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Yaqi Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yaqi Wang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

CPKD: Clinical Prior Knowledge-Constrained Diffusion Models for Surgical Phase Recognition in Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

Gastrointestinal malignancies constitute a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, with advanced-stage prognosis remaining particularly dismal. Originating as a groundbreaking technique for early gastric cancer treatment, Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection has evolved into a versatile intervention for diverse gastrointestinal lesions. While computer-assisted systems significantly enhance procedural precision and safety in ESD, their clinical adoption faces a critical bottleneck: reliable surgical phase recognition within complex endoscopic workflows. Current state-of-the-art approaches predominantly rely on multi-stage refinement architectures that iteratively optimize temporal predictions. In this paper, we present Clinical Prior Knowledge-Constrained Diffusion (CPKD), a novel generative framework that reimagines phase recognition through denoising diffusion principles while preserving the core iterative refinement philosophy. This architecture progressively reconstructs phase sequences starting from random noise and conditioned on visual-temporal features. To better capture three domain-specific characteristics, including positional priors, boundary ambiguity, and relation dependency, we design a conditional masking strategy. Furthermore, we incorporate clinical prior knowledge into the model training to improve its ability to correct phase logical errors. Comprehensive evaluations on ESD820, Cholec80, and external multi-center demonstrate that our proposed CPKD achieves superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art approaches, validating the effectiveness of diffusion-based generative paradigms for surgical phase recognition.

cs.CV↗

SPRMamba: Surgical Phase Recognition for Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection with Mamba

Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) is a minimally invasive procedure initially developed for early gastric cancer treatment and has expanded to address diverse gastrointestinal lesions. While computer-assisted surgery (CAS) systems enhance ESD precision and safety, their efficacy hinges on accurate real-time surgical phase recognition, a task complicated by ESD's inherent complexity, including heterogeneous lesion characteristics and dynamic tissue interactions. Existing video-based phase recognition algorithms, constrained by inefficient temporal context modeling, exhibit limited performance in capturing fine-grained phase transitions and long-range dependencies. To overcome these limitations, we propose SPRMamba, a novel framework integrating a Mamba-based architecture with a Scaled Residual TranMamba (SRTM) block to synergize long-term temporal modeling and localized detail extraction. SPRMamba further introduces the Hierarchical Sampling Strategy to optimize computational efficiency, enabling real-time processing critical for clinical deployment. Evaluated on the ESD385 dataset and the cholecystectomy benchmark Cholec80, SPRMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance (87.64% accuracy on ESD385, +1.0% over prior methods), demonstrating robust generalizability across surgical workflows. This advancement bridges the gap between computational efficiency and temporal sensitivity, offering a transformative tool for intraoperative guidance and skill assessment in ESD surgery. The code is accessible at https://github.com/Zxnyyyyy/SPRMamba.

cs.CV↗

Efficient MedSAMs: Segment Anything in Medical Images on Laptop

Promptable segmentation foundation models have emerged as a transformative approach to addressing the diverse needs in medical images, but most existing models require expensive computing, posing a big barrier to their adoption in clinical practice. In this work, we organized the first international competition dedicated to promptable medical image segmentation, featuring a large-scale dataset spanning nine common imaging modalities from over 20 different institutions. The top teams developed lightweight segmentation foundation models and implemented an efficient inference pipeline that substantially reduced computational requirements while maintaining state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy. Moreover, the post-challenge phase advanced the algorithms through the design of performance booster and reproducibility tasks, resulting in improved algorithms and validated reproducibility of the winning solution. Furthermore, the best-performing algorithms have been incorporated into the open-source software with a user-friendly interface to facilitate clinical adoption. The data and code are publicly available to foster the further development of medical image segmentation foundation models and pave the way for impactful real-world applications.

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Adaptive Interactive Segmentation for Multimodal Medical Imaging via Selection Engine

In medical image analysis, achieving fast, efficient, and accurate segmentation is essential for automated diagnosis and treatment. Although recent advancements in deep learning have significantly improved segmentation accuracy, current models often face challenges in adaptability and generalization, particularly when processing multi-modal medical imaging data. These limitations stem from the substantial variations between imaging modalities and the inherent complexity of medical data. To address these challenges, we propose the Strategy-driven Interactive Segmentation Model (SISeg), built on SAM2, which enhances segmentation performance across various medical imaging modalities by integrating a selection engine. To mitigate memory bottlenecks and optimize prompt frame selection during the inference of 2D image sequences, we developed an automated system, the Adaptive Frame Selection Engine (AFSE). This system dynamically selects the optimal prompt frames without requiring extensive prior medical knowledge and enhances the interpretability of the model's inference process through an interactive feedback mechanism. We conducted extensive experiments on 10 datasets covering 7 representative medical imaging modalities, demonstrating the SISeg model's robust adaptability and generalization in multi-modal tasks. The project page and code will be available at: [URL].

cs.CV↗

SRSA: A Cost-Efficient Strategy-Router Search Agent for Real-world Human-Machine Interactions

Recently, as Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive emerging capabilities and gained widespread popularity, research on LLM-based search agents has proliferated. In real-world situations, users often input contextual and highly personalized queries to chatbots, challenging LLMs to capture context and generate appropriate answers. However, much of the prior research has not focused specifically on authentic human-machine dialogue scenarios. It also ignores the important balance between response quality and computational cost by forcing all queries to follow the same agent process. To address these gaps, we propose a Strategy-Router Search Agent (SRSA), routing different queries to appropriate search strategies and enabling fine-grained serial searches to obtain high-quality results at a relatively low cost. To evaluate our work, we introduce a new dataset, Contextual Query Enhancement Dataset (CQED), comprising contextual queries to simulate authentic and daily interactions between humans and chatbots. Using LLM-based automatic evaluation metrics, we assessed SRSA's performance in terms of informativeness, completeness, novelty, and actionability. To conclude, SRSA provides an approach that resolves the issue of simple serial searches leading to degenerate answers for lengthy and contextual queries, effectively and efficiently parses complex user queries, and generates more comprehensive and informative responses without fine-tuning an LLM.

cs.AI↗

Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Domain-Specific Question Answering: A Case Study on Pittsburgh and CMU

We designed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system to provide large language models with relevant documents for answering domain-specific questions about Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). We extracted over 1,800 subpages using a greedy scraping strategy and employed a hybrid annotation process, combining manual and Mistral-generated question-answer pairs, achieving an inter-annotator agreement (IAA) score of 0.7625. Our RAG framework integrates BM25 and FAISS retrievers, enhanced with a reranker for improved document retrieval accuracy. Experimental results show that the RAG system significantly outperforms a non-RAG baseline, particularly in time-sensitive and complex queries, with an F1 score improvement from 5.45% to 42.21% and recall of 56.18%. This study demonstrates the potential of RAG systems in enhancing answer precision and relevance, while identifying areas for further optimization in document retrieval and model training.

cs.LG↗

A Spatial-Spectral and Temporal Dual Prototype Network for Motor Imagery Brain-Computer Interface

Motor imagery electroencephalogram (MI-EEG) decoding plays a crucial role in developing motor imagery brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCIs). However, decoding intentions from MI remains challenging due to the inherent complexity of EEG signals relative to the small-sample size. To address this issue, we propose a spatial-spectral and temporal dual prototype network (SST-DPN). First, we design a lightweight attention mechanism to uniformly model the spatial-spectral relationships across multiple EEG electrodes, enabling the extraction of powerful spatial-spectral features. Then, we develop a multi-scale variance pooling module tailored for EEG signals to capture long-term temporal features. This module is parameter-free and computationally efficient, offering clear advantages over the widely used transformer models. Furthermore, we introduce dual prototype learning to optimize the feature space distribution and training process, thereby improving the model's generalization ability on small-sample MI datasets. Our experimental results show that the SST-DPN outperforms state-of-the-art models with superior classification accuracy (84.11% for dataset BCI4-2A, 86.65% for dataset BCI4-2B). Additionally, we use the BCI3-4A dataset with fewer training data to further validate the generalization ability of the proposed SST-DPN. We also achieve superior performance with 82.03% classification accuracy. Benefiting from the lightweight parameters and superior decoding accuracy, our SST-DPN shows great potential for practical MI-BCI applications. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/hancan16/SST-DPN.

cs.HC↗

Multi-modal Intermediate Feature Interaction AutoEncoder for Overall Survival Prediction of Esophageal Squamous Cell Cancer

Survival prediction for esophageal squamous cell cancer (ESCC) is crucial for doctors to assess a patient's condition and tailor treatment plans. The application and development of multi-modal deep learning in this field have attracted attention in recent years. However, the prognostically relevant features between cross-modalities have not been further explored in previous studies, which could hinder the performance of the model. Furthermore, the inherent semantic gap between different modal feature representations is also ignored. In this work, we propose a novel autoencoder-based deep learning model to predict the overall survival of the ESCC. Two novel modules were designed for multi-modal prognosis-related feature reinforcement and modeling ability enhancement. In addition, a novel joint loss was proposed to make the multi-modal feature representations more aligned. Comparison and ablation experiments demonstrated that our model can achieve satisfactory results in terms of discriminative ability, risk stratification, and the effectiveness of the proposed modules.

eess.IV↗

Class-balanced Open-set Semi-supervised Object Detection for Medical Images

Medical image datasets in the real world are often unlabeled and imbalanced, and Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD) can utilize unlabeled data to improve an object detector. However, existing approaches predominantly assumed that the unlabeled data and test data do not contain out-of-distribution (OOD) classes. The few open-set semi-supervised object detection methods have two weaknesses: first, the class imbalance is not considered; second, the OOD instances are distinguished and simply discarded during pseudo-labeling. In this paper, we consider the open-set semi-supervised object detection problem which leverages unlabeled data that contain OOD classes to improve object detection for medical images. Our study incorporates two key innovations: Category Control Embed (CCE) and out-of-distribution Detection Fusion Classifier (OODFC). CCE is designed to tackle dataset imbalance by constructing a Foreground information Library, while OODFC tackles open-set challenges by integrating the ``unknown'' information into basic pseudo-labels. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art SSOD performance, achieving a 4.25 mAP improvement on the public Parasite dataset.

cs.CV↗

SETTP: Style Extraction and Tunable Inference via Dual-level Transferable Prompt Learning

Text style transfer, an important research direction in natural language processing, aims to adapt the text to various preferences but often faces challenges with limited resources. In this work, we introduce a novel method termed Style Extraction and Tunable Inference via Dual-level Transferable Prompt Learning (SETTP) for effective style transfer in low-resource scenarios. First, SETTP learns source style-level prompts containing fundamental style characteristics from high-resource style transfer. During training, the source style-level prompts are transferred through an attention module to derive a target style-level prompt for beneficial knowledge provision in low-resource style transfer. Additionally, we propose instance-level prompts obtained by clustering the target resources based on the semantic content to reduce semantic bias. We also propose an automated evaluation approach of style similarity based on alignment with human evaluations using ChatGPT-4. Our experiments across three resourceful styles show that SETTP requires only 1/20th of the data volume to achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. In tasks involving scarce data like writing style and role style, SETTP outperforms previous methods by 16.24\%.

cs.CL↗

STS MICCAI 2023 Challenge: Grand challenge on 2D and 3D semi-supervised tooth segmentation

Computer-aided design (CAD) tools are increasingly popular in modern dental practice, particularly for treatment planning or comprehensive prognosis evaluation. In particular, the 2D panoramic X-ray image efficiently detects invisible caries, impacted teeth and supernumerary teeth in children, while the 3D dental cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) is widely used in orthodontics and endodontics due to its low radiation dose. However, there is no open-access 2D public dataset for children's teeth and no open 3D dental CBCT dataset, which limits the development of automatic algorithms for segmenting teeth and analyzing diseases. The Semi-supervised Teeth Segmentation (STS) Challenge, a pioneering event in tooth segmentation, was held as a part of the MICCAI 2023 ToothFairy Workshop on the Alibaba Tianchi platform. This challenge aims to investigate effective semi-supervised tooth segmentation algorithms to advance the field of dentistry. In this challenge, we provide two modalities including the 2D panoramic X-ray images and the 3D CBCT tooth volumes. In Task 1, the goal was to segment tooth regions in panoramic X-ray images of both adult and pediatric teeth. Task 2 involved segmenting tooth sections using CBCT volumes. Limited labelled images with mostly unlabelled ones were provided in this challenge prompt using semi-supervised algorithms for training. In the preliminary round, the challenge received registration and result submission by 434 teams, with 64 advancing to the final round. This paper summarizes the diverse methods employed by the top-ranking teams in the STS MICCAI 2023 Challenge.

cs.CV↗

MMFusion: Multi-modality Diffusion Model for Lymph Node Metastasis Diagnosis in Esophageal Cancer

Esophageal cancer is one of the most common types of cancer worldwide and ranks sixth in cancer-related mortality. Accurate computer-assisted diagnosis of cancer progression can help physicians effectively customize personalized treatment plans. Currently, CT-based cancer diagnosis methods have received much attention for their comprehensive ability to examine patients' conditions. However, multi-modal based methods may likely introduce information redundancy, leading to underperformance. In addition, efficient and effective interactions between multi-modal representations need to be further explored, lacking insightful exploration of prognostic correlation in multi-modality features. In this work, we introduce a multi-modal heterogeneous graph-based conditional feature-guided diffusion model for lymph node metastasis diagnosis based on CT images as well as clinical measurements and radiomics data. To explore the intricate relationships between multi-modal features, we construct a heterogeneous graph. Following this, a conditional feature-guided diffusion approach is applied to eliminate information redundancy. Moreover, we propose a masked relational representation learning strategy, aiming to uncover the latent prognostic correlations and priorities of primary tumor and lymph node image representations. Various experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/wuchengyu123/MMFusion.

eess.IV↗

Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challenges

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide array of tasks. Due to the impressive planning and reasoning abilities of LLMs, they have been used as autonomous agents to do many tasks automatically. Recently, based on the development of using one LLM as a single planning or decision-making agent, LLM-based multi-agent systems have achieved considerable progress in complex problem-solving and world simulation. To provide the community with an overview of this dynamic field, we present this survey to offer an in-depth discussion on the essential aspects of multi-agent systems based on LLMs, as well as the challenges. Our goal is for readers to gain substantial insights on the following questions: What domains and environments do LLM-based multi-agents simulate? How are these agents profiled and how do they communicate? What mechanisms contribute to the growth of agents' capacities? For those interested in delving into this field of study, we also summarize the commonly used datasets or benchmarks for them to have convenient access. To keep researchers updated on the latest studies, we maintain an open-source GitHub repository, dedicated to outlining the research on LLM-based multi-agent systems.

cs.CL↗

Enhancing Point Annotations with Superpixel and Confidence Learning Guided for Improving Semi-Supervised OCT Fluid Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of fluid in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images is beneficial for ophthalmologists to make an accurate diagnosis. Although semi-supervised OCT fluid segmentation networks enhance their performance by introducing additional unlabeled data, the performance enhancement is limited. To address this, we propose Superpixel and Confident Learning Guide Point Annotations Network (SCLGPA-Net) based on the teacher-student architecture, which can learn OCT fluid segmentation from limited fully-annotated data and abundant point-annotated data. Specifically, we use points to annotate fluid regions in unlabeled OCT images and the Superpixel-Guided Pseudo-Label Generation (SGPLG) module generates pseudo-labels and pixel-level label trust maps from the point annotations. The label trust maps provide an indication of the reliability of the pseudo-labels. Furthermore, we propose the Confident Learning Guided Label Refinement (CLGLR) module identifies error information in the pseudo-labels and leads to further refinement. Experiments on the RETOUCH dataset show that we are able to reduce the need for fully-annotated data by 94.22\%, closing the gap with the best fully supervised baselines to a mean IoU of only 2\%. Furthermore, We constructed a private 2D OCT fluid segmentation dataset for evaluation. Compared with other methods, comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve excellent performance in OCT fluid segmentation.

cs.CV↗

PMP-Swin: Multi-Scale Patch Message Passing Swin Transformer for Retinal Disease Classification

Retinal disease is one of the primary causes of visual impairment, and early diagnosis is essential for preventing further deterioration. Nowadays, many works have explored Transformers for diagnosing diseases due to their strong visual representation capabilities. However, retinal diseases exhibit milder forms and often present with overlapping signs, which pose great difficulties for accurate multi-class classification. Therefore, we propose a new framework named Multi-Scale Patch Message Passing Swin Transformer for multi-class retinal disease classification. Specifically, we design a Patch Message Passing (PMP) module based on the Message Passing mechanism to establish global interaction for pathological semantic features and to exploit the subtle differences further between different diseases. Moreover, considering the various scale of pathological features we integrate multiple PMP modules for different patch sizes. For evaluation, we have constructed a new dataset, named OPTOS dataset, consisting of 1,033 high-resolution fundus images photographed by Optos camera and conducted comprehensive experiments to validate the efficacy of our proposed method. And the results on both the public dataset and our dataset demonstrate that our method achieves remarkable performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

MSE-Nets: Multi-annotated Semi-supervised Ensemble Networks for Improving Segmentation of Medical Image with Ambiguous Boundaries

Medical image segmentation annotations exhibit variations among experts due to the ambiguous boundaries of segmented objects and backgrounds in medical images. Although using multiple annotations for each image in the fully-supervised has been extensively studied for training deep models, obtaining a large amount of multi-annotated data is challenging due to the substantial time and manpower costs required for segmentation annotations, resulting in most images lacking any annotations. To address this, we propose Multi-annotated Semi-supervised Ensemble Networks (MSE-Nets) for learning segmentation from limited multi-annotated and abundant unannotated data. Specifically, we introduce the Network Pairwise Consistency Enhancement (NPCE) module and Multi-Network Pseudo Supervised (MNPS) module to enhance MSE-Nets for the segmentation task by considering two major factors: (1) to optimize the utilization of all accessible multi-annotated data, the NPCE separates (dis)agreement annotations of multi-annotated data at the pixel level and handles agreement and disagreement annotations in different ways, (2) to mitigate the introduction of imprecise pseudo-labels, the MNPS extends the training data by leveraging consistent pseudo-labels from unannotated data. Finally, we improve confidence calibration by averaging the predictions of base networks. Experiments on the ISIC dataset show that we reduced the demand for multi-annotated data by 97.75\% and narrowed the gap with the best fully-supervised baseline to just a Jaccard index of 4\%. Furthermore, compared to other semi-supervised methods that rely only on a single annotation or a combined fusion approach, the comprehensive experimental results on ISIC and RIGA datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method in medical image segmentation with ambiguous boundaries.

cs.CV↗

TTMFN: Two-stream Transformer-based Multimodal Fusion Network for Survival Prediction

Survival prediction plays a crucial role in assisting clinicians with the development of cancer treatment protocols. Recent evidence shows that multimodal data can help in the diagnosis of cancer disease and improve survival prediction. Currently, deep learning-based approaches have experienced increasing success in survival prediction by integrating pathological images and gene expression data. However, most existing approaches overlook the intra-modality latent information and the complex inter-modality correlations. Furthermore, existing modalities do not fully exploit the immense representational capabilities of neural networks for feature aggregation and disregard the importance of relationships between features. Therefore, it is highly recommended to address these issues in order to enhance the prediction performance by proposing a novel deep learning-based method. We propose a novel framework named Two-stream Transformer-based Multimodal Fusion Network for survival prediction (TTMFN), which integrates pathological images and gene expression data. In TTMFN, we present a two-stream multimodal co-attention transformer module to take full advantage of the complex relationships between different modalities and the potential connections within the modalities. Additionally, we develop a multi-head attention pooling approach to effectively aggregate the feature representations of the two modalities. The experiment results on four datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas demonstrate that TTMFN can achieve the best performance or competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art methods in predicting the overall survival of patients.

eess.IV↗

Plug-and-play Shape Refinement Framework for Multi-site and Lifespan Brain Skull Stripping

Skull stripping is a crucial prerequisite step in the analysis of brain magnetic resonance images (MRI). Although many excellent works or tools have been proposed, they suffer from low generalization capability. For instance, the model trained on a dataset with specific imaging parameters cannot be well applied to other datasets with different imaging parameters. Especially, for the lifespan datasets, the model trained on an adult dataset is not applicable to an infant dataset due to the large domain difference. To address this issue, numerous methods have been proposed, where domain adaptation based on feature alignment is the most common. Unfortunately, this method has some inherent shortcomings, which need to be retrained for each new domain and requires concurrent access to the input images of both domains. In this paper, we design a plug-and-play shape refinement (PSR) framework for multi-site and lifespan skull stripping. To deal with the domain shift between multi-site lifespan datasets, we take advantage of the brain shape prior, which is invariant to imaging parameters and ages. Experiments demonstrate that our framework can outperform the state-of-the-art methods on multi-site lifespan datasets.

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