Recently, diagnosis, therapy and monitoring of human diseases involve a variety of imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging(MRI), computed tomography(CT), Ultrasound(US) and Positron-emission tomography(PET) as well as a variety of modern optical techniques. Over the past two decade, it has been recognized that advanced image processing techniques provide valuable information to physicians for diagnosis, image guided therapy and surgery, and monitoring of the treated organ to the therapy. Many researchers and companies have invested significant efforts in the developments of advanced medical image analysis methods; especially in the two core studies of medical image segmentation and registration, segmentations of organs and lesions are used to quantify volumes and shapes used in diagnosis and monitoring treatment; registration of multimodality images of organs improves detection, diagnosis and staging of diseases as well as image-guided surgery and therapy, registration of images obtained from the same modality are used to monitor progression of therapy. These challenging clinical-motivated applications introduce novel and sophisticated mathematical problems which stimulate developments of advanced optimization and computing methods, especially convex optimization attaining optimum in a global sense, hence, bring an enormous spread of research topics for recent computational medical image analysis. Particularly, distinct from the usual image processing, most medical images have a big volume of acquired data, often in 3D or 4D (3D + t) along with great noises or incomplete image information, and form the challenging large-scale optimization problems; how to process such poor 'big data' of medical images efficiently and solve the corresponding optimization problems robustly are the key factors of modern medical image analysis.
MicarVLMoE: A Modern Gated Cross-Aligned Vision-Language Mixture of Experts Model for Medical Image Captioning and Report Generation
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Malaya（马来亚大学计算机科学与信息学院）；School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学计算机与信息学院）
Technion Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）；Rambam Health Care Campus（兰巴姆医疗中心）
A key concern in integrating machine learning models in medicine is the ability to interpret their reasoning. Popular explainability methods have demonstrated satisfactory results in natural image recognition, yet in medical image analysis, many of these approaches provide partial and noisy explanations. Recently, attention mechanisms have shown compelling results both in their predictive performance and in their interpretable qualities. A fundamental trait of attention is that it leverages salient parts of the input which contribute to the model's prediction. To this end, our work focuses on …
As digital medical imaging becomes more prevalent and archives increase in size, representation learning exposes an interesting opportunity for enhanced medical decision support systems. On the other hand, medical imaging data is often scarce and short on annotations. In this paper, we present an assessment of unsupervised feature learning approaches for images in the biomedical literature, which can be applied to automatic biomedical concept detection. Six unsupervised representation learning methods were built, including traditional bags of visual words, autoencoders, and generative adversar…
Duke University（杜克大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Petuum, Inc.（Petuum公司）
Generating long and coherent reports to describe medical images poses challenges to bridging visual patterns with informative human linguistic descriptions. We propose a novel Hybrid Retrieval-Generation Reinforced Agent (HRGR-Agent) which reconciles traditional retrieval-based approaches populated with human prior knowledge, with modern learning-based approaches to achieve structured, robust, and diverse report generation. HRGR-Agent employs a hierarchical decision-making procedure. For each sentence, a high-level retrieval policy module chooses to either retrieve a template sentence from an …
Transfer learning is a standard technique to improve performance on tasks with limited data. However, for medical imaging, the value of transfer learning is less clear. This is likely due to the large domain mismatch between the usual natural-image pre-training (e.g. ImageNet) and medical images. However, recent advances in transfer learning have shown substantial improvements from scale. We investigate whether modern methods can change the fortune of transfer learning for medical imaging. For this, we study the class of large-scale pre-trained networks presented by Kolesnikov et al. on three …
Duke University（杜克大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Petuum, Inc.（Petuum公司）
Generating long and semantic-coherent reports to describe medical images poses great challenges towards bridging visual and linguistic modalities, incorporating medical domain knowledge, and generating realistic and accurate descriptions. We propose a novel Knowledge-driven Encode, Retrieve, Paraphrase (KERP) approach which reconciles traditional knowledge- and retrieval-based methods with modern learning-based methods for accurate and robust medical report generation. Specifically, KERP decomposes medical report generation into explicit medical abnormality graph learning and subsequent natura…
MedNeXt: Transformer-driven Scaling of ConvNets for Medical Image Segmentation
German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)（德国癌症研究中心）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT)（国家肿瘤疾病中心）；University Medical Center Heidelberg（海德堡大学医院）；Helmholtz Imaging（亥姆霍兹成像机构）
Computer aided diagnosis (CAD) has gained an increased amount of attention in the general research community over the last years as an example of a typical limited data application - with experiments on labeled 100k-200k datasets. Although these datasets are still small compared to natural image datasets like ImageNet1k, ImageNet21k and JFT, they are large for annotated medical datasets, where 1k-10k labeled samples are much more common. There is no baseline on which methods to build on in the low data regime. In this work we bridge this gap by providing an extensive study on medical image cla…
Recent Advances in Medical Imaging Segmentation: A Survey
Junia, UMR 8520, CNRS, Centrale Lille, Univerity of Polytechnique Hauts-de-France（Junia研究院、法国国家科学研究中心、Centrale Lille、法国高等技术大学 Hauts-de-France）；Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE（索邦人工智能中心（SCAI））
Modern deep learning systems for medical image classification have demonstrated exceptional capabilities for distinguishing between image based medical categories. However, they are severely hindered by their ina-bility to explain the reasoning behind their decision making. This is partly due to the uninterpretable continuous latent representations of neural net-works. Emergent languages (EL) have recently been shown to enhance the capabilities of neural networks by equipping them with symbolic represen-tations in the framework of referential games. Symbolic representations are one of the corn…
Med-2E3: A 2D-Enhanced 3D Medical Multimodal Large Language Model
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学电子工程系）；College of AI, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能学院）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）；Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi（德里印度理工学院）
Semantic segmentation of medical images is an essential first step in computer-aided diagnosis systems for many applications. However, given many disparate imaging modalities and inherent variations in the patient data, it is difficult to consistently achieve high accuracy using modern deep neural networks (DNNs). This has led researchers to propose interactive image segmentation techniques where a medical expert can interactively correct the output of a DNN to the desired accuracy. However, these techniques often need separate training data with the associated human interactions, and do not g…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been widely investigated for many potential applications in medical imaging. DatasetGAN is a recently proposed framework based on modern GANs that can synthesize high-quality segmented images while requiring only a small set of annotated training images. The synthesized annotated images could be potentially employed for many medical imaging applications, where images with segmentation information are required. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no published studies focusing on its applications to medical imaging. In this work, prelimina…
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens（雅典国立卡波迪斯特里亚大学）
Medical Informatics and the application of modern signal processing in the assistance of the diagnostic process in medical imaging is one of the more recent and active research areas today. This thesis addresses a variety of issues related to the general problem of medical image analysis, specifically in mammography, and presents a series of algorithms and design approaches for all the intermediate levels of a modern system for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD). The diagnostic problem is analyzed with a systematic approach, first defining the imaging characteristics and features that are relevant…
Annotated medical images are typically rarer than labeled natural images since they are limited by domain knowledge and privacy constraints. Recent advances in transfer and contrastive learning have provided effective solutions to tackle such issues from different perspectives. The state-of-the-art transfer learning (e.g., Big Transfer (BiT)) and contrastive learning (e.g., Simple Siamese Contrastive Learning (SimSiam)) approaches have been investigated independently, without considering the complementary nature of such techniques. It would be appealing to accelerate contrastive learning with …
Neural networks have shown tremendous potential for reconstructing high-resolution images in inverse problems. The non-convex and opaque nature of neural networks, however, hinders their utility in sensitive applications such as medical imaging. To cope with this challenge, this paper advocates a convex duality framework that makes a two-layer fully-convolutional ReLU denoising network amenable to convex optimization. The convex dual network not only offers the optimum training with convex solvers, but also facilitates interpreting training and prediction. In particular, it implies training ne…
In this extended abstract, we will present and discuss opportunities and challenges brought about by a new deep learning method by AUC maximization (aka \underline{\bf D}eep \underline{\bf A}UC \underline{\bf M}aximization or {\bf DAM}) for medical image classification. Since AUC (aka area under ROC curve) is a standard performance measure for medical image classification, hence directly optimizing AUC could achieve a better performance for learning a deep neural network than minimizing a traditional loss function (e.g., cross-entropy loss). Recently, there emerges a trend of using deep AUC ma…
What Makes a Good Medical Image Tokenizer? Rethinking Reconstruction and Generation in Medical Image Tokenization
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学伊萨尔河右岸医院）；ELLIS Institute Finland（芬兰ELLIS研究所）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）
Lesion segmentation in medical imaging has been an important topic in clinical research. Researchers have proposed various detection and segmentation algorithms to address this task. Recently, deep learning-based approaches have significantly improved the performance over conventional methods. However, most state-of-the-art deep learning methods require the manual design of multiple network components and training strategies. In this paper, we propose a new automated machine learning algorithm, T-AutoML, which not only searches for the best neural architecture, but also finds the best combinat…
Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering, University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学哈索·普拉特纳数字工程研究所）；TU Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）；Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai（西奈山伊坎医学院哈索·普拉特纳数字健康研究所）
High annotation costs are a substantial bottleneck in applying modern deep learning architectures to clinically relevant medical use cases, substantiating the need for novel algorithms to learn from unlabeled data. In this work, we propose ContIG, a self-supervised method that can learn from large datasets of unlabeled medical images and genetic data. Our approach aligns images and several genetic modalities in the feature space using a contrastive loss. We design our method to integrate multiple modalities of each individual person in the same model end-to-end, even when the available modalit…
Manifold learning has been successfully applied to a variety of medical imaging problems. Its use in real-time applications requires fast projection onto the low-dimensional space. To this end, out-of-sample extensions are applied by constructing an interpolation function that maps from the input space to the low-dimensional manifold. Commonly used approaches such as the Nyström extension and kernel ridge regression require using all training points. We propose an interpolation function that only depends on a small subset of the input training data. Consequently, in the testing phase each new …
Navigating Data Scarcity using Foundation Models: A Benchmark of Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Learning Approaches in Medical Imaging
Cluster of Excellence “Machine Learning”（卓越集群“机器学习”）；University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, University of Lucerne（卢塞恩大学健康科学与医学院）
Recent advances in digital imaging, e.g., increased number of pixels captured, have meant that the volume of data to be processed and analyzed from these images has also increased. Deep learning algorithms are state-of-the-art for analyzing such images, given their high accuracy when trained with a large data volume of data. Nevertheless, such analysis requires considerable computational power, making such algorithms time- and resource-demanding. Such high demands can be met by using third-party cloud service providers. However, analyzing medical images using such services raises several legal…
Medical imaging is crucial in modern clinics to guide the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Medical image reconstruction is one of the most fundamental and important components of medical imaging, whose major objective is to acquire high-quality medical images for clinical usage at minimal cost and risk to the patients. Mathematical models in medical image reconstruction or, more generally, image restoration in computer vision, have been playing a prominent role. Earlier mathematical models are mostly designed by human knowledge or hypothesis on the image to be reconstructed, and we shall c…
University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；University Hospital Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学医院）
Correct performance assessment is crucial for evaluating modern artificial intelligence algorithms in medicine like deep-learning based medical image segmentation models. However, there is no universal metric library in Python for standardized and reproducible evaluation. Thus, we propose our open-source publicly available Python package MISeval: a metric library for Medical Image Segmentation Evaluation. The implemented metrics can be intuitively used and easily integrated into any performance assessment pipeline. The package utilizes modern CI/CD strategies to ensure functionality and stabil…
The recent 3D medical ViTs (e.g., SwinUNETR) achieve the state-of-the-art performances on several 3D volumetric data benchmarks, including 3D medical image segmentation. Hierarchical transformers (e.g., Swin Transformers) reintroduced several ConvNet priors and further enhanced the practical viability of adapting volumetric segmentation in 3D medical datasets. The effectiveness of hybrid approaches is largely credited to the large receptive field for non-local self-attention and the large number of model parameters. In this work, we propose a lightweight volumetric ConvNet, termed 3D UX-Net, w…
PRIMA: Pre-Training with Risk-Integrated Image--Metadata Alignment for Medical Diagnosis with LLM-Based Feature Aggregation
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University（杜克大学生物医学工程系）；Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, University of Michigan（密歇根大学眼科与视觉科学系）
No Masks Needed: Explainable AI for Deriving Segmentation from Classification
Dept. Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London（帝国理工学院伦敦分校电子与电气工程系）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey（萨里大学视觉、语音与信号处理中心）
Univ. of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Cross-silo federated learning (FL) has attracted much attention in medical imaging analysis with deep learning in recent years as it can resolve the critical issues of insufficient data, data privacy, and training efficiency. However, there can be a generalization gap between the model trained from FL and the one from centralized training. This important issue comes from the non-iid data distribution of the local data in the participating clients and is well-known as client drift. In this work, we propose a novel training framework FedSM to avoid the client drift issue and successfully close t…
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学电子工程系）；College of AI, Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能学院）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学计算机学院）
HadBalance: A Plug-and-Play Unified Global Geometric Prior Framework for Generalizable Biomedical Segmentation
Department of Eye and Vision Science, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学眼与视觉科学系）；Department of Primary Care and Mental Health, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学初级保健与精神健康系）；School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University（北京大学心理与认知科学学院）；Computer Vision Research Group, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学计算机视觉研究组）；Institute of Life Course & Medical Sciences, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学生命历程与医学科学研究所）；Bioengineering Program, Biomedical Sciences Division (BioMed), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学生物医学科学部生物工程项目）；Ningbo Cixi Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院宁波慈溪生物医学工程研究所）；Liverpool Centre for Cardiovascular Science, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学利物浦心血管科学中心）
Vector Institute（矢量研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；CIFAR（加拿大高等研究院）
This work explores the use of computer vision for image segmentation and classification of medical fluid samples in transparent containers (for example, tubes, syringes, infusion bags). Handling fluids such as infusion fluids, blood, and urine samples is a significant part of the work carried out in medical labs and hospitals. The ability to accurately identify and segment the liquids and the vessels that contain them from images can help in automating such processes. Modern computer vision typically involves training deep neural nets on large datasets of annotated images. This work presents a…
Object segmentation plays an important role in the modern medical image analysis, which benefits clinical study, disease diagnosis, and surgery planning. Given the various modalities of medical images, the automated or semi-automated segmentation approaches have been used to identify and parse organs, bones, tumors, and other regions-of-interest (ROI). However, these contemporary segmentation approaches tend to fail to predict the boundary areas of ROI, because of the fuzzy appearance contrast caused during the imaging procedure. To further improve the segmentation quality of boundary areas, w…
