MetaFood CVPR 2024 Challenge on Physically Informed 3D Food Reconstruction: Methods and Results

The increasing interest in computer vision applications for nutrition and dietary monitoring has led to the development of advanced 3D reconstruction techniques for food items. However, the scarcity of high-quality data and limited collaboration between industry and academia have constrained progress in this field. Building on recent advancements in 3D reconstruction, we host the MetaFood Workshop and its challenge for Physically Informed 3D Food Reconstruction. This challenge focuses on reconstructing volume-accurate 3D models of food items from 2D images, using a visible checkerboard as a size reference. Participants were tasked with reconstructing 3D models for 20 selected food items of varying difficulty levels: easy, medium, and hard. The easy level provides 200 images, the medium level provides 30 images, and the hard level provides only 1 image for reconstruction. In total, 16 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The solutions developed in this challenge achieved promising results in 3D food reconstruction, with significant potential for improving portion estimation for dietary assessment and nutritional monitoring. More details about this workshop challenge and access to the dataset can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/cvpr-metafood-2024.

Empowering Tuberculosis Screening with Explainable Self-Supervised Deep Neural Networks

Tuberculosis persists as a global health crisis, especially in resource-limited populations and remote regions, with more than 10 million individuals newly infected annually. It stands as a stark symbol of inequity in public health. Tuberculosis impacts roughly a quarter of the global populace, with the majority of cases concentrated in eight countries, accounting for two-thirds of all tuberculosis infections. Although a severe ailment, tuberculosis is both curable and manageable. However, early detection and screening of at-risk populations are imperative. Chest x-ray stands as the predominant imaging technique utilized in tuberculosis screening efforts. However, x-ray screening necessitates skilled radiologists, a resource often scarce, particularly in remote regions with limited resources. Consequently, there is a pressing need for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered systems to support clinicians and healthcare providers in swift screening. However, training a reliable AI model necessitates large-scale high-quality data, which can be difficult and costly to acquire. Inspired by these challenges, in this work, we introduce an explainable self-supervised self-train learning network tailored for tuberculosis case screening. The network achieves an outstanding overall accuracy of 98.14% and demonstrates high recall and precision rates of 95.72% and 99.44%, respectively, in identifying tuberculosis cases, effectively capturing clinically significant features.

Understanding the Limitations of Diffusion Concept Algebra Through Food

Image generation techniques, particularly latent diffusion models, have exploded in popularity in recent years. Many techniques have been developed to manipulate and clarify the semantic concepts these large-scale models learn, offering crucial insights into biases and concept relationships. However, these techniques are often only validated in conventional realms of human or animal faces and artistic style transitions. The food domain offers unique challenges through complex compositions and regional biases, which can shed light on the limitations and opportunities within existing methods. Through the lens of food imagery, we analyze both qualitative and quantitative patterns within a concept traversal technique. We reveal measurable insights into the model's ability to capture and represent the nuances of culinary diversity, while also identifying areas where the model's biases and limitations emerge.

NutritionVerse-Direct: Exploring Deep Neural Networks for Multitask Nutrition Prediction from Food Images

Many aging individuals encounter challenges in effectively tracking their dietary intake, exacerbating their susceptibility to nutrition-related health complications. Self-reporting methods are often inaccurate and suffer from substantial bias; however, leveraging intelligent prediction methods can automate and enhance precision in this process. Recent work has explored using computer vision prediction systems to predict nutritional information from food images. Still, these methods are often tailored to specific situations, require other inputs in addition to a food image, or do not provide comprehensive nutritional information. This paper aims to enhance the efficacy of dietary intake estimation by leveraging various neural network architectures to directly predict a meal's nutritional content from its image. Through comprehensive experimentation and evaluation, we present NutritionVerse-Direct, a model utilizing a vision transformer base architecture with three fully connected layers that lead to five regression heads predicting calories (kcal), mass (g), protein (g), fat (g), and carbohydrates (g) present in a meal. NutritionVerse-Direct yields a combined mean average error score on the NutritionVerse-Real dataset of 412.6, an improvement of 25.5% over the Inception-ResNet model, demonstrating its potential for improving dietary intake estimation accuracy.

Improving Breast Cancer Grade Prediction with Multiparametric MRI Created Using Optimized Synthetic Correlated Diffusion Imaging

Breast cancer was diagnosed for over 7.8 million women between 2015 to 2020. Grading plays a vital role in breast cancer treatment planning. However, the current tumor grading method involves extracting tissue from patients, leading to stress, discomfort, and high medical costs. A recent paper leveraging volumetric deep radiomic features from synthetic correlated diffusion imaging (CDI$^s$) for breast cancer grade prediction showed immense promise for noninvasive methods for grading. Motivated by the impact of CDI$^s$ optimization for prostate cancer delineation, this paper examines using optimized CDI$^s$ to improve breast cancer grade prediction. We fuse the optimized CDI$^s$ signal with diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) to create a multiparametric MRI for each patient. Using a larger patient cohort and training across all the layers of a pretrained MONAI model, we achieve a leave-one-out cross-validation accuracy of 95.79%, over 8% higher compared to that previously reported.

Enhancing Clinically Significant Prostate Cancer Prediction in T2-weighted Images through Transfer Learning from Breast Cancer

In 2020, prostate cancer saw a staggering 1.4 million new cases, resulting in over 375,000 deaths. The accurate identification of clinically significant prostate cancer is crucial for delivering effective treatment to patients. Consequently, there has been a surge in research exploring the application of deep neural networks to predict clinical significance based on magnetic resonance images. However, these networks demand extensive datasets to attain optimal performance. Recently, transfer learning emerged as a technique that leverages acquired features from a domain with richer data to enhance the performance of a domain with limited data. In this paper, we investigate the improvement of clinically significant prostate cancer prediction in T2-weighted images through transfer learning from breast cancer. The results demonstrate a remarkable improvement of over 30% in leave-one-out cross-validation accuracy.

Using Multiparametric MRI with Optimized Synthetic Correlated Diffusion Imaging to Enhance Breast Cancer Pathologic Complete Response Prediction

In 2020, 685,000 deaths across the world were attributed to breast cancer, underscoring the critical need for innovative and effective breast cancer treatment. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy has recently gained popularity as a promising treatment strategy for breast cancer, attributed to its efficacy in shrinking large tumors and leading to pathologic complete response. However, the current process to recommend neoadjuvant chemotherapy relies on the subjective evaluation of medical experts which contain inherent biases and significant uncertainty. A recent study, utilizing volumetric deep radiomic features extracted from synthetic correlated diffusion imaging (CDI$^s$), demonstrated significant potential in noninvasive breast cancer pathologic complete response prediction. Inspired by the positive outcomes of optimizing CDI$^s$ for prostate cancer delineation, this research investigates the application of optimized CDI$^s$ to enhance breast cancer pathologic complete response prediction. Using multiparametric MRI that fuses optimized CDI$^s$ with diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), we obtain a leave-one-out cross-validation accuracy of 93.28%, over 5.5% higher than that previously reported.

Optimizing Synthetic Correlated Diffusion Imaging for Breast Cancer Tumour Delineation

Breast cancer is a significant cause of death from cancer in women globally, highlighting the need for improved diagnostic imaging to enhance patient outcomes. Accurate tumour identification is essential for diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, emphasizing the importance of advanced imaging technologies that provide detailed views of tumour characteristics and disease. Synthetic correlated diffusion imaging (CDI$^s$) is a recent method that has shown promise for prostate cancer delineation compared to current MRI images. In this paper, we explore tuning the coefficients in the computation of CDI$^s$ for breast cancer tumour delineation by maximizing the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) using a Nelder-Mead simplex optimization strategy. We show that the best AUC is achieved by the CDI$^s$ - Optimized modality, outperforming the best gold-standard modality by 0.0044. Notably, the optimized CDI$^s$ modality also achieves AUC values over 0.02 higher than the Unoptimized CDI$^s$ value, demonstrating the importance of optimizing the CDI$^s$ exponents for the specific cancer application.

How Much You Ate? Food Portion Estimation on Spoons

Monitoring dietary intake is a crucial aspect of promoting healthy living. In recent years, advances in computer vision technology have facilitated dietary intake monitoring through the use of images and depth cameras. However, the current state-of-the-art image-based food portion estimation algorithms assume that users take images of their meals one or two times, which can be inconvenient and fail to capture food items that are not visible from a top-down perspective, such as ingredients submerged in a stew. To address these limitations, we introduce an innovative solution that utilizes stationary user-facing cameras to track food items on utensils, not requiring any change of camera perspective after installation. The shallow depth of utensils provides a more favorable angle for capturing food items, and tracking them on the utensil's surface offers a significantly more accurate estimation of dietary intake without the need for post-meal image capture. The system is reliable for estimation of nutritional content of liquid-solid heterogeneous mixtures such as soups and stews. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate the exceptional potential of our method as a non-invasive, user-friendly, and highly accurate dietary intake monitoring tool.

In The Wild Ellipse Parameter Estimation for Circular Dining Plates and Bowls

Ellipse estimation is an important topic in food image processing because it can be leveraged to parameterize plates and bowls, which in turn can be used to estimate camera view angles and food portion sizes. Automatically detecting the elliptical rim of plates and bowls and estimating their ellipse parameters for data "in-the-wild" is challenging: diverse camera angles and plate shapes could have been used for capture, noisy background, multiple non-uniform plates and bowls in the image could be present. Recent advancements in foundational models offer promising capabilities for zero-shot semantic understanding and object segmentation. However, the output mask boundaries for plates and bowls generated by these models often lack consistency and precision compared to traditional ellipse fitting methods. In this paper, we combine ellipse fitting with semantic information extracted by zero-shot foundational models and propose WildEllipseFit, a method to detect and estimate the elliptical rim for plate and bowl. Evaluation on the proposed Yummly-ellipse dataset demonstrates its efficacy and zero-shot capability in real-world scenarios.