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Guang Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Guang Yang.

At least 235 records · Page 13Linked to original sources

Enhancing Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Fibrosis via Controllable Image Generation

Fibrotic Lung Disease (FLD) is a severe condition marked by lung stiffening and scarring, leading to respiratory decline. High-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) is critical for diagnosing and monitoring FLD; however, fibrosis appears as irregular, diffuse patterns with unclear boundaries, leading to high inter-observer variability and time-intensive manual annotation. To tackle this challenge, we propose DiffSeg, a novel weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) method that uses image-level annotations to generate pixel-level fibrosis segmentation, reducing the need for fine-grained manual labeling. Additionally, our DiffSeg incorporates a diffusion-based generative model to synthesize HRCT images with different levels of fibrosis from healthy slices, enabling the generation of the fibrosis-injected slices and their paired fibrosis location. Experiments indicate that our method significantly improves the accuracy of pseudo masks generated by existing WSSS methods, greatly reducing the complexity of manual labeling and enhancing the consistency of the generated masks.

eess.IV↗

Persistent nodal magnon-photon polariton in ferromagnetic heterostructures

Exceptional points with coalescence of eigenvalues and eigenvectors are spectral singularities in the parameter space, achieving which often needs fine-tuning of parameters in quantum systems. We predict a \textit{persistent} realization of nodal magnon-photon polariton, i.e., a polariton of long wavelength without any gap splitting in a thin ferromagnetic insulator film sandwiched by two normal metals, which persistently exists when the ferromagnet is sufficiently thick $\sim 100$~nm due to the joint effect of dissipation and dissipative coupling. We perform the model calculation \textit{beyond the perturbation theory} using a classical approach, develop a quantum scheme able to account for the Ohmic dissipation, and find ultrastrong coupling with coupling strength comparable to the bare magnon frequency. Via revealing a simple conversion relation we extend this formalism to superconductors and predict the gap opened by the ultrastrong coupling strongly depends on the direction of polariton propagation. Our findings may help search for robust non-Hermitian topological phases in magnonic and spintronic devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Querying in Constant Expected Time with Learned Indexes

Learned indexes leverage machine learning models to accelerate query answering in databases, showing impressive practical performance. However, theoretical understanding of these methods remains incomplete. Existing research suggests that learned indexes have superior asymptotic complexity compared to their non-learned counterparts, but these findings have been established under restrictive probabilistic assumptions. Specifically, for a sorted array with $n$ elements, it has been shown that learned indexes can find a key in $O(\log(\log n))$ expected time using at most linear space, compared with $O(\log n)$ for non-learned methods. In this work, we prove $O(1)$ expected time can be achieved with at most linear space, thereby establishing the tightest upper bound so far for the time complexity of an asymptotically optimal learned index. Notably, we use weaker probabilistic assumptions than prior research, meaning our work generalizes previous results. Furthermore, we introduce a new measure of statistical complexity for data. This metric exhibits an information-theoretical interpretation and can be estimated in practice. This characterization provides further theoretical understanding of learned indexes, by helping to explain why some datasets seem to be particularly challenging for these methods.

cs.DB↗

Data and Physics driven Deep Learning Models for Fast MRI Reconstruction: Fundamentals and Methodologies

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a pivotal clinical diagnostic tool, yet its extended scanning times often compromise patient comfort and image quality, especially in volumetric, temporal and quantitative scans. This review elucidates recent advances in MRI acceleration via data and physics-driven models, leveraging techniques from algorithm unrolling models, enhancement-based methods, and plug-and-play models to the emerging full spectrum of generative model-based methods. We also explore the synergistic integration of data models with physics-based insights, encompassing the advancements in multi-coil hardware accelerations like parallel imaging and simultaneous multi-slice imaging, and the optimization of sampling patterns. We then focus on domain-specific challenges and opportunities, including image redundancy exploitation, image integrity, evaluation metrics, data heterogeneity, and model generalization. This work also discusses potential solutions and future research directions, with an emphasis on the role of data harmonization and federated learning for further improving the general applicability and performance of these methods in MRI reconstruction.

eess.SP↗

Explicit Differentiable Slicing and Global Deformation for Cardiac Mesh Reconstruction

Mesh reconstruction of the cardiac anatomy from medical images is useful for shape and motion measurements and biophysics simulations to facilitate the assessment of cardiac function and health. However, 3D medical images are often acquired as 2D slices that are sparsely sampled and noisy, and mesh reconstruction on such data is a challenging task. Traditional voxel-based approaches rely on pre- and post-processing that compromises image fidelity, while mesh-level deep learning approaches require mesh annotations that are difficult to get. Therefore, direct cross-domain supervision from 2D images to meshes is a key technique for advancing 3D learning in medical imaging, but it has not been well-developed. While there have been attempts to approximate the optimized meshes' slicing, few existing methods directly use 2D slices to supervise mesh reconstruction in a differentiable manner. Here, we propose a novel explicit differentiable voxelization and slicing (DVS) algorithm that allows gradient backpropagation to a mesh from its slices, facilitating refined mesh optimization directly supervised by the losses defined on 2D images. Further, we propose an innovative framework for extracting patient-specific left ventricle (LV) meshes from medical images by coupling DVS with a graph harmonic deformation (GHD) mesh morphing descriptor of cardiac shape that naturally preserves mesh quality and smoothness during optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in cardiac mesh reconstruction tasks from CT and MRI, with an overall Dice score of 90% on multi-datasets, outperforming existing approaches. The proposed method can further quantify clinically useful parameters such as ejection fraction and global myocardial strains, closely matching the ground truth and surpassing the traditional voxel-based approach in sparse images.

eess.IV↗

Preserving Cardiac Integrity: A Topology-Infused Approach to Whole Heart Segmentation

Whole heart segmentation (WHS) supports cardiovascular disease (CVD) diagnosis, disease monitoring, treatment planning, and prognosis. Deep learning has become the most widely used method for WHS applications in recent years. However, segmentation of whole-heart structures faces numerous challenges including heart shape variability during the cardiac cycle, clinical artifacts like motion and poor contrast-to-noise ratio, domain shifts in multi-center data, and the distinct modalities of CT and MRI. To address these limitations and improve segmentation quality, this paper introduces a new topology-preserving module that is integrated into deep neural networks. The implementation achieves anatomically plausible segmentation by using learned topology-preserving fields, which are based entirely on 3D convolution and are therefore very effective for 3D voxel data. We incorporate natural constraints between structures into the end-to-end training and enrich the feature representation of the neural network. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on an open-source medical heart dataset, specifically using the WHS++ data. The results demonstrate that the architecture performs exceptionally well, achieving a Dice coefficient of 0.939 during testing. This indicates full topology preservation for individual structures and significantly outperforms other baselines in preserving the overall scene topology.

eess.IV↗

Anatomy of Thermally Interplayed Spin-Orbit Torque Driven Antiferromagnetic Switching

Current-induced antiferromagnetic (AFM) switching remains critical in spintronics, yet the interplay between thermal effects and spin torques still lacks clear clarification. Here we experimentally investigate the thermally interplayed spin-orbit torque induced AFM switching in magnetic tunnel junctions via pulse-width dependent reversal and time-resolved measurements. By introducing the Langevin random field into the AFM precession equation, we establish a novel AFM switching model that anatomically explains the experimental observations. Our findings elucidate the currentinduced AFM switching mechanism and offer significant promise for advancements in spintronics.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Deep Generative Models Unveil Patterns in Medical Images Through Vision-Language Conditioning

Deep generative models have significantly advanced medical imaging analysis by enhancing dataset size and quality. Beyond mere data augmentation, our research in this paper highlights an additional, significant capacity of deep generative models: their ability to reveal and demonstrate patterns in medical images. We employ a generative structure with hybrid conditions, combining clinical data and segmentation masks to guide the image synthesis process. Furthermore, we innovatively transformed the tabular clinical data into textual descriptions. This approach simplifies the handling of missing values and also enables us to leverage large pre-trained vision-language models that investigate the relations between independent clinical entries and comprehend general terms, such as gender and smoking status. Our approach differs from and presents a more challenging task than traditional medical report-guided synthesis due to the less visual correlation of our clinical information with the images. To overcome this, we introduce a text-visual embedding mechanism that strengthens the conditions, ensuring the network effectively utilizes the provided information. Our pipeline is generalizable to both GAN-based and diffusion models. Experiments on chest CT, particularly focusing on the smoking status, demonstrated a consistent intensity shift in the lungs which is in agreement with clinical observations, indicating the effectiveness of our method in capturing and visualizing the impact of specific attributes on medical image patterns. Our methods offer a new avenue for the early detection and precise visualization of complex clinical conditions with deep generative models. All codes are https://github.com/junzhin/DGM-VLC.

cs.CV↗

Rare Occasions: Tidal Disruption Events Rarely Power the AGNs Observed in Dwarf Galaxies

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) could be an important growth channel for massive black holes in dwarf galaxies. Theoretical work suggests that the observed active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in dwarf galaxies are predominantly TDE-powered. To assess this claim, we perform variability analyses on the dwarf-hosted AGNs detected in the $7$ Ms Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S) survey, with observations spanning $\approx 16$ years. Based on the spectral energy distribution (SED) modeling with X-CIGALE, we select AGNs hosted by dwarf galaxies (stellar mass below $10^{10}\ M_\odot$). We focus on X-ray sources with full-band detections, leading to a sample of $78$ AGNs (0.122 $\leq$ $z$ $\leq$ 3.515). We fit the X-ray light curves with a canonical TDE model of $t^{-5/3}$ and a constant model. If the former outperforms the latter in fitting quality for a source, we consider the source as a potential TDE. We identify five potential TDEs, constituting a small fraction of our sample. Using true- and false-positive rates obtained from fitting models to simulated light curves, we perform Bayesian analysis to obtain the posterior of the TDE fraction for our sample. The posterior peaks close to zero ($2.56\%$), and we obtain a $2$-$σ$ upper limit of $9.80\%$. Therefore, our result indicates that the observed AGNs in dwarf galaxies are not predominantly powered by TDEs.

astro-ph.GA↗

HAMLET: Graph Transformer Neural Operator for Partial Differential Equations

We present a novel graph transformer framework, HAMLET, designed to address the challenges in solving partial differential equations (PDEs) using neural networks. The framework uses graph transformers with modular input encoders to directly incorporate differential equation information into the solution process. This modularity enhances parameter correspondence control, making HAMLET adaptable to PDEs of arbitrary geometries and varied input formats. Notably, HAMLET scales effectively with increasing data complexity and noise, showcasing its robustness. HAMLET is not just tailored to a single type of physical simulation, but can be applied across various domains. Moreover, it boosts model resilience and performance, especially in scenarios with limited data. We demonstrate, through extensive experiments, that our framework is capable of outperforming current techniques for PDEs.

cs.LG↗

Deep Separable Spatiotemporal Learning for Fast Dynamic Cardiac MRI

Dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays an indispensable role in cardiac diagnosis. To enable fast imaging, the k-space data can be undersampled but the image reconstruction poses a great challenge of high-dimensional processing. This challenge necessitates extensive training data in deep learning reconstruction methods. In this work, we propose a novel and efficient approach, leveraging a dimension-reduced separable learning scheme that can perform exceptionally well even with highly limited training data. We design this new approach by incorporating spatiotemporal priors into the development of a Deep Separable Spatiotemporal Learning network (DeepSSL), which unrolls an iteration process of a 2D spatiotemporal reconstruction model with both temporal low-rankness and spatial sparsity. Intermediate outputs can also be visualized to provide insights into the network behavior and enhance interpretability. Extensive results on cardiac cine datasets demonstrate that the proposed DeepSSL surpasses state-of-the-art methods both visually and quantitatively, while reducing the demand for training cases by up to 75%. Additionally, its preliminary adaptability to unseen cardiac patients has been verified through a blind reader study conducted by experienced radiologists and cardiologists. Furthermore, DeepSSL enhances the accuracy of the downstream task of cardiac segmentation and exhibits robustness in prospectively undersampled real-time cardiac MRI.

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Serp-Mamba: Advancing High-Resolution Retinal Vessel Segmentation with Selective State-Space Model

Ultra-Wide-Field Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (UWF-SLO) images capture high-resolution views of the retina with typically 200 spanning degrees. Accurate segmentation of vessels in UWF-SLO images is essential for detecting and diagnosing fundus disease. Recent studies have revealed that the selective State Space Model (SSM) in Mamba performs well in modeling long-range dependencies, which is crucial for capturing the continuity of elongated vessel structures. Inspired by this, we propose the first Serpentine Mamba (Serp-Mamba) network to address this challenging task. Specifically, we recognize the intricate, varied, and delicate nature of the tubular structure of vessels. Furthermore, the high-resolution of UWF-SLO images exacerbates the imbalance between the vessel and background categories. Based on the above observations, we first devise a Serpentine Interwoven Adaptive (SIA) scan mechanism, which scans UWF-SLO images along curved vessel structures in a snake-like crawling manner. This approach, consistent with vascular texture transformations, ensures the effective and continuous capture of curved vascular structure features. Second, we propose an Ambiguity-Driven Dual Recalibration (ADDR) module to address the category imbalance problem intensified by high-resolution images. Our ADDR module delineates pixels by two learnable thresholds and refines ambiguous pixels through a dual-driven strategy, thereby accurately distinguishing vessels and background regions. Experiment results on three datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our Serp-Mamba on high-resolution vessel segmentation. We also conduct a series of ablation studies to verify the impact of our designs. Our code shall be released upon publication of this work.

cs.CV↗

Infrared and Visible Image Fusion with Hierarchical Human Perception

Image fusion combines images from multiple domains into one image, containing complementary information from source domains. Existing methods take pixel intensity, texture and high-level vision task information as the standards to determine preservation of information, lacking enhancement for human perception. We introduce an image fusion method, Hierarchical Perception Fusion (HPFusion), which leverages Large Vision-Language Model to incorporate hierarchical human semantic priors, preserving complementary information that satisfies human visual system. We propose multiple questions that humans focus on when viewing an image pair, and answers are generated via the Large Vision-Language Model according to images. The texts of answers are encoded into the fusion network, and the optimization also aims to guide the human semantic distribution of the fused image more similarly to source images, exploring complementary information within the human perception domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate our HPFusoin can achieve high-quality fusion results both for information preservation and human visual enhancement.

cs.CV↗

Multi-Modal Experience Inspired AI Creation

AI creation, such as poem or lyrics generation, has attracted increasing attention from both industry and academic communities, with many promising models proposed in the past few years. Existing methods usually estimate the outputs based on single and independent visual or textual information. However, in reality, humans usually make creations according to their experiences, which may involve different modalities and be sequentially correlated. To model such human capabilities, in this paper, we define and solve a novel AI creation problem based on human experiences. More specifically, we study how to generate texts based on sequential multi-modal information. Compared with the previous works, this task is much more difficult because the designed model has to well understand and adapt the semantics among different modalities and effectively convert them into the output in a sequential manner. To alleviate these difficulties, we firstly design a multi-channel sequence-to-sequence architecture equipped with a multi-modal attention network. For more effective optimization, we then propose a curriculum negative sampling strategy tailored for the sequential inputs. To benchmark this problem and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we manually labeled a new multi-modal experience dataset. With this dataset, we conduct extensive experiments by comparing our model with a series of representative baselines, where we can demonstrate significant improvements in our model based on both automatic and human-centered metrics. The code and data are available at: \url{https://github.com/Aman-4-Real/MMTG}.

cs.AI↗

Learning Task-Specific Sampling Strategy for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-View Computed Tomography (SVCT) offers low-dose and fast imaging but suffers from severe artifacts. Optimizing the sampling strategy is an essential approach to improving the imaging quality of SVCT. However, current methods typically optimize a universal sampling strategy for all types of scans, overlooking the fact that the optimal strategy may vary depending on the specific scanning task, whether it involves particular body scans (e.g., chest CT scans) or downstream clinical applications (e.g., disease diagnosis). The optimal strategy for one scanning task may not perform as well when applied to other tasks. To address this problem, we propose a deep learning framework that learns task-specific sampling strategies with a multi-task approach to train a unified reconstruction network while tailoring optimal sampling strategies for each individual task. Thus, a task-specific sampling strategy can be applied for each type of scans to improve the quality of SVCT imaging and further assist in performance of downstream clinical usage. Extensive experiments across different scanning types provide validation for the effectiveness of task-specific sampling strategies in enhancing imaging quality. Experiments involving downstream tasks verify the clinical value of learned sampling strategies, as evidenced by notable improvements in downstream task performance. Furthermore, the utilization of a multi-task framework with a shared reconstruction network facilitates deployment on current imaging devices with switchable task-specific modules, and allows for easily integrate new tasks without retraining the entire model.

eess.IV↗

CT-SDM: A Sampling Diffusion Model for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction across All Sampling Rates

Sparse views X-ray computed tomography has emerged as a contemporary technique to mitigate radiation dose. Because of the reduced number of projection views, traditional reconstruction methods can lead to severe artifacts. Recently, research studies utilizing deep learning methods has made promising progress in removing artifacts for Sparse-View Computed Tomography (SVCT). However, given the limitations on the generalization capability of deep learning models, current methods usually train models on fixed sampling rates, affecting the usability and flexibility of model deployment in real clinical settings. To address this issue, our study proposes a adaptive reconstruction method to achieve high-performance SVCT reconstruction at any sampling rate. Specifically, we design a novel imaging degradation operator in the proposed sampling diffusion model for SVCT (CT-SDM) to simulate the projection process in the sinogram domain. Thus, the CT-SDM can gradually add projection views to highly undersampled measurements to generalize the full-view sinograms. By choosing an appropriate starting point in diffusion inference, the proposed model can recover the full-view sinograms from any sampling rate with only one trained model. Experiments on several datasets have verified the effectiveness and robustness of our approach, demonstrating its superiority in reconstructing high-quality images from sparse-view CT scans across various sampling rates.

cs.CV↗

McCaD: Multi-Contrast MRI Conditioned, Adaptive Adversarial Diffusion Model for High-Fidelity MRI Synthesis

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is instrumental in clinical diagnosis, offering diverse contrasts that provide comprehensive diagnostic information. However, acquiring multiple MRI contrasts is often constrained by high costs, long scanning durations, and patient discomfort. Current synthesis methods, typically focused on single-image contrasts, fall short in capturing the collective nuances across various contrasts. Moreover, existing methods for multi-contrast MRI synthesis often fail to accurately map feature-level information across multiple imaging contrasts. We introduce McCaD (Multi-Contrast MRI Conditioned Adaptive Adversarial Diffusion), a novel framework leveraging an adversarial diffusion model conditioned on multiple contrasts for high-fidelity MRI synthesis. McCaD significantly enhances synthesis accuracy by employing a multi-scale, feature-guided mechanism, incorporating denoising and semantic encoders. An adaptive feature maximization strategy and a spatial feature-attentive loss have been introduced to capture more intrinsic features across multiple contrasts. This facilitates a precise and comprehensive feature-guided denoising process. Extensive experiments on tumor and healthy multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrated that the McCaD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines quantitively and qualitatively. The code is provided with supplementary materials.

cs.CV↗