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Zhen-Qiu Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Zhen-Qiu Feng.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

SPIRONet: Spatial-Frequency Learning and Graph-based Channel Interaction Network for Vessel Segmentation

Automatic vessel segmentation plays a pivotal role in the development of next-generation interventional navigation systems for surgical robotics. However, current approaches still suffer from suboptimal segmentation performance under challenging intraoperative conditions, such as low-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), small or slender vessels, and strong interference. In this study, a novel spatial-frequency learning and graph-based channel interaction network (SPIRONet) is proposed to address the above issues. To address low-SNR vessel appearance and small or slender branches, dual spatial-frequency encoders are utilized, where the frequency encoder captures global vessel continuity that is less affected by local noise fluctuations, while the spatial encoder preserves fine vessel details. A cross-attention fusion module is further introduced to adaptively integrate this complementary spatial and frequency information. Moreover, to suppress interference from non-target vessels and vessel-like structures, a graph-based channel interaction module is designed to model channel-wise correlations, enhancing consistent vessel-related responses while suppressing task-irrelevant activations. Extensive experimental results on five challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive and consistently strong performance compared with existing methods. For example, SPIRONet achieves IoU improvements of +0.87%, +0.52%, +0.23%, +1.39%, and +2.22% over the strongest competing methods on CADSA, CAXF, DCA1, XCAD, and ARCADE, respectively. Moreover, SPIRONet achieves an inference speed of 21 FPS with a 512x512 input size, meeting the real-time requirements of interventional scenarios (6-12 FPS). These promising results indicate SPIRONet's potential for integration into interventional navigation systems. Code is available at https://github.com/Dxhuang-CASIA/SPIRONet.

eess.IV

CROP: Conservative Reward for Model-based Offline Policy Optimization

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy using collected data without online interactions. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing for addressing offline RL challenges because of their capability to mitigate the limitations of data coverage through data generation using models. Nonetheless, a prevalent issue in offline RL is the overestimation caused by distribution shift. This study proposes a novel model-based offline RL algorithm named Conservative Reward for model-based Offline Policy optimization (CROP). CROP introduces a streamlined objective that concurrently minimizes estimation error and the rewards of random actions, thereby yielding a robustly conservative reward estimator. Theoretical analysis shows that the designed conservative reward mechanism leads to a conservative policy evaluation and mitigates distribution shift. Experiments showcase that with the simple modification to reward estimation, CROP can conservatively estimate the reward and achieve competitive performance with existing methods. The source code will be available after acceptance.

cs.LG

MOSformer: Momentum encoder-based inter-slice fusion transformer for medical image segmentation

Medical image segmentation takes an important position in various clinical applications. 2.5D-based segmentation models bridge the computational efficiency of 2D-based models with the spatial perception capabilities of 3D-based models. However, existing 2.5D-based models primarily adopt a single encoder to extract features of target and neighborhood slices, failing to effectively fuse inter-slice information, resulting in suboptimal segmentation performance. In this study, a novel momentum encoder-based inter-slice fusion transformer (MOSformer) is proposed to overcome this issue by leveraging inter-slice information from multi-scale feature maps extracted by different encoders. Specifically, dual encoders are employed to enhance feature distinguishability among different slices. One of the encoders is moving-averaged to maintain consistent slice representations. Moreover, an inter-slice fusion transformer (IF-Trans) module is developed to fuse inter-slice multi-scale features. MOSformer is evaluated on three benchmark datasets (Synapse, ACDC, and AMOS), achieving a new state-of-the-art with 85.63%, 92.19%, and 85.43% DSC, respectively. These results demonstrate MOSformer's competitiveness in medical image segmentation.

eess.IV

CASOG: Conservative Actor-critic with SmOoth Gradient for Skill Learning in Robot-Assisted Intervention

Robot-assisted intervention has shown reduced radiation exposure to physicians and improved precision in clinical trials. However, existing vascular robotic systems follow master-slave control mode and entirely rely on manual commands. This paper proposes a novel offline reinforcement learning algorithm, Conservative Actor-critic with SmOoth Gradient (CASOG), to learn manipulation skills from human demonstrations on vascular robotic systems. The proposed algorithm conservatively estimates Q-function and smooths gradients of convolution layers to deal with distribution shift and overfitting issues. Furthermore, to focus on complex manipulations, transitions with larger temporal-difference error are sampled with higher probability. Comparative experiments in a pre-clinical environment demonstrate that CASOG can deliver guidewire to the target at a success rate of 94.00\% and mean backward steps of 14.07, performing closer to humans and better than prior offline reinforcement learning methods. These results indicate that the proposed algorithm is promising to improve the autonomy of vascular robotic systems.

cs.RO