arXiv subjects

Hairong Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Hairong Zheng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Longitudinal fMRI reveals multi-network reconfiguration and a recurrent frontoparietal shift across rest and task states during adult aging

Functional connectivity changes across adult aging, but most evidence is cross-sectional, and covariance-based connectivity depends on blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) fluctuation amplitude. Covariance decline can reflect changing fluctuation amplitude, and its interpretation may depend on whether normalization uses signal amplitude or includes estimated noise. It is also unclear which longitudinal changes recur across brain states. We analyzed 852 adults (baseline age 36-89 years) from the Aging Adult Brain Connectome with repeated functional MRI (fMRI) during rest, inhibitory control, associative memory, and visual-motor processing (2,220 sessions; median follow-up 5.5 years). Baseline age and elapsed follow-up were modeled separately. Ten cortical networks were tested jointly across states, and covariance was normalized either by released signal amplitude or by a candidate total amplitude reconstructed from released signal and noise amplitudes. Native common covariance declined by 7-11% per 5 years, while signal pair amplitude declined by 9% on average across states, significantly more than estimated noise pair amplitude. Under signal normalization, the relative balance among networks reconfigured over follow-up and differed across states, and the frontoparietal network shifted positively relative to the other nine networks in all four states, by 5-8% per 5 years. The estimated common trajectory was near zero under signal normalization but declined by 4-7% per 5 years under candidate total normalization. The network reconfiguration and the positive frontoparietal-relative direction persisted under both. Within-person coupling between the frontoparietal shift and fluid cognition was not detected. Adult aging thus combines normalization-dependent overall change with a state-dependent redistribution among networks that includes a recurrent frontoparietal shift.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2026

SGAM: Shared Gaussian Geometry with Implicit Amplitude Modeling for Scan-Specific 3D Multi-Contrast MRI Reconstruction

Three-dimensional (3D) multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MCMRI) provides rich anatomical and quantitative information but requires long acquisition times, motivating k-space undersampling. However, reconstruction of large volumetric datasets imposes substantial computational and memory demands. To address this challenge, we propose SGAM, a memory-efficient, scan-specific framework for joint full-volume 3D MCMRI reconstruction. SGAM is based on a shared-geometry Gaussian representation in which amplitudes are modeled by a multi-output implicit neural representation (INR) and contrast-specific phases by explicit variables. This design exploits common anatomical structure across contrasts while preserving contrast-specific signal variations. The representation is jointly optimized using only the acquired multi-coil k-space without external training data. Experiments showed that SGAM consistently outperformed the comparison methods across imaging tasks and acceleration factors, with greater improvements under stronger undersampling. SGAM also achieved a favorable balance between reconstruction quality and computational cost, demonstrating its effectiveness for 3D multi-contrast MRI reconstruction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

MCSeg: Pre-training and Fine-tuning Volumetric Pyramid Transformer for Multi-modal Cardiac Image Segmentation

Automatic cardiac image segmentation is pivotal for diagnosing and treating cardiac diseases. In this work, we introduce MCSeg, a volumetric transformer-based network tailored for multi-modal cardiac segmentation. To overcome the architectural mismatch inherent in existing hybrid networks, we propose a novel Scaling Feature Pyramid (SFP). Unlike conventional skip connections, the SFP effectively bridges the single-scale 3D Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder and the multi-scale CNN decoder by transforming the ViT's output into a hierarchical feature pyramid, ensuring that global contextual information is effectively leveraged. For the training paradigm, the ViT encoder first undergoes self-supervised pre-training via masked image modeling. Subsequently, the network is fine-tuned on downstream tasks, during which a regional mutual information (RMI) loss is integrated to improve boundary segmentation accuracy. In experiments, MCSeg consistently outperforms eleven SOTA methods on CT dataset ImageCHD, multi-modal dataset MM-WHS, MRI dataset HVSMR-2.0 and MSD Heart, highlighting the effectiveness of our MCSeg for multi-modal cardiac segmentation tasks. Furthermore, MCSeg's superior performance in few-shot experiment showcases its significant potential in adapting to limited data scenarios. Codes and pre-trained ViT-B weights are open-sourced at https://openi.pcl.ac.cn/OpenMedIA/MCSeg

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

GrowPage: On-Demand KV Budgeting for Efficient LLM Reasoning Serving

Long-output reasoning has made the key--value (KV) cache a critical memory bottleneck for efficient LLM serving. Existing KV compression methods usually rely on a predefined per-request budget and adjust only which KV states are retained, leaving the total capacity fixed throughout decoding. However, reasoning workloads exhibit substantial demand variation: different requests require different KV capacities, and the attention demand of an individual request evolves during generation. We introduce \textbf{GrowPage}, an on-demand KV budgeting framework that treats KV capacity as a runtime resource. GrowPage maintains lightweight dual-timescale query summaries to capture recent and long-term attention behaviors, and uses their relative attention working sets to estimate demand evolution. At each capacity boundary, GrowPage either compresses KV states within the current allocation or acquires an additional physical page when broader demand emerges. By integrating with PagedAttention's page-level memory abstraction, GrowPage preserves continuous batching and prefix caching. Experiments on reasoning benchmarks across multiple models show that GrowPage achieves a superior performance--throughput trade-off over existing approaches.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

A multicenter benchmark and clinically structured metric for coronary CTA report generation

Reliable evaluation of automated coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) report generation requires standardized multicentre benchmarks and clinically structured metrics. We established a four-centre benchmark comprising 3,021 CCTA series from 818 patient-report pairs to evaluate seven open-source three-dimensional vision-language models. We developed CSM$_{\text{CCTA}}$, a clinically structured metric for CCTA report evaluation, with patient-, vessel-, and segment-level variables defined according to clinical guidelines. Report pairs are compared at the finest shared anatomical level, and the contributions of different clinical components are weighted based on expert assessments. We estimated these weights using 70 expert-scored cases and evaluated clinical alignment in a non-overlapping set of 30 cases. CSM$_{\text{CCTA}}$ showed a strong correlation with radiologist scores (Pearson's $r=0.97$, $p<0.001$), exceeding the next-best metric, FORTE ($r=0.70$), by 0.27, and agreed with expert preferences in 115 of 160 pairwise comparisons (71.9\%). Under controlled perturbations, CSM$_{\text{CCTA}}$ remained stable to clinically equivalent wording and decreased monotonically with progressive information omission. In the multicenter benchmark, the CCTA-trained C2RG model achieved the highest CSM$_{\text{CCTA}}$ scores across all four hospitals, although its performance remained far from optimal. In contrast, CCTA-irrelevant reports accounted for up to 98.7\% of the outputs from generalist models. Together, the benchmark provides a standardized setting for model comparison, while CSM$_{\text{CCTA}}$ enables clinically structured evaluation of finding agreement and anatomical specificity. These results support a more clinically aligned and anatomically resolved approach to evaluating CCTA report generation. Code is available at https://openi.pcl.ac.cn/OpenMedIA/CSM_CCTA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

StableMind: Source-Free Cross-Subject fMRI Decoding with Regularized Adaptation

Existing cross-subject fMRI decoding methods typically train a model on multiple scanned subjects and then adapt it to a new subject using substantial paired fMRI-image data. However, in realistic scenarios, new-subject fMRI data are often limited due to costly data acquisition, and raw data from previous subjects may be inaccessible, leading existing methods to suffer performance degradation during new-subject adaptation. In this paper, we identify that this degradation stems from two key issues: brain-side instability caused by large subject differences in fMRI responses, and image-side supervision unreliability caused by fine-grained visual details that are not reliably supported by limited fMRI signals. To address these challenges, we propose StableMind, a regularized adaptation framework designed to improve brain-side representation stability and image-side supervision reliability. (1) To stabilize brain representations, StableMind reuses ridge projections from the pretrained model as adaptation priors to constrain limited-data new-subject adaptation, and applies Fourier-based feature-level brain augmentation to improve robustness to individual variability. (2) To improve image supervision reliability, StableMind introduces difficulty-aware image blur for brain-image alignment, reducing the influence of fine-grained visual details that are weakly supported by limited fMRI signals while preserving stable visual structure. Experiments on the Natural Scenes Dataset under a unified 1-hour adaptation protocol demonstrate that StableMind achieves 84.02% image retrieval accuracy and 81.66% brain retrieval accuracy averaged over four subjects, surpassing the state-of-the-art method by 5.71% brain retrieval accuracy with fewer trainable adaptation parameters. Our code is available at https://github.com/lingeringlight/StableMind.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Bias-constrained multimodal intelligence for equitable and reliable clinical AI

The integration of medical imaging and clinical text has enabled the emergence of generalist artificial intelligence (AI) systems for healthcare. However, pervasive biases, such as imbalanced disease prevalence, skewed anatomical region distributions, heterogeneous imaging protocols, and demographic disparities, pose significant challenges to the fairness and reliability of vision-language systems in real-world clinical settings. Here we present BiasCareVL, a bias-aware multimodal learning framework that introduces bias control directly into model design, rather than treating it as a post hoc correction. BiasCareVL incorporates adaptive uncertainty modeling with optional human-in-the-loop refinement to regulate the influence of dominant data patterns and to promote equitable reasoning under distributional imbalance. Trained on 3.44 million samples spanning over 15 imaging modalities, the framework supports diverse clinical tasks, including visual question answering, disease classification, segmentation, and report generation within a unified representation space. Across eight public benchmarks covering dermatology, oncology, radiology, and pathology, BiasCareVL consistently outperforms 20 state-of-the-art methods, with pronounced gains in clinically challenging scenarios, including over 10% accuracy improvement in multi-class skin lesion diagnosis and more than 20% Dice improvement in small tumor segmentation. Furthermore, BiasCareVL achieves diagnostic performance exceeding human accuracy with substantially reduced time requirements when evaluated with board-certified radiologists. By open-sourcing BiasCareVL, we aim to promote a transparent, reproducible, and equitable future for AI in healthcare, paving the way for general-purpose, trustworthy, and clinically reliable AI systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

ApET: Approximation-Error Guided Token Compression for Efficient VLMs

Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multimodal understanding capabilities, yet the redundant visual tokens incur prohibitive computational overhead and degrade inference efficiency. Prior studies typically relies on [CLS] attention or text-vision cross-attention to identify and discard redundant visual tokens. Despite promising results, such solutions are prone to introduce positional bias and, more critically, are incompatible with efficient attention kernels such as FlashAttention, limiting their practical deployment for VLM acceleration. In this paper, we step away from attention dependencies and revisit visual token compression from an information-theoretic perspective, aiming to maximally preserve visual information without any attention involvement. We present ApET, an Approximation-Error guided Token compression framework. ApET first reconstructs the original visual tokens with a small set of basis tokens via linear approximation, then leverages the approximation error to identify and drop the least informative tokens. Extensive experiments across multiple VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that ApET retains 95.2% of the original performance on image-understanding tasks and even attains 100.4% on video-understanding tasks, while compressing the token budgets by 88.9% and 87.5%, respectively. Thanks to its attention-free design, ApET seamlessly integrates with FlashAttention, enabling further inference acceleration and making VLM deployment more practical. Code is available at https://github.com/MaQianKun0/ApET.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Unsupervised patch-based dynamic MRI reconstruction using learnable tensor function with implicit neural representation

Dynamic MRI suffers from limited spatiotemporal resolution due to long acquisition times. Undersampling k-space accelerates imaging but makes accurate reconstruction challenging. Supervised deep learning methods achieve impressive results but rely on large fully sampled datasets, which are difficult to obtain. Recently, implicit neural representations (INR) have emerged as a powerful unsupervised paradigm that reconstructs images from a single undersampled dataset without external training data. However, existing INR-based methods still face challenges when applied to highly undersampled dynamic MRI, mainly due to their inefficient representation capacity and high computational cost. To address these issues, we propose TenF-INR, a novel unsupervised framework that integrates low-rank tensor modeling with INR, where each factor matrix in the tensor decomposition is modeled as a learnable factor function. Specifically,we employ INR to model learnable tensor functions within a low-rank decomposition, reducing the parameter space and computational burden. A patch-based nonlocal tensor modeling strategy further exploits temporal correlations and inter-patch similarities, enhancing the recovery of fine spatiotemporal details. Experiments on dynamic cardiac and abdominal datasets demonstrate that TenF-INR achieves up to 21-fold acceleration, outperforming both supervised and unsupervised state-of-the-art methods in image quality, temporal fidelity, and quantitative accuracy.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

A multi-modal vision-language model for generalizable annotation-free pathology localization

Existing deep learning models for defining pathology from clinical imaging data rely on expert annotations and lack generalization capabilities in open clinical environments. Here, we present a generalizable vision-language model for Annotation-Free pathology Localization (AFLoc). The core strength of AFLoc is extensive multi-level semantic structure-based contrastive learning, which comprehensively aligns multi-granularity medical concepts with abundant image features to adapt to the diverse expressions of pathologies without the reliance on expert image annotations. We conduct primary experiments on a dataset of 220K pairs of image-report chest X-ray images and perform validation across eight external datasets encompassing 34 types of chest pathologies. The results demonstrate that AFLoc outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both annotation-free localization and classification tasks. Additionally, we assess the generalizability of AFLoc on other modalities, including histopathology and retinal fundus images. We show that AFLoc exhibits robust generalization capabilities, even surpassing human benchmarks in localizing five different types of pathological images. These results highlight the potential of AFLoc in reducing annotation requirements and its applicability in complex clinical environments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Guided MRI Reconstruction via Schrödinger Bridge

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an inherently multi-contrast modality, where cross-contrast priors can be exploited to improve image reconstruction from undersampled data. Recently, diffusion models have shown remarkable performance in MRI reconstruction. However, they still struggle to effectively utilize such priors, mainly because existing methods rely on feature-level fusion in image or latent spaces, which lacks explicit structural correspondence and thus leads to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose $\mathbf{I}^2$SB-Inversion, a multi-contrast guided reconstruction framework based on the Schrödinger Bridge (SB). The proposed method performs pixel-wise translation between paired contrasts, providing explicit structural constraints between the guidance and target images. Furthermore, an Inversion strategy is introduced to correct inter-modality misalignment, which often occurs in guided reconstruction, thereby mitigating artifacts and improving reconstruction accuracy. Experiments on paired T1- and T2-weighted datasets demonstrate that $\mathbf{I}^2$SB-Inversion achieves a high acceleration factor of up to 14.4 and consistently outperforms existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Accurate myocardial T1 mapping at 5T using an improved MOLLI method: A validation study

Background: Accurate myocardial T1 mapping at 5T remains a technical challenge due to field inhomogeneity and prolonged T1 values. The aim of this study is to develop an accurate and clinically applicable myocardial T1 mapping technique for 5T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems and validate its performance in a multicenter study. Methods: The proposed method is based on a 5-(3)-3 MOLLI sequence, dubbed combined-correction MOLLI (coMOLLI), which corrects for both inversion efficiency and readout-induced signal disturbances. Specifically, coMOLLI employs a gradient recalled echo (GRE) readout rather than the commonly used bSSFP readout. Its signal evolution is modeled to estimate T1 values, which incorporates both inversion efficiency and readout disturbances to improve fitting accuracy. To further enhance accuracy, the inversion pulse was redesigned under hardware constraints and the observed B0 and B1 variations over the heart at 5T, using adiabatic hyperbolic secant (HSn) and tangent/hyperbolic tangent (Tan/Tanh) pulses. The method was validated in phantom experiments, as well as in 21 healthy volunteers and 9 patients. Results: The optimized inversion pulse at 5T is the Tan/Tanh pulse with A = 10 kHz, K_s = 4, k = 22, and T_p = 8 ms. In phantom studies, coMOLLI showed high accuracy versus reference IR-FSE, yielding relative errors within 5% for all nine vials. In vivo studies, the average native myocardial T1 values across 21 healthy volunteers were 1468 +/- 48 ms, 1514 +/- 39 ms, and 1545 +/- 50 ms, and blood T1 values were 2182 +/- 132 ms, 2124 +/- 153 ms, and 2131 +/- 158 ms for apical, middle, and base slices, respectively. Conclusion: The coMOLLI method demonstrated high accuracy in phantom studies and feasibility in vivo studies. By adopting the widely used 5-(3)-3 MOLLI acquisition scheme, it shows potential for clinical cardiac imaging at 5T.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2025

HAVIR: HierArchical Vision to Image Reconstruction using CLIP-Guided Versatile Diffusion

The reconstruction of visual information from brain activity fosters interdisciplinary integration between neuroscience and computer vision. However, existing methods still face challenges in accurately recovering highly complex visual stimuli. This difficulty stems from the characteristics of natural scenes: low-level features exhibit heterogeneity, while high-level features show semantic entanglement due to contextual overlaps. Inspired by the hierarchical representation theory of the visual cortex, we propose the HAVIR model, which separates the visual cortex into two hierarchical regions and extracts distinct features from each. Specifically, the Structural Generator extracts structural information from spatial processing voxels and converts it into latent diffusion priors, while the Semantic Extractor converts semantic processing voxels into CLIP embeddings. These components are integrated via the Versatile Diffusion model to synthesize the final image. Experimental results demonstrate that HAVIR enhances both the structural and semantic quality of reconstructions, even in complex scenes, and outperforms existing models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Physics-Guided Diffusion Transformer with Spherical Harmonic Posterior Sampling for High-Fidelity Angular Super-Resolution in Diffusion MRI

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) angular super-resolution (ASR) aims to reconstruct high-angular-resolution (HAR) signals from limited low-angular-resolution (LAR) data without prolonging scan time. However, existing methods are limited in recovering fine-grained angular details or preserving high fidelity due to inadequate modeling of q-space geometry and insufficient incorporation of physical constraints. In this paper, we introduce a Physics-Guided Diffusion Transformer (PGDiT) designed to explore physical priors throughout both training and inference stages. During training, a Q-space Geometry-Aware Module (QGAM) with b-vector modulation and random angular masking facilitates direction-aware representation learning, enabling the network to generate directionally consistent reconstructions with fine angular details from sparse and noisy data. In inference, a two-stage Spherical Harmonics-Guided Posterior Sampling (SHPS) enforces alignment with the acquired data, followed by heat-diffusion-based SH regularization to ensure physically plausible reconstructions. This coarse-to-fine refinement strategy mitigates oversmoothing and artifacts commonly observed in purely data-driven or generative models. Extensive experiments on general ASR tasks and two downstream applications, Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and Neurite Orientation Dispersion and Density Imaging (NODDI), demonstrate that PGDiT outperforms existing deep learning models in detail recovery and data fidelity. Our approach presents a novel generative ASR framework that offers high-fidelity HAR dMRI reconstructions, with potential applications in neuroscience and clinical research.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Myocardial T1 mapping at 5T using multi-inversion recovery real-time spoiled GRE

Objective: To develop an accurate myocardial T1 mapping technique at 5T using Look-Locker-based multiple inversion-recovery with the real-time spoiled gradient echo (GRE) acquisition. Approach: The proposed T1 mapping technique (mIR-rt) samples the recovery of inverted magnetization using the real-time GRE and the images captured during diastole are selected for T1 fitting. Multiple-inversion recoveries are employed to increase the sample size for accurate fitting. The T1 mapping method was validated using Bloch simulation, phantom studies, and in 16 healthy volunteers at 5T. Main results: In both simulation and phantom studies, the T1 values measured by mIR-rt closely approximate the reference T1 values, with errors less than 3%, while the conventional MOLLI sequence underestimates T1 values. The myocardial T1 values at 5T are 1553 +/- 52 ms, 1531 +/- 53 ms, and 1526 +/- 60 ms (mean +/- standard deviation) at the apex, middle, and base, respectively. The T1 values measured by MOLLI (1350 +/- 48 ms, 1349 +/- 47 ms, and 1354 +/- 45 ms at the apex, middle, and base) were significantly lower than those of mIR-rt with p<0.001 for all three layers. The mIR-rt sequence method used in our study provides high reproducibility, particularly in the middle slices, supporting its practical relevance for myocardial T1 mapping. Significance: The proposed method is feasible for myocardial T1 mapping at 5T and provides better accuracy than the conventional MOLLI sequence.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2025

Generative Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging: Foundations, Progress, and Clinical Translation

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming medical imaging by enabling capabilities such as data synthesis, image enhancement, modality translation, and spatiotemporal modeling. This review presents a comprehensive and forward-looking synthesis of recent advances in generative modeling including generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational autoencoders (VAEs), diffusion models, and emerging multimodal foundation architectures and evaluates their expanding roles across the clinical imaging continuum. We systematically examine how generative AI contributes to key stages of the imaging workflow, from acquisition and reconstruction to cross-modality synthesis, diagnostic support, and treatment planning. Emphasis is placed on both retrospective and prospective clinical scenarios, where generative models help address longstanding challenges such as data scarcity, standardization, and integration across modalities. To promote rigorous benchmarking and translational readiness, we propose a three-tiered evaluation framework encompassing pixel-level fidelity, feature-level realism, and task-level clinical relevance. We also identify critical obstacles to real-world deployment, including generalization under domain shift, hallucination risk, data privacy concerns, and regulatory hurdles. Finally, we explore the convergence of generative AI with large-scale foundation models, highlighting how this synergy may enable the next generation of scalable, reliable, and clinically integrated imaging systems. By charting technical progress and translational pathways, this review aims to guide future research and foster interdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of AI, medicine, and biomedical engineering.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Training-free Token Reduction for Vision Mamba

Vision Mamba has emerged as a strong competitor to Vision Transformers (ViTs) due to its ability to efficiently capture long-range dependencies with linear computational complexity. While token reduction, an effective compression technique in ViTs, has rarely been explored in Vision Mamba. Exploring Vision Mamba's efficiency is essential for enabling broader applications. However, we find that directly applying existing token reduction techniques for ViTs to Vision Mamba leads to significant performance degradation. This is primarily because Mamba is a sequence model without attention mechanisms, whereas most token reduction techniques for ViTs rely on attention mechanisms for importance measurement and overlook the order of compressed tokens. In this paper, we investigate a Mamba structure-aware importance score to evaluate token importance in a simple and effective manner. Building on this score, we further propose MTR, a training-free \textbf{M}amba \textbf{T}oken \textbf{R}eduction framework. Without the need for training or additional tuning parameters, our method can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-and-play component across various Mamba models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces computational workload while minimizing performance impact across various tasks and multiple backbones. Notably, MTR reduces FLOPs by approximately 40\% on the Vim-B backbone, with only a 1.6\% drop in ImageNet performance without retraining.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

HAVIR: HierArchical Vision to Image Reconstruction using CLIP-Guided Versatile Diffusion

Reconstructing visual information from brain activity bridges the gap between neuroscience and computer vision. Even though progress has been made in decoding images from fMRI using generative models, a challenge remains in accurately recovering highly complex visual stimuli. This difficulty stems from their elemental density and diversity, sophisticated spatial structures, and multifaceted semantic information. To address these challenges, we propose HAVIR that contains two adapters: (1) The AutoKL Adapter transforms fMRI voxels into a latent diffusion prior, capturing topological structures; (2) The CLIP Adapter converts the voxels to CLIP text and image embeddings, containing semantic information. These complementary representations are fused by Versatile Diffusion to generate the final reconstructed image. To extract the most essential semantic information from complex scenarios, the CLIP Adapter is trained with text captions describing the visual stimuli and their corresponding semantic images synthesized from these captions. The experimental results demonstrate that HAVIR effectively reconstructs both structural features and semantic information of visual stimuli even in complex scenarios, outperforming existing models.

cs.CV↗