arXiv subjects

Terrence Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Terrence Chen.

83 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Motion Pyramid Networks for Accurate and Efficient Cardiac Motion Estimation

Cardiac motion estimation plays a key role in MRI cardiac feature tracking and function assessment such as myocardium strain. In this paper, we propose Motion Pyramid Networks, a novel deep learning-based approach for accurate and efficient cardiac motion estimation. We predict and fuse a pyramid of motion fields from multiple scales of feature representations to generate a more refined motion field. We then use a novel cyclic teacher-student training strategy to make the inference end-to-end and further improve the tracking performance. Our teacher model provides more accurate motion estimation as supervision through progressive motion compensations. Our student model learns from the teacher model to estimate motion in a single step while maintaining accuracy. The teacher-student knowledge distillation is performed in a cyclic way for a further performance boost. Our proposed method outperforms a strong baseline model on two public available clinical datasets significantly, evaluated by a variety of metrics and the inference time. New evaluation metrics are also proposed to represent errors in a clinically meaningful manner.

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arXiv2020

MRI Image Reconstruction via Learning Optimization Using Neural ODEs

We propose to formulate MRI image reconstruction as an optimization problem and model the optimization trajectory as a dynamic process using ordinary differential equations (ODEs). We model the dynamics in ODE with a neural network and solve the desired ODE with the off-the-shelf (fixed) solver to obtain reconstructed images. We extend this model and incorporate the knowledge of off-the-shelf ODE solvers into the network design (learned solvers). We investigate several models based on three ODE solvers and compare models with fixed solvers and learned solvers. Our models achieve better reconstruction results and are more parameter efficient than other popular methods such as UNet and cascaded CNN. We introduce a new way of tackling the MRI reconstruction problem by modeling the continuous optimization dynamics using neural ODEs.

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arXiv2020

Measure Anatomical Thickness from Cardiac MRI with Deep Neural Networks

Accurate estimation of shape thickness from medical images is crucial in clinical applications. For example, the thickness of myocardium is one of the key to cardiac disease diagnosis. While mathematical models are available to obtain accurate dense thickness estimation, they suffer from heavy computational overhead due to iterative solvers. To this end, we propose novel methods for dense thickness estimation, including a fast solver that estimates thickness from binary annular shapes and an end-to-end network that estimates thickness directly from raw cardiac images.We test the proposed models on three cardiac datasets and one synthetic dataset, achieving impressive results and generalizability on all. Thickness estimation is performed without iterative solvers or manual correction, which is 100 times faster than the mathematical model. We also analyze thickness patterns on different cardiac pathologies with a standard clinical model and the results demonstrate the potential clinical value of our method for thickness based cardiac disease diagnosis.

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arXiv2020

Real-Time Cardiac Cine MRI with Residual Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network

Real-time cardiac cine MRI does not require ECG gating in the data acquisition and is more useful for patients who can not hold their breaths or have abnormal heart rhythms. However, to achieve fast image acquisition, real-time cine commonly acquires highly undersampled data, which imposes a significant challenge for MRI image reconstruction. We propose a residual convolutional RNN for real-time cardiac cine reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work applying deep learning approach to Cartesian real-time cardiac cine reconstruction. Based on the evaluation from radiologists, our deep learning model shows superior performance than compressed sensing.

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arXiv2020

Anatomy-Aware Cardiac Motion Estimation

Cardiac motion estimation is critical to the assessment of cardiac function. Myocardium feature tracking (FT) can directly estimate cardiac motion from cine MRI, which requires no special scanning procedure. However, current deep learning-based FT methods may result in unrealistic myocardium shapes since the learning is solely guided by image intensities without considering anatomy. On the other hand, motion estimation through learning is challenging because ground-truth motion fields are almost impossible to obtain. In this study, we propose a novel Anatomy-Aware Tracker (AATracker) for cardiac motion estimation that preserves anatomy by weak supervision. A convolutional variational autoencoder (VAE) is trained to encapsulate realistic myocardium shapes. A baseline dense motion tracker is trained to approximate the motion fields and then refined to estimate anatomy-aware motion fields under the weak supervision from the VAE. We evaluate the proposed method on long-axis cardiac cine MRI, which has more complex myocardium appearances and motions than short-axis. Compared with other methods, AATracker significantly improves the tracking performance and provides visually more realistic tracking results, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed weakly-supervision scheme in cardiac motion estimation.

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arXiv2020

FOAL: Fast Online Adaptive Learning for Cardiac Motion Estimation

Motion estimation of cardiac MRI videos is crucial for the evaluation of human heart anatomy and function. Recent researches show promising results with deep learning-based methods. In clinical deployment, however, they suffer dramatic performance drops due to mismatched distributions between training and testing datasets, commonly encountered in the clinical environment. On the other hand, it is arguably impossible to collect all representative datasets and to train a universal tracker before deployment. In this context, we proposed a novel fast online adaptive learning (FOAL) framework: an online gradient descent based optimizer that is optimized by a meta-learner. The meta-learner enables the online optimizer to perform a fast and robust adaptation. We evaluated our method through extensive experiments on two public clinical datasets. The results showed the superior performance of FOAL in accuracy compared to the offline-trained tracking method. On average, the FOAL took only $0.4$ second per video for online optimization.

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arXiv2020

Hierarchical Kinematic Human Mesh Recovery

We consider the problem of estimating a parametric model of 3D human mesh from a single image. While there has been substantial recent progress in this area with direct regression of model parameters, these methods only implicitly exploit the human body kinematic structure, leading to sub-optimal use of the model prior. In this work, we address this gap by proposing a new technique for regression of human parametric model that is explicitly informed by the known hierarchical structure, including joint interdependencies of the model. This results in a strong prior-informed design of the regressor architecture and an associated hierarchical optimization that is flexible to be used in conjunction with the current standard frameworks for 3D human mesh recovery. We demonstrate these aspects by means of extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets, showing how our proposed new design outperforms several existing and popular methods, establishing new state-of-the-art results. By considering joint interdependencies, our method is equipped to infer joints even under data corruptions, which we demonstrate by conducting experiments under varying degrees of occlusion.

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arXiv2019

Towards Robust RGB-D Human Mesh Recovery

We consider the problem of human pose estimation. While much recent work has focused on the RGB domain, these techniques are inherently under-constrained since there can be many 3D configurations that explain the same 2D projection. To this end, we propose a new method that uses RGB-D data to estimate a parametric human mesh model. Our key innovations include (a) the design of a new dynamic data fusion module that facilitates learning with a combination of RGB-only and RGB-D datasets, (b) a new constraint generator module that provides SMPL supervisory signals when explicit SMPL annotations are not available, and (c) the design of a new depth ranking learning objective, all of which enable principled model training with RGB-D data. We conduct extensive experiments on a variety of RGB-D datasets to demonstrate efficacy.

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arXiv2018

Structure-Aware Shape Synthesis

We propose a new procedure to guide training of a data-driven shape generative model using a structure-aware loss function. Complex 3D shapes often can be summarized using a coarsely defined structure which is consistent and robust across variety of observations. However, existing synthesis techniques do not account for structure during training, and thus often generate implausible and structurally unrealistic shapes. During training, we enforce structural constraints in order to enforce consistency and structure across the entire manifold. We propose a novel methodology for training 3D generative models that incorporates structural information into an end-to-end training pipeline.

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arXiv2018

Generating Synthetic X-ray Images of a Person from the Surface Geometry

We present a novel framework that learns to predict human anatomy from body surface. Specifically, our approach generates a synthetic X-ray image of a person only from the person's surface geometry. Furthermore, the synthetic X-ray image is parametrized and can be manipulated by adjusting a set of body markers which are also generated during the X-ray image prediction. With the proposed framework, multiple synthetic X-ray images can easily be generated by varying surface geometry. By perturbing the parameters, several additional synthetic X-ray images can be generated from the same surface geometry. As a result, our approach offers a potential to overcome the training data barrier in the medical domain. This capability is achieved by learning a pair of networks - one learns to generate the full image from the partial image and a set of parameters, and the other learns to estimate the parameters given the full image. During training, the two networks are trained iteratively such that they would converge to a solution where the predicted parameters and the full image are consistent with each other. In addition to medical data enrichment, our framework can also be used for image completion as well as anomaly detection.

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arXiv2017

DepthSynth: Real-Time Realistic Synthetic Data Generation from CAD Models for 2.5D Recognition

Recent progress in computer vision has been dominated by deep neural networks trained over large amounts of labeled data. Collecting such datasets is however a tedious, often impossible task; hence a surge in approaches relying solely on synthetic data for their training. For depth images however, discrepancies with real scans still noticeably affect the end performance. We thus propose an end-to-end framework which simulates the whole mechanism of these devices, generating realistic depth data from 3D models by comprehensively modeling vital factors e.g. sensor noise, material reflectance, surface geometry. Not only does our solution cover a wider range of sensors and achieve more realistic results than previous methods, assessed through extended evaluation, but we go further by measuring the impact on the training of neural networks for various recognition tasks; demonstrating how our pipeline seamlessly integrates such architectures and consistently enhances their performance.

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