Yirui Wang

CV
h-index28
22papers
406citations
Novelty51%
AI Score52

22 Papers

LGJun 1, 2023Code
Improving and Benchmarking Offline Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

Bingyi Kang, Xiao Ma, Yirui Wang et al.

Recently, Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable progress with the emergence of various algorithms and datasets. However, these methods usually focus on algorithmic advancements, ignoring that many low-level implementation choices considerably influence or even drive the final performance. As a result, it becomes hard to attribute the progress in Offline RL as these choices are not sufficiently discussed and aligned in the literature. In addition, papers focusing on a dataset (e.g., D4RL) often ignore algorithms proposed on another dataset (e.g., RL Unplugged), causing isolation among the algorithms, which might slow down the overall progress. Therefore, this work aims to bridge the gaps caused by low-level choices and datasets. To this end, we empirically investigate 20 implementation choices using three representative algorithms (i.e., CQL, CRR, and IQL) and present a guidebook for choosing implementations. Following the guidebook, we find two variants CRR+ and CQL+ , achieving new state-of-the-art on D4RL. Moreover, we benchmark eight popular offline RL algorithms across datasets under unified training and evaluation framework. The findings are inspiring: the success of a learning paradigm severely depends on the data distribution, and some previous conclusions are biased by the dataset used. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/offbench.

IVAug 28, 2022
Accurate and Robust Lesion RECIST Diameter Prediction and Segmentation with Transformers

Youbao Tang, Ning Zhang, Yirui Wang et al.

Automatically measuring lesion/tumor size with RECIST (Response Evaluation Criteria In Solid Tumors) diameters and segmentation is important for computer-aided diagnosis. Although it has been studied in recent years, there is still space to improve its accuracy and robustness, such as (1) enhancing features by incorporating rich contextual information while keeping a high spatial resolution and (2) involving new tasks and losses for joint optimization. To reach this goal, this paper proposes a transformer-based network (MeaFormer, Measurement transFormer) for lesion RECIST diameter prediction and segmentation (LRDPS). It is formulated as three correlative and complementary tasks: lesion segmentation, heatmap prediction, and keypoint regression. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to use keypoint regression for RECIST diameter prediction. MeaFormer can enhance high-resolution features by employing transformers to capture their long-range dependencies. Two consistency losses are introduced to explicitly build relationships among these tasks for better optimization. Experiments show that MeaFormer achieves the state-of-the-art performance of LRDPS on the large-scale DeepLesion dataset and produces promising results of two downstream clinic-relevant tasks, i.e., 3D lesion segmentation and RECIST assessment in longitudinal studies.

CVJul 22, 2022
PieTrack: An MOT solution based on synthetic data training and self-supervised domain adaptation

Yirui Wang, Shenghua He, Youbao Tang et al.

In order to cope with the increasing demand for labeling data and privacy issues with human detection, synthetic data has been used as a substitute and showing promising results in human detection and tracking tasks. We participate in the 7th Workshop on Benchmarking Multi-Target Tracking (BMTT), themed on "How Far Can Synthetic Data Take us"? Our solution, PieTrack, is developed based on synthetic data without using any pre-trained weights. We propose a self-supervised domain adaptation method that enables mitigating the domain shift issue between the synthetic (e.g., MOTSynth) and real data (e.g., MOT17) without involving extra human labels. By leveraging the proposed multi-scale ensemble inference, we achieved a final HOTA score of 58.7 on the MOT17 testing set, ranked third place in the challenge.

88.9ROApr 16
ShapeGen: Robotic Data Generation for Category-Level Manipulation

Yirui Wang, Xiuwei Xu, Angyuan Ma et al.

Manipulation policies deployed in uncontrolled real-world scenarios are faced with great in-category geometric diversity of everyday objects. In order to function robustly under such variations, policies need to work in a category-level manner, i.e. knowing how to interact with any object in a certain category, instead of only a specific one seen during training. This in-category generalizability is usually nurtured with shape-diversified training data; however, manually collecting such a corpus of data is infeasible due to the requirement of intense human labor and large collections of divergent objects at hand. In this paper, we propose ShapeGen, a data generation method that aims at generating shape-variated manipulation data in a simulator-free and 3D manner. ShapeGen decomposes the process into two stages: Shape Library curation and Function-Aware Generation. In the first stage, we train spatial warpings between shapes mapping points to points that correspond functionally, and aggregate 3D models along with the warpings into a plug-and-play Shape Library. In the second stage, we design a pipeline that, leveraging established Libraries, requires only minimal human annotation to generate physically plausible and functionally correct novel demonstrations. Experiments in the real world demonstrate the effectiveness of ShapeGen to boost policies' in-category shape generalizability. Project page: https://wangyr22.github.io/ShapeGen/.

CVSep 28, 2025
LLaVA-OneVision-1.5: Fully Open Framework for Democratized Multimodal Training

Xiang An, Yin Xie, Kaicheng Yang et al.

We present LLaVA-OneVision-1.5, a novel family of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) that achieve state-of-the-art performance with significantly reduced computational and financial costs. Different from the existing works, LLaVA-OneVision-1.5 provides an open, efficient, and reproducible framework for building high-quality vision-language models entirely from scratch. The LLaVA-OneVision-1.5 release comprises three primary components: (1) Large-Scale Curated Datasets: We construct an 85M concept-balanced pretraining dataset LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-Mid-Traning and a meticulously curated 22M instruction dataset LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-Instruct. (2) Efficient Training Framework: We develop a complete end-to-end efficient training framework leveraging an offline parallel data packing strategy to facilitate the training of LLaVA-OneVision-1.5 within a $16,000 budget. (3) State-of-the-art Performance: Experimental results demonstrate that LLaVA-OneVision-1.5 yields exceptionally competitive performance across a broad range of downstream tasks. Specifically, LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-8B outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-7B on 18 of 27 benchmarks, and LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-4B surpasses Qwen2.5-VL-3B on all 27 benchmarks. We anticipate releasing LLaVA-OneVision-1.5-RL shortly and encourage the community to await further updates.

AISep 26, 2025
EMMA: Generalizing Real-World Robot Manipulation via Generative Visual Transfer

Zhehao Dong, Xiaofeng Wang, Zheng Zhu et al.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly rely on diverse training data to achieve robust generalization. However, collecting large-scale real-world robot manipulation data across varied object appearances and environmental conditions remains prohibitively time-consuming and expensive. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose Embodied Manipulation Media Adaptation (EMMA), a VLA policy enhancement framework that integrates a generative data engine with an effective training pipeline. We introduce DreamTransfer, a diffusion Transformer-based framework for generating multi-view consistent, geometrically grounded embodied manipulation videos. DreamTransfer enables text-controlled visual editing of robot videos, transforming foreground, background, and lighting conditions without compromising 3D structure or geometrical plausibility. Furthermore, we explore hybrid training with real and generated data, and introduce AdaMix, a hard-sample-aware training strategy that dynamically reweights training batches to focus optimization on perceptually or kinematically challenging samples. Extensive experiments show that videos generated by DreamTransfer significantly outperform prior video generation methods in multi-view consistency, geometric fidelity, and text-conditioning accuracy. Crucially, VLAs trained with generated data enable robots to generalize to unseen object categories and novel visual domains using only demonstrations from a single appearance. In real-world robotic manipulation tasks with zero-shot visual domains, our approach achieves over a 200% relative performance gain compared to training on real data alone, and further improves by 13% with AdaMix, demonstrating its effectiveness in boosting policy generalization.

CVApr 4, 2024
Effective Lymph Nodes Detection in CT Scans Using Location Debiased Query Selection and Contrastive Query Representation in Transformer

Yirui Wang, Qinji Yu, Ke Yan et al.

Lymph node (LN) assessment is a critical, indispensable yet very challenging task in the routine clinical workflow of radiology and oncology. Accurate LN analysis is essential for cancer diagnosis, staging, and treatment planning. Finding scatteredly distributed, low-contrast clinically relevant LNs in 3D CT is difficult even for experienced physicians under high inter-observer variations. Previous automatic LN detection works typically yield limited recall and high false positives (FPs) due to adjacent anatomies with similar image intensities, shapes, or textures (vessels, muscles, esophagus, etc). In this work, we propose a new LN DEtection TRansformer, named LN-DETR, to achieve more accurate performance. By enhancing the 2D backbone with a multi-scale 2.5D feature fusion to incorporate 3D context explicitly, more importantly, we make two main contributions to improve the representation quality of LN queries. 1) Considering that LN boundaries are often unclear, an IoU prediction head and a location debiased query selection are proposed to select LN queries of higher localization accuracy as the decoder query's initialization. 2) To reduce FPs, query contrastive learning is employed to explicitly reinforce LN queries towards their best-matched ground-truth queries over unmatched query predictions. Trained and tested on 3D CT scans of 1067 patients (with 10,000+ labeled LNs) via combining seven LN datasets from different body parts (neck, chest, and abdomen) and pathologies/cancers, our method significantly improves the performance of previous leading methods by > 4-5% average recall at the same FP rates in both internal and external testing. We further evaluate on the universal lesion detection task using NIH DeepLesion benchmark, and our method achieves the top performance of 88.46% averaged recall across 0.5 to 4 FPs per image, compared with other leading reported results.

IVMar 16, 2025
A Continual Learning-driven Model for Accurate and Generalizable Segmentation of Clinically Comprehensive and Fine-grained Whole-body Anatomies in CT

Dazhou Guo, Zhanghexuan Ji, Yanzhou Su et al.

Precision medicine in the quantitative management of chronic diseases and oncology would be greatly improved if the Computed Tomography (CT) scan of any patient could be segmented, parsed and analyzed in a precise and detailed way. However, there is no such fully annotated CT dataset with all anatomies delineated for training because of the exceptionally high manual cost, the need for specialized clinical expertise, and the time required to finish the task. To this end, we proposed a novel continual learning-driven CT model that can segment complete anatomies presented using dozens of previously partially labeled datasets, dynamically expanding its capacity to segment new ones without compromising previously learned organ knowledge. Existing multi-dataset approaches are not able to dynamically segment new anatomies without catastrophic forgetting and would encounter optimization difficulty or infeasibility when segmenting hundreds of anatomies across the whole range of body regions. Our single unified CT segmentation model, CL-Net, can highly accurately segment a clinically comprehensive set of 235 fine-grained whole-body anatomies. Composed of a universal encoder, multiple optimized and pruned decoders, CL-Net is developed using 13,952 CT scans from 20 public and 16 private high-quality partially labeled CT datasets of various vendors, different contrast phases, and pathologies. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that CL-Net consistently outperforms the upper limit of an ensemble of 36 specialist nnUNets trained per dataset with the complexity of 5% model size and significantly surpasses the segmentation accuracy of recent leading Segment Anything-style medical image foundation models by large margins. Our continual learning-driven CL-Net model would lay a solid foundation to facilitate many downstream tasks of oncology and chronic diseases using the most widely adopted CT imaging.

CVAug 6, 2025
Pseudo Depth Meets Gaussian: A Feed-forward RGB SLAM Baseline

Linqing Zhao, Xiuwei Xu, Yirui Wang et al.

Incrementally recovering real-sized 3D geometry from a pose-free RGB stream is a challenging task in 3D reconstruction, requiring minimal assumptions on input data. Existing methods can be broadly categorized into end-to-end and visual SLAM-based approaches, both of which either struggle with long sequences or depend on slow test-time optimization and depth sensors. To address this, we first integrate a depth estimator into an RGB-D SLAM system, but this approach is hindered by inaccurate geometric details in predicted depth. Through further investigation, we find that 3D Gaussian mapping can effectively solve this problem. Building on this, we propose an online 3D reconstruction method using 3D Gaussian-based SLAM, combined with a feed-forward recurrent prediction module to directly infer camera pose from optical flow. This approach replaces slow test-time optimization with fast network inference, significantly improving tracking speed. Additionally, we introduce a local graph rendering technique to enhance robustness in feed-forward pose prediction. Experimental results on the Replica and TUM-RGBD datasets, along with a real-world deployment demonstration, show that our method achieves performance on par with the state-of-the-art SplaTAM, while reducing tracking time by more than 90\%.

CVMar 11, 2025
From Slices to Sequences: Autoregressive Tracking Transformer for Cohesive and Consistent 3D Lymph Node Detection in CT Scans

Qinji Yu, Yirui Wang, Ke Yan et al.

Lymph node (LN) assessment is an essential task in the routine radiology workflow, providing valuable insights for cancer staging, treatment planning and beyond. Identifying scatteredly-distributed and low-contrast LNs in 3D CT scans is highly challenging, even for experienced clinicians. Previous lesion and LN detection methods demonstrate effectiveness of 2.5D approaches (i.e, using 2D network with multi-slice inputs), leveraging pretrained 2D model weights and showing improved accuracy as compared to separate 2D or 3D detectors. However, slice-based 2.5D detectors do not explicitly model inter-slice consistency for LN as a 3D object, requiring heuristic post-merging steps to generate final 3D LN instances, which can involve tuning a set of parameters for each dataset. In this work, we formulate 3D LN detection as a tracking task and propose LN-Tracker, a novel LN tracking transformer, for joint end-to-end detection and 3D instance association. Built upon DETR-based detector, LN-Tracker decouples transformer decoder's query into the track and detection groups, where the track query autoregressively follows previously tracked LN instances along the z-axis of a CT scan. We design a new transformer decoder with masked attention module to align track query's content to the context of current slice, meanwhile preserving detection query's high accuracy in current slice. An inter-slice similarity loss is introduced to encourage cohesive LN association between slices. Extensive evaluation on four lymph node datasets shows LN-Tracker's superior performance, with at least 2.7% gain in average sensitivity when compared to other top 3D/2.5D detectors. Further validation on public lung nodule and prostate tumor detection tasks confirms the generalizability of LN-Tracker as it achieves top performance on both tasks.

IVNov 27, 2024
Leveraging Semantic Asymmetry for Precise Gross Tumor Volume Segmentation of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma in Planning CT

Zi Li, Ying Chen, Zeli Chen et al.

In the radiation therapy of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), clinicians typically delineate the gross tumor volume (GTV) using non-contrast planning computed tomography to ensure accurate radiation dose delivery. However, the low contrast between tumors and adjacent normal tissues necessitates that radiation oncologists manually delineate the tumors, often relying on diagnostic MRI for guidance. % In this study, we propose a novel approach to directly segment NPC gross tumors on non-contrast planning CT images, circumventing potential registration errors when aligning MRI or MRI-derived tumor masks to planning CT. To address the low contrast issues between tumors and adjacent normal structures in planning CT, we introduce a 3D Semantic Asymmetry Tumor segmentation (SATs) method. Specifically, we posit that a healthy nasopharyngeal region is characteristically bilaterally symmetric, whereas the emergence of nasopharyngeal carcinoma disrupts this symmetry. Then, we propose a Siamese contrastive learning segmentation framework that minimizes the voxel-wise distance between original and flipped areas without tumor and encourages a larger distance between original and flipped areas with tumor. Thus, our approach enhances the sensitivity of features to semantic asymmetries. % Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SATs achieves the leading NPC GTV segmentation performance in both internal and external testing, \emph{e.g.}, with at least 2\% absolute Dice score improvement and 12\% average distance error reduction when compared to other state-of-the-art methods in the external testing.

IVDec 16, 2021
Coherence Learning using Keypoint-based Pooling Network for Accurately Assessing Radiographic Knee Osteoarthritis

Kang Zheng, Yirui Wang, Chen-I Hsieh et al.

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a common degenerate joint disorder that affects a large population of elderly people worldwide. Accurate radiographic assessment of knee OA severity plays a critical role in chronic patient management. Current clinically-adopted knee OA grading systems are observer subjective and suffer from inter-rater disagreements. In this work, we propose a computer-aided diagnosis approach to provide more accurate and consistent assessments of both composite and fine-grained OA grades simultaneously. A novel semi-supervised learning method is presented to exploit the underlying coherence in the composite and fine-grained OA grades by learning from unlabeled data. By representing the grade coherence using the log-probability of a pre-trained Gaussian Mixture Model, we formulate an incoherence loss to incorporate unlabeled data in training. The proposed method also describes a keypoint-based pooling network, where deep image features are pooled from the disease-targeted keypoints (extracted along the knee joint) to provide more aligned and pathologically informative feature representations, for accurate OA grade assessments. The proposed method is comprehensively evaluated on the public Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) data, a multi-center ten-year observational study on 4,796 subjects. Experimental results demonstrate that our method leads to significant improvements over previous strong whole image-based deep classification network baselines (like ResNet-50).

CVApr 29, 2021
Scalable Semi-supervised Landmark Localization for X-ray Images using Few-shot Deep Adaptive Graph

Xiao-Yun Zhou, Bolin Lai, Weijian Li et al.

Landmark localization plays an important role in medical image analysis. Learning based methods, including CNN and GCN, have demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance. However, most of these methods are fully-supervised and heavily rely on manual labeling of a large training dataset. In this paper, based on a fully-supervised graph-based method, DAG, we proposed a semi-supervised extension of it, termed few-shot DAG, \ie five-shot DAG. It first trains a DAG model on the labeled data and then fine-tunes the pre-trained model on the unlabeled data with a teacher-student SSL mechanism. In addition to the semi-supervised loss, we propose another loss using JS divergence to regulate the consistency of the intermediate feature maps. We extensively evaluated our method on pelvis, hand and chest landmark detection tasks. Our experiment results demonstrate consistent and significant improvements over previous methods.

IVApr 5, 2021
Opportunistic Screening of Osteoporosis Using Plain Film Chest X-ray

Fakai Wang, Kang Zheng, Yirui Wang et al.

Osteoporosis is a common chronic metabolic bone disease that is often under-diagnosed and under-treated due to the limited access to bone mineral density (BMD) examinations, Dual-energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA). In this paper, we propose a method to predict BMD from Chest X-ray (CXR), one of the most common, accessible, and low-cost medical image examinations. Our method first automatically detects Regions of Interest (ROIs) of local and global bone structures from the CXR. Then a multi-ROI model is developed to exploit both local and global information in the chest X-ray image for accurate BMD estimation. Our method is evaluated on 329 CXR cases with ground truth BMD measured by DXA. The model predicted BMD has a strong correlation with the gold standard DXA BMD (Pearson correlation coefficient 0.840). When applied for osteoporosis screening, it achieves a high classification performance (AUC 0.936). As the first effort in the field to use CXR scans to predict the spine BMD, the proposed algorithm holds strong potential in enabling early osteoporosis screening through routine chest X-rays and contributing to the enhancement of public health.

IVMar 24, 2021
Semi-Supervised Learning for Bone Mineral Density Estimation in Hip X-ray Images

Kang Zheng, Yirui Wang, Xiaoyun Zhou et al.

Bone mineral density (BMD) is a clinically critical indicator of osteoporosis, usually measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA). Due to the limited accessibility of DEXA machines and examinations, osteoporosis is often under-diagnosed and under-treated, leading to increased fragility fracture risks. Thus it is highly desirable to obtain BMDs with alternative cost-effective and more accessible medical imaging examinations such as X-ray plain films. In this work, we formulate the BMD estimation from plain hip X-ray images as a regression problem. Specifically, we propose a new semi-supervised self-training algorithm to train the BMD regression model using images coupled with DEXA measured BMDs and unlabeled images with pseudo BMDs. Pseudo BMDs are generated and refined iteratively for unlabeled images during self-training. We also present a novel adaptive triplet loss to improve the model's regression accuracy. On an in-house dataset of 1,090 images (819 unique patients), our BMD estimation method achieves a high Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.8805 to ground-truth BMDs. It offers good feasibility to use the more accessible and cheaper X-ray imaging for opportunistic osteoporosis screening.

NEJan 27, 2021
ASBSO: An Improved Brain Storm Optimization With Flexible Search Length and Memory-Based Selection

Yang Yu, Shangce Gao, Yirui Wang et al.

Brain storm optimization (BSO) is a newly proposed population-based optimization algorithm, which uses a logarithmic sigmoid transfer function to adjust its search range during the convergent process. However, this adjustment only varies with the current iteration number and lacks of flexibility and variety which makes a poor search effciency and robustness of BSO. To alleviate this problem, an adaptive step length structure together with a success memory selection strategy is proposed to be incorporated into BSO. This proposed method, adaptive step length based on memory selection BSO, namely ASBSO, applies multiple step lengths to modify the generation process of new solutions, thus supplying a flexible search according to corresponding problems and convergent periods. The novel memory mechanism, which is capable of evaluating and storing the degree of improvements of solutions, is used to determine the selection possibility of step lengths. A set of 57 benchmark functions are used to test ASBSO's search ability, and four real-world problems are adopted to show its application value. All these test results indicate the remarkable improvement in solution quality, scalability, and robustness of ASBSO.

CVDec 30, 2020
Knowledge Distillation with Adaptive Asymmetric Label Sharpening for Semi-supervised Fracture Detection in Chest X-rays

Yirui Wang, Kang Zheng, Chi-Tung Chang et al.

Exploiting available medical records to train high performance computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) models via the semi-supervised learning (SSL) setting is emerging to tackle the prohibitively high labor costs involved in large-scale medical image annotations. Despite the extensive attentions received on SSL, previous methods failed to 1) account for the low disease prevalence in medical records and 2) utilize the image-level diagnosis indicated from the medical records. Both issues are unique to SSL for CAD models. In this work, we propose a new knowledge distillation method that effectively exploits large-scale image-level labels extracted from the medical records, augmented with limited expert annotated region-level labels, to train a rib and clavicle fracture CAD model for chest X-ray (CXR). Our method leverages the teacher-student model paradigm and features a novel adaptive asymmetric label sharpening (AALS) algorithm to address the label imbalance problem that specially exists in medical domain. Our approach is extensively evaluated on all CXR (N = 65,845) from the trauma registry of anonymous hospital over a period of 9 years (2008-2016), on the most common rib and clavicle fractures. The experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art fracture detection performance, i.e., an area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.9318 and a free-response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) score of 0.8914 on the rib fractures, significantly outperforming previous approaches by an AUROC gap of 1.63% and an FROC improvement by 3.74%. Consistent performance gains are also observed for clavicle fracture detection.

CVDec 7, 2020
A New Window Loss Function for Bone Fracture Detection and Localization in X-ray Images with Point-based Annotation

Xinyu Zhang, Yirui Wang, Chi-Tung Cheng et al.

Object detection methods are widely adopted for computer-aided diagnosis using medical images. Anomalous findings are usually treated as objects that are described by bounding boxes. Yet, many pathological findings, e.g., bone fractures, cannot be clearly defined by bounding boxes, owing to considerable instance, shape and boundary ambiguities. This makes bounding box annotations, and their associated losses, highly ill-suited. In this work, we propose a new bone fracture detection method for X-ray images, based on a labor effective and flexible annotation scheme suitable for abnormal findings with no clear object-level spatial extents or boundaries. Our method employs a simple, intuitive, and informative point-based annotation protocol to mark localized pathology information. To address the uncertainty in the fracture scales annotated via point(s), we convert the annotations into pixel-wise supervision that uses lower and upper bounds with positive, negative, and uncertain regions. A novel Window Loss is subsequently proposed to only penalize the predictions outside of the uncertain regions. Our method has been extensively evaluated on 4410 pelvic X-ray images of unique patients. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art image classification and object detection baselines by healthy margins, with an AUROC of 0.983 and FROC score of 89.6%.

CVDec 2, 2020
Contour Transformer Network for One-shot Segmentation of Anatomical Structures

Yuhang Lu, Kang Zheng, Weijian Li et al.

Accurate segmentation of anatomical structures is vital for medical image analysis. The state-of-the-art accuracy is typically achieved by supervised learning methods, where gathering the requisite expert-labeled image annotations in a scalable manner remains a main obstacle. Therefore, annotation-efficient methods that permit to produce accurate anatomical structure segmentation are highly desirable. In this work, we present Contour Transformer Network (CTN), a one-shot anatomy segmentation method with a naturally built-in human-in-the-loop mechanism. We formulate anatomy segmentation as a contour evolution process and model the evolution behavior by graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Training the CTN model requires only one labeled image exemplar and leverages additional unlabeled data through newly introduced loss functions that measure the global shape and appearance consistency of contours. On segmentation tasks of four different anatomies, we demonstrate that our one-shot learning method significantly outperforms non-learning-based methods and performs competitively to the state-of-the-art fully supervised deep learning methods. With minimal human-in-the-loop editing feedback, the segmentation performance can be further improved to surpass the fully supervised methods.

CVJul 6, 2020
Learning to Segment Anatomical Structures Accurately from One Exemplar

Yuhang Lu, Weijian Li, Kang Zheng et al.

Accurate segmentation of critical anatomical structures is at the core of medical image analysis. The main bottleneck lies in gathering the requisite expert-labeled image annotations in a scalable manner. Methods that permit to produce accurate anatomical structure segmentation without using a large amount of fully annotated training images are highly desirable. In this work, we propose a novel contribution of Contour Transformer Network (CTN), a one-shot anatomy segmentor including a naturally built-in human-in-the-loop mechanism. Segmentation is formulated by learning a contour evolution behavior process based on graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Training of our CTN model requires only one labeled image exemplar and leverages additional unlabeled data through newly introduced loss functions that measure the global shape and appearance consistency of contours. We demonstrate that our one-shot learning method significantly outperforms non-learning-based methods and performs competitively to the state-of-the-art fully supervised deep learning approaches. With minimal human-in-the-loop editing feedback, the segmentation performance can be further improved and tailored towards the observer desired outcomes. This can facilitate the clinician designed imaging-based biomarker assessments (to support personalized quantitative clinical diagnosis) and outperforms fully supervised baselines.

CVJul 3, 2020
Anatomy-Aware Siamese Network: Exploiting Semantic Asymmetry for Accurate Pelvic Fracture Detection in X-ray Images

Haomin Chen, Yirui Wang, Kang Zheng et al.

Visual cues of enforcing bilaterally symmetric anatomies as normal findings are widely used in clinical practice to disambiguate subtle abnormalities from medical images. So far, inadequate research attention has been received on effectively emulating this practice in CAD methods. In this work, we exploit semantic anatomical symmetry or asymmetry analysis in a complex CAD scenario, i.e., anterior pelvic fracture detection in trauma PXRs, where semantically pathological (refer to as fracture) and non-pathological (e.g., pose) asymmetries both occur. Visually subtle yet pathologically critical fracture sites can be missed even by experienced clinicians, when limited diagnosis time is permitted in emergency care. We propose a novel fracture detection framework that builds upon a Siamese network enhanced with a spatial transformer layer to holistically analyze symmetric image features. Image features are spatially formatted to encode bilaterally symmetric anatomies. A new contrastive feature learning component in our Siamese network is designed to optimize the deep image features being more salient corresponding to the underlying semantic asymmetries (caused by pelvic fracture occurrences). Our proposed method have been extensively evaluated on 2,359 PXRs from unique patients (the largest study to-date), and report an area under ROC curve score of 0.9771. This is the highest among state-of-the-art fracture detection methods, with improved clinical indications.

CVSep 4, 2019
Weakly Supervised Universal Fracture Detection in Pelvic X-rays

Yirui Wang, Le Lu, Chi-Tung Cheng et al.

Hip and pelvic fractures are serious injuries with life-threatening complications. However, diagnostic errors of fractures in pelvic X-rays (PXRs) are very common, driving the demand for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) solutions. A major challenge lies in the fact that fractures are localized patterns that require localized analyses. Unfortunately, the PXRs residing in hospital picture archiving and communication system do not typically specify region of interests. In this paper, we propose a two-stage hip and pelvic fracture detection method that executes localized fracture classification using weakly supervised ROI mining. The first stage uses a large capacity fully-convolutional network, i.e., deep with high levels of abstraction, in a multiple instance learning setting to automatically mine probable true positive and definite hard negative ROIs from the whole PXR in the training data. The second stage trains a smaller capacity model, i.e., shallower and more generalizable, with the mined ROIs to perform localized analyses to classify fractures. During inference, our method detects hip and pelvic fractures in one pass by chaining the probability outputs of the two stages together. We evaluate our method on 4 410 PXRs, reporting an area under the ROC curve value of 0.975, the highest among state-of-the-art fracture detection methods. Moreover, we show that our two-stage approach can perform comparably to human physicians (even outperforming emergency physicians and surgeons), in a preliminary reader study of 23 readers.