arXiv subjects

Dong Ni

Publications and source records attributed to Dong Ni.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Instructive Feature Enhancement for Dichotomous Medical Image Segmentation

Deep neural networks have been widely applied in dichotomous medical image segmentation (DMIS) of many anatomical structures in several modalities, achieving promising performance. However, existing networks tend to struggle with task-specific, heavy and complex designs to improve accuracy. They made little instructions to which feature channels would be more beneficial for segmentation, and that may be why the performance and universality of these segmentation models are hindered. In this study, we propose an instructive feature enhancement approach, namely IFE, to adaptively select feature channels with rich texture cues and strong discriminability to enhance raw features based on local curvature or global information entropy criteria. Being plug-and-play and applicable for diverse DMIS tasks, IFE encourages the model to focus on texture-rich features which are especially important for the ambiguous and challenging boundary identification, simultaneously achieving simplicity, universality, and certain interpretability. To evaluate the proposed IFE, we constructed the first large-scale DMIS dataset Cosmos55k, which contains 55,023 images from 7 modalities and 26 anatomical structures. Extensive experiments show that IFE can improve the performance of classic segmentation networks across different anatomies and modalities with only slight modifications. Code is available at https://github.com/yezi-66/IFE

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arXiv2023

Fourier Test-time Adaptation with Multi-level Consistency for Robust Classification

Deep classifiers may encounter significant performance degradation when processing unseen testing data from varying centers, vendors, and protocols. Ensuring the robustness of deep models against these domain shifts is crucial for their widespread clinical application. In this study, we propose a novel approach called Fourier Test-time Adaptation (FTTA), which employs a dual-adaptation design to integrate input and model tuning, thereby jointly improving the model robustness. The main idea of FTTA is to build a reliable multi-level consistency measurement of paired inputs for achieving self-correction of prediction. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we encourage consistency in global features and local attention maps between the two transformed images of the same input. Here, the transformation refers to Fourier-based input adaptation, which can transfer one unseen image into source style to reduce the domain gap. Furthermore, we leverage style-interpolated images to enhance the global and local features with learnable parameters, which can smooth the consistency measurement and accelerate convergence. Second, we introduce a regularization technique that utilizes style interpolation consistency in the frequency space to encourage self-consistency in the logit space of the model output. This regularization provides strong self-supervised signals for robustness enhancement. FTTA was extensively validated on three large classification datasets with different modalities and organs. Experimental results show that FTTA is general and outperforms other strong state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2023

Recurrent Feature Propagation and Edge Skip-Connections for Automatic Abdominal Organ Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of abdominal organs in computed tomography (CT) images can support radiation therapy and image-guided surgery workflows. Developing of such automatic solutions remains challenging mainly owing to complex organ interactions and blurry boundaries in CT images. To address these issues, we focus on effective spatial context modeling and explicit edge segmentation priors. Accordingly, we propose a 3D network with four main components trained end-to-end including shared encoder, edge detector, decoder with edge skip-connections (ESCs) and recurrent feature propagation head (RFP-Head). To capture wide-range spatial dependencies, the RFP-Head propagates and harvests local features through directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) formulated with recurrent connections in an efficient slice-wise manner, with regard to spatial arrangement of image units. To leverage edge information, the edge detector learns edge prior knowledge specifically tuned for semantic segmentation by exploiting intermediate features from the encoder with the edge supervision. The ESCs then aggregate the edge knowledge with multi-level decoder features to learn a hierarchy of discriminative features explicitly modeling complementarity between organs' interiors and edges for segmentation. We conduct extensive experiments on two challenging abdominal CT datasets with eight annotated organs. Experimental results show that the proposed network outperforms several state-of-the-art models, especially for the segmentation of small and complicated structures (gallbladder, esophagus, stomach, pancreas and duodenum). The code will be publicly available.

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arXiv2023

Hierarchical Agent-based Reinforcement Learning Framework for Automated Quality Assessment of Fetal Ultrasound Video

Ultrasound is the primary modality to examine fetal growth during pregnancy, while the image quality could be affected by various factors. Quality assessment is essential for controlling the quality of ultrasound images to guarantee both the perceptual and diagnostic values. Existing automated approaches often require heavy structural annotations and the predictions may not necessarily be consistent with the assessment results by human experts. Furthermore, the overall quality of a scan and the correlation between the quality of frames should not be overlooked. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning framework powered by two hierarchical agents that collaboratively learn to perform both frame-level and video-level quality assessments. It is equipped with a specially-designed reward mechanism that considers temporal dependency among frame quality and only requires sparse binary annotations to train. Experimental results on a challenging fetal brain dataset verify that the proposed framework could perform dual-level quality assessment and its predictions correlate well with the subjective assessment results.

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arXiv2022

RLIP: Relational Language-Image Pre-training for Human-Object Interaction Detection

The task of Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection targets fine-grained visual parsing of humans interacting with their environment, enabling a broad range of applications. Prior work has demonstrated the benefits of effective architecture design and integration of relevant cues for more accurate HOI detection. However, the design of an appropriate pre-training strategy for this task remains underexplored by existing approaches. To address this gap, we propose Relational Language-Image Pre-training (RLIP), a strategy for contrastive pre-training that leverages both entity and relation descriptions. To make effective use of such pre-training, we make three technical contributions: (1) a new Parallel entity detection and Sequential relation inference (ParSe) architecture that enables the use of both entity and relation descriptions during holistically optimized pre-training; (2) a synthetic data generation framework, Label Sequence Extension, that expands the scale of language data available within each minibatch; (3) mechanisms to account for ambiguity, Relation Quality Labels and Relation Pseudo-Labels, to mitigate the influence of ambiguous/noisy samples in the pre-training data. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the benefits of these contributions, collectively termed RLIP-ParSe, for improved zero-shot, few-shot and fine-tuning HOI detection performance as well as increased robustness to learning from noisy annotations. Code will be available at https://github.com/JacobYuan7/RLIP.

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arXiv2022

Masked Video Modeling with Correlation-aware Contrastive Learning for Breast Cancer Diagnosis in Ultrasound

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths in women. As the primary output of breast screening, breast ultrasound (US) video contains exclusive dynamic information for cancer diagnosis. However, training models for video analysis is non-trivial as it requires a voluminous dataset which is also expensive to annotate. Furthermore, the diagnosis of breast lesion faces unique challenges such as inter-class similarity and intra-class variation. In this paper, we propose a pioneering approach that directly utilizes US videos in computer-aided breast cancer diagnosis. It leverages masked video modeling as pretraining to reduce reliance on dataset size and detailed annotations. Moreover, a correlation-aware contrastive loss is developed to facilitate the identifying of the internal and external relationship between benign and malignant lesions. Experimental results show that our proposed approach achieved promising classification performance and can outperform other state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2022

Multi-Attribute Attention Network for Interpretable Diagnosis of Thyroid Nodules in Ultrasound Images

Ultrasound (US) is the primary imaging technique for the diagnosis of thyroid cancer. However, accurate identification of nodule malignancy is a challenging task that can elude less-experienced clinicians. Recently, many computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have been proposed to assist this process. However, most of them do not provide the reasoning of their classification process, which may jeopardize their credibility in practical use. To overcome this, we propose a novel deep learning framework called multi-attribute attention network (MAA-Net) that is designed to mimic the clinical diagnosis process. The proposed model learns to predict nodular attributes and infer their malignancy based on these clinically-relevant features. A multi-attention scheme is adopted to generate customized attention to improve each task and malignancy diagnosis. Furthermore, MAA-Net utilizes nodule delineations as nodules spatial prior guidance for the training rather than cropping the nodules with additional models or human interventions to prevent losing the context information. Validation experiments were performed on a large and challenging dataset containing 4554 patients. Results show that the proposed method outperformed other state-of-the-art methods and provides interpretable predictions that may better suit clinical needs.

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arXiv2022

Deep Motion Network for Freehand 3D Ultrasound Reconstruction

Freehand 3D ultrasound (US) has important clinical value due to its low cost and unrestricted field of view. Recently deep learning algorithms have removed its dependence on bulky and expensive external positioning devices. However, improving reconstruction accuracy is still hampered by difficult elevational displacement estimation and large cumulative drift. In this context, we propose a novel deep motion network (MoNet) that integrates images and a lightweight sensor known as the inertial measurement unit (IMU) from a velocity perspective to alleviate the obstacles mentioned above. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we introduce IMU acceleration for the first time to estimate elevational displacements outside the plane. We propose a temporal and multi-branch structure to mine the valuable information of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) acceleration. Second, we propose a multi-modal online self-supervised strategy that leverages IMU information as weak labels for adaptive optimization to reduce drift errors and further ameliorate the impacts of acceleration noise. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves the superior reconstruction performance, exceeding state-of-the-art methods across the board.

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arXiv2022

Fine-grained Correlation Loss for Regression

Regression learning is classic and fundamental for medical image analysis. It provides the continuous mapping for many critical applications, like the attribute estimation, object detection, segmentation and non-rigid registration. However, previous studies mainly took the case-wise criteria, like the mean square errors, as the optimization objectives. They ignored the very important population-wise correlation criterion, which is exactly the final evaluation metric in many tasks. In this work, we propose to revisit the classic regression tasks with novel investigations on directly optimizing the fine-grained correlation losses. We mainly explore two complementary correlation indexes as learnable losses: Pearson linear correlation (PLC) and Spearman rank correlation (SRC). The contributions of this paper are two folds. First, for the PLC on global level, we propose a strategy to make it robust against the outliers and regularize the key distribution factors. These efforts significantly stabilize the learning and magnify the efficacy of PLC. Second, for the SRC on local level, we propose a coarse-to-fine scheme to ease the learning of the exact ranking order among samples. Specifically, we convert the learning for the ranking of samples into the learning of similarity relationships among samples. We extensively validate our method on two typical ultrasound image regression tasks, including the image quality assessment and bio-metric measurement. Experiments prove that, with the fine-grained guidance in directly optimizing the correlation, the regression performances are significantly improved. Our proposed correlation losses are general and can be extended to more important applications.

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arXiv2022

Weakly-supervised High-fidelity Ultrasound Video Synthesis with Feature Decoupling

Ultrasound (US) is widely used for its advantages of real-time imaging, radiation-free and portability. In clinical practice, analysis and diagnosis often rely on US sequences rather than a single image to obtain dynamic anatomical information. This is challenging for novices to learn because practicing with adequate videos from patients is clinically unpractical. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to synthesize high-fidelity US videos. Specifically, the synthesis videos are generated by animating source content images based on the motion of given driving videos. Our highlights are three-fold. First, leveraging the advantages of self- and fully-supervised learning, our proposed system is trained in weakly-supervised manner for keypoint detection. These keypoints then provide vital information for handling complex high dynamic motions in US videos. Second, we decouple content and texture learning using the dual decoders to effectively reduce the model learning difficulty. Last, we adopt the adversarial training strategy with GAN losses for further improving the sharpness of the generated videos, narrowing the gap between real and synthesis videos. We validate our method on a large in-house pelvic dataset with high dynamic motion. Extensive evaluation metrics and user study prove the effectiveness of our proposed method.

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arXiv2022

Agent with Tangent-based Formulation and Anatomical Perception for Standard Plane Localization in 3D Ultrasound

Standard plane (SP) localization is essential in routine clinical ultrasound (US) diagnosis. Compared to 2D US, 3D US can acquire multiple view planes in one scan and provide complete anatomy with the addition of coronal plane. However, manually navigating SPs in 3D US is laborious and biased due to the orientation variability and huge search space. In this study, we introduce a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework for automatic SP localization in 3D US. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we formulate SP localization in 3D US as a tangent-point-based problem in RL to restructure the action space and significantly reduce the search space. Second, we design an auxiliary task learning strategy to enhance the model's ability to recognize subtle differences crossing Non-SPs and SPs in plane search. Finally, we propose a spatial-anatomical reward to effectively guide learning trajectories by exploiting spatial and anatomical information simultaneously. We explore the efficacy of our approach on localizing four SPs on uterus and fetal brain datasets. The experiments indicate that our approach achieves a high localization accuracy as well as robust performance.

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arXiv2022

Online Reflective Learning for Robust Medical Image Segmentation

Deep segmentation models often face the failure risks when the testing image presents unseen distributions. Improving model robustness against these risks is crucial for the large-scale clinical application of deep models. In this study, inspired by human learning cycle, we propose a novel online reflective learning framework (RefSeg) to improve segmentation robustness. Based on the reflection-on-action conception, our RefSeg firstly drives the deep model to take action to obtain semantic segmentation. Then, RefSeg triggers the model to reflect itself. Because making deep models realize their segmentation failures during testing is challenging, RefSeg synthesizes a realistic proxy image from the semantic mask to help deep models build intuitive and effective reflections. This proxy translates and emphasizes the segmentation flaws. By maximizing the structural similarity between the raw input and the proxy, the reflection-on-action loop is closed with segmentation robustness improved. RefSeg runs in the testing phase and is general for segmentation models. Extensive validation on three medical image segmentation tasks with a public cardiac MR dataset and two in-house large ultrasound datasets show that our RefSeg remarkably improves model robustness and reports state-of-the-art performance over strong competitors.

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arXiv2022

Personalized Diagnostic Tool for Thyroid Cancer Classification using Multi-view Ultrasound

Over the past decades, the incidence of thyroid cancer has been increasing globally. Accurate and early diagnosis allows timely treatment and helps to avoid over-diagnosis. Clinically, a nodule is commonly evaluated from both transverse and longitudinal views using thyroid ultrasound. However, the appearance of the thyroid gland and lesions can vary dramatically across individuals. Identifying key diagnostic information from both views requires specialized expertise. Furthermore, finding an optimal way to integrate multi-view information also relies on the experience of clinicians and adds further difficulty to accurate diagnosis. To address these, we propose a personalized diagnostic tool that can customize its decision-making process for different patients. It consists of a multi-view classification module for feature extraction and a personalized weighting allocation network that generates optimal weighting for different views. It is also equipped with a self-supervised view-aware contrastive loss to further improve the model robustness towards different patient groups. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can better utilize multi-view information and outperform the competing methods.

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arXiv2022

Sketch guided and progressive growing GAN for realistic and editable ultrasound image synthesis

Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely used for anatomical structure inspection in clinical diagnosis. The training of new sonographers and deep learning based algorithms for US image analysis usually requires a large amount of data. However, obtaining and labeling large-scale US imaging data are not easy tasks, especially for diseases with low incidence. Realistic US image synthesis can alleviate this problem to a great extent. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) based image synthesis framework. Our main contributions include: 1) we present the first work that can synthesize realistic B-mode US images with high-resolution and customized texture editing features; 2) to enhance structural details of generated images, we propose to introduce auxiliary sketch guidance into a conditional GAN. We superpose the edge sketch onto the object mask and use the composite mask as the network input; 3) to generate high-resolution US images, we adopt a progressive training strategy to gradually generate high-resolution images from low-resolution images. In addition, a feature loss is proposed to minimize the difference of high-level features between the generated and real images, which further improves the quality of generated images; 4) the proposed US image synthesis method is quite universal and can also be generalized to the US images of other anatomical structures besides the three ones tested in our study (lung, hip joint, and ovary); 5) extensive experiments on three large US image datasets are conducted to validate our method. Ablation studies, customized texture editing, user studies, and segmentation tests demonstrate promising results of our method in synthesizing realistic US images.

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arXiv2022

Statistical Dependency Guided Contrastive Learning for Multiple Labeling in Prenatal Ultrasound

Standard plane recognition plays an important role in prenatal ultrasound (US) screening. Automatically recognizing the standard plane along with the corresponding anatomical structures in US image can not only facilitate US image interpretation but also improve diagnostic efficiency. In this study, we build a novel multi-label learning (MLL) scheme to identify multiple standard planes and corresponding anatomical structures of fetus simultaneously. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we represent the class correlation by word embeddings to capture the fine-grained semantic and latent statistical concurrency. Second, we equip the MLL with a graph convolutional network to explore the inner and outer relationship among categories. Third, we propose a novel cluster relabel-based contrastive learning algorithm to encourage the divergence among ambiguous classes. Extensive validation was performed on our large in-house dataset. Our approach reports the highest accuracy as 90.25% for standard planes labeling, 85.59% for planes and structures labeling and mAP as 94.63%. The proposed MLL scheme provides a novel perspective for standard plane recognition and can be easily extended to other medical image classification tasks.

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arXiv2022

HASA: Hybrid Architecture Search with Aggregation Strategy for Echinococcosis Classification and Ovary Segmentation in Ultrasound Images

Different from handcrafted features, deep neural networks can automatically learn task-specific features from data. Due to this data-driven nature, they have achieved remarkable success in various areas. However, manual design and selection of suitable network architectures are time-consuming and require substantial effort of human experts. To address this problem, researchers have proposed neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms which can automatically generate network architectures but suffer from heavy computational cost and instability if searching from scratch. In this paper, we propose a hybrid NAS framework for ultrasound (US) image classification and segmentation. The hybrid framework consists of a pre-trained backbone and several searched cells (i.e., network building blocks), which takes advantage of the strengths of both NAS and the expert knowledge from existing convolutional neural networks. Specifically, two effective and lightweight operations, a mixed depth-wise convolution operator and a squeeze-and-excitation block, are introduced into the candidate operations to enhance the variety and capacity of the searched cells. These two operations not only decrease model parameters but also boost network performance. Moreover, we propose a re-aggregation strategy for the searched cells, aiming to further improve the performance for different vision tasks. We tested our method on two large US image datasets, including a 9-class echinococcosis dataset containing 9566 images for classification and an ovary dataset containing 3204 images for segmentation. Ablation experiments and comparison with other handcrafted or automatically searched architectures demonstrate that our method can generate more powerful and lightweight models for the above US image classification and segmentation tasks.

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arXiv2022

Generalizable Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation via Style Augmentation and Dual Normalization

For medical image segmentation, imagine if a model was only trained using MR images in source domain, how about its performance to directly segment CT images in target domain? This setting, namely generalizable cross-modality segmentation, owning its clinical potential, is much more challenging than other related settings, e.g., domain adaptation. To achieve this goal, we in this paper propose a novel dual-normalization model by leveraging the augmented source-similar and source-dissimilar images during our generalizable segmentation. To be specific, given a single source domain, aiming to simulate the possible appearance change in unseen target domains, we first utilize a nonlinear transformation to augment source-similar and source-dissimilar images. Then, to sufficiently exploit these two types of augmentations, our proposed dual-normalization based model employs a shared backbone yet independent batch normalization layer for separate normalization. Afterward, we put forward a style-based selection scheme to automatically choose the appropriate path in the test stage. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets, i.e., BraTS, Cross-Modality Cardiac, and Abdominal Multi-Organ datasets, have demonstrated that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art domain generalization methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zzzqzhou/Dual-Normalization.

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arXiv2022

Detecting Human-Object Interactions with Object-Guided Cross-Modal Calibrated Semantics

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is an essential task to understand human-centric images from a fine-grained perspective. Although end-to-end HOI detection models thrive, their paradigm of parallel human/object detection and verb class prediction loses two-stage methods' merit: object-guided hierarchy. The object in one HOI triplet gives direct clues to the verb to be predicted. In this paper, we aim to boost end-to-end models with object-guided statistical priors. Specifically, We propose to utilize a Verb Semantic Model (VSM) and use semantic aggregation to profit from this object-guided hierarchy. Similarity KL (SKL) loss is proposed to optimize VSM to align with the HOI dataset's priors. To overcome the static semantic embedding problem, we propose to generate cross-modality-aware visual and semantic features by Cross-Modal Calibration (CMC). The above modules combined composes Object-guided Cross-modal Calibration Network (OCN). Experiments conducted on two popular HOI detection benchmarks demonstrate the significance of incorporating the statistical prior knowledge and produce state-of-the-art performances. More detailed analysis indicates proposed modules serve as a stronger verb predictor and a more superior method of utilizing prior knowledge. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/JacobYuan7/OCN-HOI-Benchmark}.

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