Current methods focusing on medical image segmentation suffer from incorrect annotations, which is known as the noisy label issue. Most medical image segmentation with noisy labels methods utilize either noise transition matrix, noise-robust loss functions or pseudo-labeling methods, while none of the current research focuses on clean label disentanglement. We argue that the main reason is that the severe class-imbalanced issue will lead to the inaccuracy of the selected ``clean'' labels, thus influencing the robustness of the model against the noises. In this work, we come up with a simple but efficient class-balanced sampling strategy to tackle the class-imbalanced problem, which enables our newly proposed clean label disentangling framework to successfully select clean labels from the given label sets and encourages the model to learn from the correct annotations. However, such a method will filter out too many annotations which may also contain useful information. Therefore, we further extend our clean label disentangling framework to a new noisy feature-aided clean label disentangling framework, which takes the full annotations into utilization to learn more semantics. Extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our methods, where our methods achieve new state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyao3302/2BDenoise.
Deep Self-Cleansing for Medical Image Segmentation with Noisy Labels
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学生命科学与医学部生物医学工程学院）；Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学苏州研究院）；Army Medical University (Third Military Medical University)（中国人民解放军陆军军医大学（第三军医大学））；The First Affiliated Hospital, College of Medicine, Zhejiang University（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院）；College of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University（立命馆大学信息科学与工程学院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）
Manual annotation of medical images is highly subjective, leading to inevitable and huge annotation biases. Deep learning models may surpass human performance on a variety of tasks, but they may also mimic or amplify these biases. Although we can have multiple annotators and fuse their annotations to reduce stochastic errors, we cannot use this strategy to handle the bias caused by annotators' preferences. In this paper, we highlight the issue of annotator-related biases on medical image segmentation tasks, and propose a Preference-involved Annotation Distribution Learning (PADL) framework to …
Research School of Computer Science, the Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学计算机科学研究院）；Data61-CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61中心）；OPPO US Research（OPPO美国研究院）
The prevalent convolutional neural network (CNN) based image denoising methods extract features of images to restore the clean ground truth, achieving high denoising accuracy. However, these methods may ignore the underlying distribution of clean images, inducing distortions or artifacts in denoising results. This paper proposes a new perspective to treat image denoising as a distribution learning and disentangling task. Since the noisy image distribution can be viewed as a joint distribution of clean images and noise, the denoised images can be obtained via manipulating the latent representat…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Canon Medical Research Europe Ltd.（佳能医疗欧洲研究有限公司）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Generalising deep models to new data from new centres (termed here domains) remains a challenge. This is largely attributed to shifts in data statistics (domain shifts) between source and unseen domains. Recently, gradient-based meta-learning approaches where the training data are split into meta-train and meta-test sets to simulate and handle the domain shifts during training have shown improved generalisation performance. However, the current fully supervised meta-learning approaches are not scalable for medical image segmentation, where large effort is required to create pixel-wise annotati…
When Does RL Help Medical VLMs? Disentangling Vision, SFT, and RL Gains
University of Toronto, Canada（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute, Canada（向量研究所）；KITE Research Institute, University Health Network, Canada（KITE研究机构）；York University, Canada（约克大学）
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA（加利福尼亚大学）；LOS ANGELES（洛杉矶）
Image segmentation is a fundamental and challenging problem in computer vision with applications spanning multiple areas, such as medical imaging, remote sensing, and autonomous vehicles. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained traction in the design of automated segmentation pipelines. Although CNN-based models are adept at learning abstract features from raw image data, their performance is dependent on the availability and size of suitable training datasets. Additionally, these models are often unable to capture the details of object boundaries and generalize poorly to un…
Layer-wise Noise Guided Selective Wavelet Reconstruction for Robust Medical Image Segmentation
Big Data and Software College, Chongqing University（重庆大学大数据与软件学院）；Office of Scientific Research, Peking University（北京大学科研办公室）；Key Lab of High Confidence Software Technology, Ministry of Education (Peking University)（教育部高可信软件技术重点实验室（北京大学））；School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）；Department of Cardiology and Institute of Vascular Medicine, Peking University Third Hospital（北京大学第三医院心内科和血管医学研究院）
Disentangling Sampling from Training Budget in Class-Imbalanced CT Body Composition Segmentation
Amsterdam University Medical Center（阿姆斯特丹大学医学中心）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Informatics Institute, Faculty of Science（信息学院，科学学院）；Department of Radiology（放射科）；Mayo Clinic Rochester（罗切斯特梅奥诊所）
Deep convolutional neural networks have driven substantial advancements in the automatic understanding of images. Requiring a large collection of images and their associated annotations is one of the main bottlenecks limiting the adoption of deep networks. In the task of medical image segmentation, requiring pixel-level semantic annotations performed by human experts exacerbate this difficulty. This paper proposes a new framework to train a fully convolutional segmentation network from a large set of cheap unreliable annotations and a small set of expert-level clean annotations. We propose a s…
MIMM-X: Disentangling Spurious Correlations for Medical Image Analysis
Medical Image and Data Analysis, University Hospital of Tübingen, Germany（医学图像与数据分析，图宾根大学医院，德国）；Institute for Signal Processing and System Theory, University of Stuttgart, Germany（信号处理与系统理论研究所，斯图加特大学，德国）；Stanford University, Department of Radiology, Stanford, USA（斯坦福大学放射科，斯坦福，美国）
For Domain Generalizable Object Detection (DGOD), Disentangled Representation Learning (DRL) helps a lot by explicitly disentangling Domain-Invariant Representations (DIR) from Domain-Specific Representations (DSR). Considering the domain category is an attribute of input data, it should be feasible for networks to fit a specific mapping which projects DSR into feature channels exclusive to domain-specific information, and thus much cleaner disentanglement of DIR from DSR can be achieved simply on channel dimension. Inspired by this idea, we propose a novel DRL method for DGOD, which is termed…
Recently, significant progress has been made on image denoising with strong supervision from large-scale datasets. However, obtaining well-aligned noisy-clean training image pairs for each specific scenario is complicated and costly in practice. Consequently, applying a conventional supervised denoising network on in-the-wild noisy inputs is not straightforward. Although several studies have challenged this problem without strong supervision, they rely on less practical assumptions and cannot be applied to practical situations directly. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a no…
VoxShield: Protecting 3D Medical Datasets from Unauthorized Training via Frequency-Aware Inter-Slice Disruption
Westlake University（西拉雅大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Hokkaido University（北海道大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Recent years have seen increasing use of supervised learning methods for segmentation tasks. However, the predictive performance of these algorithms depends on the quality of labels. This problem is particularly pertinent in the medical image domain, where both the annotation cost and inter-observer variability are high. In a typical label acquisition process, different human experts provide their estimates of the "true" segmentation labels under the influence of their own biases and competence levels. Treating these noisy labels blindly as the ground truth limits the performance that automati…
The CLIP network measures the similarity between natural text and images; in this work, we investigate the entanglement of the representation of word images and natural images in its image encoder. First, we find that the image encoder has an ability to match word images with natural images of scenes described by those words. This is consistent with previous research that suggests that the meaning and the spelling of a word might be entangled deep within the network. On the other hand, we also find that CLIP has a strong ability to match nonsense words, suggesting that processing of letters is…
Disentangling Progress in Medical Image Registration: Beyond Trend-Driven Architectures towards Domain-Specific Strategies
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Safeguarding Medical Image Segmentation Datasets against Unauthorized Training via Contour- and Texture-Aware Perturbations
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆凯特琳癌症中心）；Great Bay University（大湾区大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
It is known that Deep Neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and the adversarial robustness of DNNs could be improved by adding adversarial noises to training data (e.g., the standard adversarial training (SAT)). However, inappropriate noises added to training data may reduce a model's performance, which is termed the trade-off between accuracy and robustness. This problem has been sufficiently studied for the classification of whole images but has rarely been explored for image analysis tasks in the medical application domain, including image segmentation, landmark dete…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Johns Hopkins School of Medicine（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学医学院）；National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Health（美国国立卫生研究院国家老龄化研究所）
Disentangling anatomical and contrast information from medical images has gained attention recently, demonstrating benefits for various image analysis tasks. Current methods learn disentangled representations using either paired multi-modal images with the same underlying anatomy or auxiliary labels (e.g., manual delineations) to provide inductive bias for disentanglement. However, these requirements could significantly increase the time and cost in data collection and limit the applicability of these methods when such data are not available. Moreover, these methods generally do not guarantee …
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）
While medical images such as computed tomography (CT) are stored in DICOM format in hospital PACS, it is still quite routine in many countries to print a film as a transferable medium for the purposes of self-storage and secondary consultation. Also, with the ubiquitousness of mobile phone cameras, it is quite common to take pictures of the CT films, which unfortunately suffer from geometric deformation and illumination variation. In this work, we study the problem of recovering a CT film, which marks the first attempt in the literature, to the best of our knowledge. We start with building a l…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；deepc GmbH（deepc有限公司）；Ludwig Maximilians University Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Disentangled representations can be useful in many downstream tasks, help to make deep learning models more interpretable, and allow for control over features of synthetically generated images that can be useful in training other models that require a large number of labelled or unlabelled data. Recently, flow-based generative models have been proposed to generate realistic images by directly modeling the data distribution with invertible functions. In this work, we propose a new flow-based generative model framework, named GLOWin, that is end-to-end invertible and able to learn disentangled r…
Medical images have been indispensable and useful tools for supporting medical experts in making diagnostic decisions. However, taken medical images especially throat and endoscopy images are normally hazy, lack of focus, or uneven illumination. Thus, these could difficult the diagnosis process for doctors. In this paper, we propose MIINet, a novel image-to-image translation network for improving quality of medical images by unsupervised translating low-quality images to the high-quality clean version. Our MIINet is not only capable of generating high-resolution clean images, but also preservi…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Point cloud denoising aims to restore clean point clouds from raw observations corrupted by noise and outliers while preserving the fine-grained details. We present a novel deep learning-based denoising model, that incorporates normalizing flows and noise disentanglement techniques to achieve high denoising accuracy. Unlike existing works that extract features of point clouds for point-wise correction, we formulate the denoising process from the perspective of distribution learning and feature disentanglement. By considering noisy point clouds as a joint distribution of clean points and noise,…
Medical Image Deidentification, Cleaning and Compression Using Pylogik
Northwestern University（西北大学）；Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine（西北大学范伯格医学院）；Northwestern Memorial Hospital（西北纪念医院）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Various deep learning models have been developed to segment anatomical structures from medical images, but they typically have poor performance when tested on another target domain with different data distribution. Recently, unsupervised domain adaptation methods have been proposed to alleviate this so-called domain shift issue, but most of them are designed for scenarios with relatively small domain shifts and are likely to fail when encountering a large domain gap. In this paper, we propose DCDA, a novel cross-modality unsupervised domain adaptation framework for tasks with large domain shif…
Center for Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School（麻省总医院与哈佛医学院高级医学计算与分析中心）；Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School（麻省总医院与哈佛医学院戈登医学成像中心）
Deep neural networks have been proved efficient for medical image denoising. Current training methods require both noisy and clean images. However, clean images cannot be acquired for many practical medical applications due to naturally noisy signal, such as dynamic imaging, spectral computed tomography, arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging, etc. In this paper we proposed a training method which learned denoising neural networks from noisy training samples only. Training data in the acquisition domain was split to two subsets and the network was trained to map one noisy set to the…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in a wide variety of natural image and medical image computing tasks. However, these achievements indispensably rely on accurately annotated training data. If encountering some noisy-labeled images, the network training procedure would suffer from difficulties, leading to a sub-optimal classifier. This problem is even more severe in the medical image analysis field, as the annotation quality of medical images heavily relies on the expertise and experience of annotators. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative training paradigm with …
Ambient-Pix2PixGAN for Translating Medical Images from Noisy Data
University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute（密歇根大学-上海交通大学联合学院）；Global Institute of Future Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学未来技术全球研究院）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学生物医学工程学院）
Adversarial training is one of the main defenses against adversarial attacks. In this paper, we provide the first rigorous study on diagnosing elements of adversarial training, which reveals two intriguing properties. First, we study the role of normalization. Batch normalization (BN) is a crucial element for achieving state-of-the-art performance on many vision tasks, but we show it may prevent networks from obtaining strong robustness in adversarial training. One unexpected observation is that, for models trained with BN, simply removing clean images from training data largely boosts adversa…
RelativeFlow: Taming Medical Image Denoising Learning with Noisy Reference
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院，中国）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, USA（凯斯西储大学生物医学工程系，美国）；School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China（东南大学仪器科学与工程学院，中国）；Department of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, USA（亚利桑那大学光学科学系，美国）
Active Label Cleaning for Reliable Detection of Electron Dense Deposits in Transmission Electron Microscopy Images
School of Biomedical Engineering（生物医学工程学院）；Southern Medical University（南方医科大学）；College of Letters and Science（文理学院）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；School of Basic Medical Sciences（基础医学学院）；Department of Nephrology（肾内科）；Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University（南方医科大学南芳医院）
Image restoration has been an extensively researched topic in numerous fields. With the advent of deep learning, a lot of the current algorithms were replaced by algorithms that are more flexible and robust. Deep networks have demonstrated impressive performance in a variety of tasks like blind denoising, image enhancement, deblurring, super-resolution, inpainting, among others. Most of these learning-based algorithms use a large amount of clean data during the training process. However, in certain applications in medical image processing, one may not have access to a large amount of clean dat…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
We tackle the problem of Human Locomotion Forecasting, a task for jointly predicting the spatial positions of several keypoints on the human body in the near future under an egocentric setting. In contrast to the previous work that aims to solve either the task of pose prediction or trajectory forecasting in isolation, we propose a framework to unify the two problems and address the practically useful task of pedestrian locomotion prediction in the wild. Among the major challenges in solving this task is the scarcity of annotated egocentric video datasets with dense annotations for pose, depth…
Active Label Refinement for Robust Training of Imbalanced Medical Image Classification Tasks in the Presence of High Label Noise
Center for Imaging Science, Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院成像科学中心）；University of Aberdeen（阿伯丁大学）；Biomedical Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院生物医学工程系）
Australian Institute for Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg（马格德堡奥托·冯·格里克大学）
Real-world large-scale medical image analysis (MIA) datasets have three challenges: 1) they contain noisy-labelled samples that affect training convergence and generalisation, 2) they usually have an imbalanced distribution of samples per class, and 3) they normally comprise a multi-label problem, where samples can have multiple diagnoses. Current approaches are commonly trained to solve a subset of those problems, but we are unaware of methods that address the three problems simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a new training module called Non-Volatile Unbiased Memory (NVUM), which non-v…
Image denoising is of great importance for medical imaging system, since it can improve image quality for disease diagnosis and downstream image analyses. In a variety of applications, dynamic imaging techniques are utilized to capture the time-varying features of the subject, where multiple images are acquired for the same subject at different time points. Although signal-to-noise ratio of each time frame is usually limited by the short acquisition time, the correlation among different time frames can be exploited to improve denoising results with shared information across time frames. With t…
Microsoft Research Cambridge（微软剑桥研究院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Imperfections in data annotation, known as label noise, are detrimental to the training of machine learning models and have an often-overlooked confounding effect on the assessment of model performance. Nevertheless, employing experts to remove label noise by fully re-annotating large datasets is infeasible in resource-constrained settings, such as healthcare. This work advocates for a data-driven approach to prioritising samples for re-annotation - which we term "active label cleaning". We propose to rank instances according to estimated label correctness and labelling difficulty of each samp…
