Evaluating lesion progression and treatment response via longitudinal lesion tracking plays a critical role in clinical practice. Automated approaches for this task are motivated by prohibitive labor costs and time consumption when lesion matching is done manually. Previous methods typically lack the integration of local and global information. In this work, we propose a transformer-based approach, termed Transformer Lesion Tracker (TLT). Specifically, we design a Cross Attention-based Transformer (CAT) to capture and combine both global and local information to enhance feature extraction. We also develop a Registration-based Anatomical Attention Module (RAAM) to introduce anatomical information to CAT so that it can focus on useful feature knowledge. A Sparse Selection Strategy (SSS) is presented for selecting features and reducing memory footprint in Transformer training. In addition, we use a global regression to further improve model performance. We conduct experiments on a public dataset to show the superiority of our method and find that our model performance has improved the average Euclidean center error by at least 14.3% (6mm vs. 7mm) compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA). Code is available at https://github.com/TangWen920812/TLT.
PAII Inc（PAII公司）；Ping An Technology（平安科技）；Chang Gung Memorial Hospital（长庚纪念医院）
Monitoring treatment response in longitudinal studies plays an important role in clinical practice. Accurately identifying lesions across serial imaging follow-up is the core to the monitoring procedure. Typically this incorporates both image and anatomical considerations. However, matching lesions manually is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this work, we present deep lesion tracker (DLT), a deep learning approach that uses both appearance- and anatomical-based signals. To incorporate anatomical constraints, we propose an anatomical signal encoder, which prevents lesions being matched w…
Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳）深圳大数据研究院）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely adopted in brain lesion detection and segmentation. However, locating small lesions in 2D MRI slices is challenging, and requires to balance between the granularity of 3D context aggregation and the computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel view-disentangled transformer to enhance the extraction of MRI features for more accurate tumour detection. First, the proposed transformer harvests long-range correlation among different positions in a 3D brain scan. Second, the transformer models a stack of slice features as multiple 2D views …
Federal University of Espirito Santo, UFES（圣埃斯皮里图联邦大学（UFES））
Skin cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in the world. Different computer-aided diagnosis systems have been proposed to tackle skin lesion diagnosis, most of them based in deep convolutional neural networks. However, recent advances in computer vision achieved state-of-art results in many tasks, notably Transformer-based networks. We explore and evaluate advances in computer vision architectures, training methods and multimodal feature fusion for skin lesion diagnosis task. Experiments show that PiT ($0.800 \pm 0.006$), CoaT ($0.780 \pm 0.024$) and ViT ($0.771 \pm 0.018$) backbone…
University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
In video object tracking, there exist rich temporal contexts among successive frames, which have been largely overlooked in existing trackers. In this work, we bridge the individual video frames and explore the temporal contexts across them via a transformer architecture for robust object tracking. Different from classic usage of the transformer in natural language processing tasks, we separate its encoder and decoder into two parallel branches and carefully design them within the Siamese-like tracking pipelines. The transformer encoder promotes the target templates via attention-based feature…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Chongqing Innovation Center, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学重庆创新中心）
Automatic diabetic retinopathy (DR) lesions segmentation makes great sense of assisting ophthalmologists in diagnosis. Although many researches have been conducted on this task, most prior works paid too much attention to the designs of networks instead of considering the pathological association for lesions. Through investigating the pathogenic causes of DR lesions in advance, we found that certain lesions are closed to specific vessels and present relative patterns to each other. Motivated by the observation, we propose a relation transformer block (RTB) to incorporate attention mechanisms a…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；La Trobe University（拉筹伯大学）
Transformer framework has been showing superior performances in visual object tracking for its great strength in information aggregation across the template and search image with the well-known attention mechanism. Most recent advances focus on exploring attention mechanism variants for better information aggregation. We find these schemes are equivalent to or even just a subset of the basic self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we prove that the vanilla self-attention structure is sufficient for information aggregation, and structural adaption is unnecessary. The key is not the attention s…
Multi-modal skin lesion diagnosis (MSLD) has achieved remarkable success by modern computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) technology based on deep convolutions. However, the information aggregation across modalities in MSLD remains challenging due to severity unaligned spatial resolution (e.g., dermoscopic image and clinical image) and heterogeneous data (e.g., dermoscopic image and patients' meta-data). Limited by the intrinsic local attention, most recent MSLD pipelines using pure convolutions struggle to capture representative features in shallow layers, thus the fusion across different modalities …
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Meta AI；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
As an important area in computer vision, object tracking has formed two separate communities that respectively study Single Object Tracking (SOT) and Multiple Object Tracking (MOT). However, current methods in one tracking scenario are not easily adapted to the other due to the divergent training datasets and tracking objects of both tasks. Although UniTrack \cite{wang2021different} demonstrates that a shared appearance model with multiple heads can be used to tackle individual tracking tasks, it fails to exploit the large-scale tracking datasets for training and performs poorly on single obje…
Zhengzhou University（郑州大学）；Ningbo Huamei Hospital, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学宁波华美医院）
The spread of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has claimed millions of lives. Automatic segmentation of lesions from CT images can assist doctors with screening, treatment, and monitoring. However, accurate segmentation of lesions from CT images can be very challenging due to data and model limitations. Recently, Transformer-based networks have attracted a lot of attention in the area of computer vision, as Transformer outperforms CNN at a bunch of tasks. In this work, we propose a novel network structure that combines CNN and Transformer for the segmentation of COVID-19 lesions. …
TCLeaf-Net: a transformer-convolution framework with global-local attention for robust in-field lesion-level plant leaf disease detection
School of Optoelectronic Science and Engineering, South China Normal University（光电科学与工程学院，华南师范大学）；College of Engineering Physics, Shenzhen Technology University（工程物理学院，深圳科技大学）；Faculty of Intelligent Technology, Shanghai Institute of Technology（智能技术学院，上海理工大学）；Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University（信息科学研究生院，东北大学）
International Institute of Information Technology Naya Raipur（国际信息技术学院纳亚赖普尔分校）
Skin cancer is one of the most prevalent forms of human cancer. It is recognized mainly visually, beginning with clinical screening and continuing with the dermoscopic examination, histological assessment, and specimen collection. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) perform highly segregated and potentially universal tasks against a classified finegrained object. This research proposes a novel multi-class prediction framework that classifies skin lesions based on ViT and ViTGAN. Vision transformers-based GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) are utilized to tackle the class imbalance. T…
Object trackers deployed on low-power devices need to be light-weight, however, most of the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods rely on using compute-heavy backbones built using CNNs or transformers. Large sizes of such models do not allow their deployment in low-power conditions and designing compressed variants of large tracking models is of great importance. This paper demonstrates how highly compressed light-weight object trackers can be designed using neural architectural pruning of large CNN and transformer based trackers. Further, a comparative study on architectural choices best su…
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 …
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Xiamen University Malaysia（厦门大学马来西亚分校）；Manteia Technologies Co.,Ltd（曼泰亚科技有限公司）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Skin lesion segmentation from dermoscopy images is of great importance for improving the quantitative analysis of skin cancer. However, the automatic segmentation of melanoma is a very challenging task owing to the large variation of melanoma and ambiguous boundaries of lesion areas. While convolutional neutral networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable progress in this task, most of existing solutions are still incapable of effectively capturing global dependencies to counteract the inductive bias caused by limited receptive fields. Recently, transformers have been proposed as a promising tool …
SAM-Swin: SAM-Driven Dual-Swin Transformers with Adaptive Lesion Enhancement for Laryngo-Pharyngeal Tumor Detection
College of Big Data and Internet, Shenzhen Technology University（深圳技术大学大数据与互联网学院）；The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学附属第一医院）；Aberdeen Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, South China Normal University（华南师范大学阿伯丁数据科学与人工智能学院）
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学学院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Recent advances in automated skin cancer diagnosis have yielded performance on par with board-certified dermatologists. However, these approaches formulated skin cancer diagnosis as a simple classification task, dismissing the potential benefit from lesion segmentation. We argue that an accurate lesion segmentation can supplement the classification task with additive lesion information, such as asymmetry, border, intensity, and physical size; in turn, a faithful lesion classification can support the segmentation task with discriminant lesion features. To this end, this paper proposes a new mul…
Pancreatic cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death. Accurate detection, segmentation, and differential diagnosis of the full taxonomy of pancreatic lesions, i.e., normal, seven major types of lesions, and other lesions, is critical to aid the clinical decision-making of patient management and treatment. However, existing works focus on segmentation and classification for very specific lesion types (PDAC) or groups. Moreover, none of the previous work considers using lesion prevalence-related non-imaging patient information to assist the differential diagnosis. To this end, …
Template-based discriminative trackers are currently the dominant tracking methods due to their robustness and accuracy, and the Siamese-network-based methods that depend on cross-correlation operation between features extracted from template and search images show the state-of-the-art tracking performance. However, general cross-correlation operation can only obtain relationship between local patches in two feature maps. In this paper, we propose a novel tracker network based on a powerful attention mechanism called Transformer encoder-decoder architecture to gain global and rich contextual i…
Automated Detection of Multiple Sclerosis Lesions on 7-tesla MRI Using U-net and Transformer-based Segmentation
Department of Neurology, University of Maryland School of Medicine（马里兰大学医学院神经内科）；Baltimore VA Medical Center, VA Maryland Healthcare System（巴尔的摩退伍军人事务医疗中心，马里兰州退伍军人医疗系统）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Universal Lesion Detection (ULD) in computed tomography plays an essential role in computer-aided diagnosis. Promising ULD results have been reported by multi-slice-input detection approaches which model 3D context from multiple adjacent CT slices, but such methods still experience difficulty in obtaining a global representation among different slices and within each individual slice since they only use convolution-based fusion operations. In this paper, we propose a novel Slice Attention Transformer (SATr) block which can be easily plugged into convolution-based ULD backbones to form hybrid n…
The design of more complex and powerful neural network models has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in visual object tracking. These advances can be attributed to deeper networks, or the introduction of new building blocks, such as transformers. However, in the pursuit of increased tracking performance, runtime is often hindered. Furthermore, efficient tracking architectures have received surprisingly little attention. In this paper, we introduce the Exemplar Transformer, a transformer module utilizing a single instance level attention layer for realtime visual object tracking. E.T.T…
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…
SkinFormer: Learning Statistical Texture Representation with Transformer for Skin Lesion Segmentation
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Shandong Computer Science Center（山东省计算中心）；Qilu University of Technology（齐鲁工业大学）；Shandong Fundamental Research Center for Computer Science（山东计算机科学基础研究中心）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Transformer-based visual object tracking has been utilized extensively. However, the Transformer structure is lack of enough inductive bias. In addition, only focusing on encoding the global feature does harm to modeling local details, which restricts the capability of tracking in aerial robots. Specifically, with local-modeling to global-search mechanism, the proposed tracker replaces the global encoder by a novel local-recognition encoder. In the employed encoder, a local-recognition attention and a local element correction network are carefully designed for reducing the global redundant inf…
Clinically, the accurate annotation of lesions/tissues can significantly facilitate the disease diagnosis. For example, the segmentation of optic disc/cup (OD/OC) on fundus image would facilitate the glaucoma diagnosis, the segmentation of skin lesions on dermoscopic images is helpful to the melanoma diagnosis, etc. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, a wide range of methods proved the lesions/tissues segmentation can also facilitate the automated disease diagnosis models. However, existing methods are limited in the sense that they can only capture static regional correlations i…
