified model trained across diverse medical imaging tasks (e.g., segmentation and enhancement) and anatomical regions. As a result, the full potential of ICL in medical imaging remains underexplored. Thus, we present \textbf{Medverse}, a universal ICL model for 3D medical imaging, trained on 22 datasets covering diverse tasks in universal image segmentation, transformation, and enhancement across multiple organs, imaging modalities, and clinical centers. Medverse employs a next-scale autoregressive in-context learning framework that progressively refines predictions from coarse to fine, generating consistent, full-resolution volumetric outputs and enabling multi-scale anatomical awareness. We further propose a blockwise cross-attention module that facilitates long-range interactions between context and target inputs while preserving computational efficiency through spatial sparsity. Medverse is extensively evaluated on a broad collection of held-out datasets covering previously unseen clinical centers, organs, species, and imaging modalities. Results demonstrate that Medverse substantially outperforms existing ICL baselines and establishes a novel paradigm for in-context learning. Code and model weights will be made publicly available. Our model are publicly available at https://github.com/jiesihu/Medverse.

Jiesi Hu, Yanwu Yang, Zhiyu Ye et al.

Universal models for medical image segmentation, such as interactive and in-context learning (ICL) models, offer strong generalization but require extensive annotations. Interactive models need repeated user prompts for each image, while ICL relies on dense, pixel-level labels. To address this, we propose Weakly Supervised In-Context Learning (WS-ICL), a new ICL paradigm that leverages weak prompts (e.g., bounding boxes or points) instead of dense labels for context. This approach significantly reduces annotation effort by eliminating the need for fine-grained masks and repeated user prompting for all images. We evaluated the proposed WS-ICL model on three held-out benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that WS-ICL achieves performance comparable to regular ICL models at a significantly lower annotation cost. In addition, WS-ICL is highly competitive even under the interactive paradigm. These findings establish WS-ICL as a promising step toward more efficient and unified universal models for medical image segmentation. Our code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/jiesihu/Weak-ICL.

Yonghao Long, Jianfeng Cao, Anton Deguet et al.

Robot-assisted surgery has become progressively more and more popular due to its clinical advantages. In the meanwhile, the artificial intelligence and augmented reality in robotic surgery are developing rapidly and receive lots of attention. However, current methods have not discussed the coherent integration of AI and AR in robotic surgery. In this paper, we develop a novel system by seamlessly merging artificial intelligence module and augmented reality visualization to automatically generate the surgical guidance for robotic surgery education. Specifically, we first leverage reinforcement leaning to learn from expert demonstration and then generate 3D guidance trajectory, providing prior context information of the surgical procedure. Along with other information such as text hint, the 3D trajectory is then overlaid in the stereo view of dVRK, where the user can perceive the 3D guidance and learn the procedure. The proposed system is evaluated through a preliminary experiment on surgical education task peg-transfer, which proves its feasibility and potential as the next generation of robot-assisted surgery education solution.

Jianfeng Cao, Hong Yan

Semantic and instance segmentation algorithms are two general yet distinct image segmentation solutions powered by Convolution Neural Network. While semantic segmentation benefits extensively from the end-to-end training strategy, instance segmentation is frequently framed as a multi-stage task, supported by learning-based discrimination and post-process clustering. Independent optimizations on substages instigate the accumulation of segmentation errors. In this work, we propose to embed prior clustering information into an embedding learning framework FCRNet, stimulating the one-stage instance segmentation. FCRNet relieves the complexity of post process by incorporating the number of clustering groups into the embedding space. The superior performance of FCRNet is verified and compared with other methods on the nucleus dataset BBBC006.