Ensembled Cold-Diffusion Restorations for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD) methods aim to identify anomalies in test samples comparing them with a normative distribution learned from a dataset known to be anomaly-free. Approaches based on generative models offer interpretability by generating anomaly-free versions of test images, but are typically unable to identify subtle anomalies. Alternatively, approaches using feature modelling or self-supervised methods, such as the ones relying on synthetically generated anomalies, do not provide out-of-the-box interpretability. In this work, we present a novel method that combines the strengths of both strategies: a generative cold-diffusion pipeline (i.e., a diffusion-like pipeline which uses corruptions not based on noise) that is trained with the objective of turning synthetically-corrupted images back to their normal, original appearance. To support our pipeline we introduce a novel synthetic anomaly generation procedure, called DAG, and a novel anomaly score which ensembles restorations conditioned with different degrees of abnormality. Our method surpasses the prior state-of-the art for unsupervised anomaly detection in three different Brain MRI datasets.

Resource-efficient Medical Image Analysis with Self-adapting Forward-Forward Networks

We introduce a fast Self-adapting Forward-Forward Network (SaFF-Net) for medical imaging analysis, mitigating power consumption and resource limitations, which currently primarily stem from the prevalent reliance on back-propagation for model training and fine-tuning. Building upon the recently proposed Forward-Forward Algorithm (FFA), we introduce the Convolutional Forward-Forward Algorithm (CFFA), a parameter-efficient reformulation that is suitable for advanced image analysis and overcomes the speed and generalisation constraints of the original FFA. To address hyper-parameter sensitivity of FFAs we are also introducing a self-adapting framework SaFF-Net fine-tuning parameters during warmup and training in parallel. Our approach enables more effective model training and eliminates the previously essential requirement for an arbitrarily chosen Goodness function in FFA. We evaluate our approach on several benchmarking datasets in comparison with standard Back-Propagation (BP) neural networks showing that FFA-based networks with notably fewer parameters and function evaluations can compete with standard models, especially, in one-shot scenarios and large batch sizes. The code will be available at the time of the conference.

Stability and Generalizability in SDE Diffusion Models with Measure-Preserving Dynamics

Inverse problems describe the process of estimating the causal factors from a set of measurements or data. Mapping of often incomplete or degraded data to parameters is ill-posed, thus data-driven iterative solutions are required, for example when reconstructing clean images from poor signals. Diffusion models have shown promise as potent generative tools for solving inverse problems due to their superior reconstruction quality and their compatibility with iterative solvers. However, most existing approaches are limited to linear inverse problems represented as Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs). This simplification falls short of addressing the challenging nature of real-world problems, leading to amplified cumulative errors and biases. We provide an explanation for this gap through the lens of measure-preserving dynamics of Random Dynamical Systems (RDS) with which we analyse Temporal Distribution Discrepancy and thus introduce a theoretical framework based on RDS for SDE diffusion models. We uncover several strategies that inherently enhance the stability and generalizability of diffusion models for inverse problems and introduce a novel score-based diffusion framework, the \textbf{D}ynamics-aware S\textbf{D}E \textbf{D}iffusion \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{M}odel (D$^3$GM). The \textit{Measure-preserving property} can return the degraded measurement to the original state despite complex degradation with the RDS concept of \textit{stability}. Our extensive experimental results corroborate the effectiveness of D$^3$GM across multiple benchmarks including a prominent application for inverse problems, magnetic resonance imaging. Code and data will be publicly available.

Image Distillation for Safe Data Sharing in Histopathology

Histopathology can help clinicians make accurate diagnoses, determine disease prognosis, and plan appropriate treatment strategies. As deep learning techniques prove successful in the medical domain, the primary challenges become limited data availability and concerns about data sharing and privacy. Federated learning has addressed this challenge by training models locally and updating parameters on a server. However, issues, such as domain shift and bias, persist and impact overall performance. Dataset distillation presents an alternative approach to overcoming these challenges. It involves creating a small synthetic dataset that encapsulates essential information, which can be shared without constraints. At present, this paradigm is not practicable as current distillation approaches only generate non human readable representations and exhibit insufficient performance for downstream learning tasks. We train a latent diffusion model and construct a new distilled synthetic dataset with a small number of human readable synthetic images. Selection of maximally informative synthetic images is done via graph community analysis of the representation space. We compare downstream classification models trained on our synthetic distillation data to models trained on real data and reach performances suitable for practical application.

Weakly Supervised Learning of Cortical Surface Reconstruction from Segmentations

Existing learning-based cortical surface reconstruction approaches heavily rely on the supervision of pseudo ground truth (pGT) cortical surfaces for training. Such pGT surfaces are generated by traditional neuroimage processing pipelines, which are time consuming and difficult to generalize well to low-resolution brain MRI, e.g., from fetuses and neonates. In this work, we present CoSeg, a learning-based cortical surface reconstruction framework weakly supervised by brain segmentations without the need for pGT surfaces. CoSeg introduces temporal attention networks to learn time-varying velocity fields from brain MRI for diffeomorphic surface deformations, which fit an initial surface to target cortical surfaces within only 0.11 seconds for each brain hemisphere. A weakly supervised loss is designed to reconstruct pial surfaces by inflating the white surface along the normal direction towards the boundary of the cortical gray matter segmentation. This alleviates partial volume effects and encourages the pial surface to deform into deep and challenging cortical sulci. We evaluate CoSeg on 1,113 adult brain MRI at 1mm and 2mm resolution. CoSeg achieves superior geometric and morphological accuracy compared to existing learning-based approaches. We also verify that CoSeg can extract high-quality cortical surfaces from fetal brain MRI on which traditional pipelines fail to produce acceptable results.

EchoNet-Synthetic: Privacy-preserving Video Generation for Safe Medical Data Sharing

To make medical datasets accessible without sharing sensitive patient information, we introduce a novel end-to-end approach for generative de-identification of dynamic medical imaging data. Until now, generative methods have faced constraints in terms of fidelity, spatio-temporal coherence, and the length of generation, failing to capture the complete details of dataset distributions. We present a model designed to produce high-fidelity, long and complete data samples with near-real-time efficiency and explore our approach on a challenging task: generating echocardiogram videos. We develop our generation method based on diffusion models and introduce a protocol for medical video dataset anonymization. As an exemplar, we present EchoNet-Synthetic, a fully synthetic, privacy-compliant echocardiogram dataset with paired ejection fraction labels. As part of our de-identification protocol, we evaluate the quality of the generated dataset and propose to use clinical downstream tasks as a measurement on top of widely used but potentially biased image quality metrics. Experimental outcomes demonstrate that EchoNet-Synthetic achieves comparable dataset fidelity to the actual dataset, effectively supporting the ejection fraction regression task. Code, weights and dataset are available at https://github.com/HReynaud/EchoNet-Synthetic.

The Developing Human Connectome Project: A Fast Deep Learning-based Pipeline for Neonatal Cortical Surface Reconstruction

The Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP) aims to explore developmental patterns of the human brain during the perinatal period. An automated processing pipeline has been developed to extract high-quality cortical surfaces from structural brain magnetic resonance (MR) images for the dHCP neonatal dataset. However, the current implementation of the pipeline requires more than 6.5 hours to process a single MRI scan, making it expensive for large-scale neuroimaging studies. In this paper, we propose a fast deep learning (DL) based pipeline for dHCP neonatal cortical surface reconstruction, incorporating DL-based brain extraction, cortical surface reconstruction and spherical projection, as well as GPU-accelerated cortical surface inflation and cortical feature estimation. We introduce a multiscale deformation network to learn diffeomorphic cortical surface reconstruction end-to-end from T2-weighted brain MRI. A fast unsupervised spherical mapping approach is integrated to minimize metric distortions between cortical surfaces and projected spheres. The entire workflow of our DL-based dHCP pipeline completes within only 24 seconds on a modern GPU, which is nearly 1000 times faster than the original dHCP pipeline. Manual quality control demonstrates that for 82.5% of the test samples, our DL-based pipeline produces superior (54.2%) or equal quality (28.3%) cortical surfaces compared to the original dHCP pipeline.

Diff-Def: Diffusion-Generated Deformation Fields for Conditional Atlases

Anatomical atlases are widely used for population analysis. Conditional atlases target a particular sub-population defined via certain conditions (e.g. demographics or pathologies) and allow for the investigation of fine-grained anatomical differences - such as morphological changes correlated with age. Existing approaches use either registration-based methods that are unable to handle large anatomical variations or generative models, which can suffer from training instabilities and hallucinations. To overcome these limitations, we use latent diffusion models to generate deformation fields, which transform a general population atlas into one representing a specific sub-population. By generating a deformation field and registering the conditional atlas to a neighbourhood of images, we ensure structural plausibility and avoid hallucinations, which can occur during direct image synthesis. We compare our method to several state-of-the-art atlas generation methods in experiments using 5000 brain as well as whole-body MR images from UK Biobank. Our method generates highly realistic atlases with smooth transformations and high anatomical fidelity, outperforming the baselines.

Style-Extracting Diffusion Models for Semi-Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

Deep learning-based image generation has seen significant advancements with diffusion models, notably improving the quality of generated images. Despite these developments, generating images with unseen characteristics beneficial for downstream tasks has received limited attention. To bridge this gap, we propose Style-Extracting Diffusion Models, featuring two conditioning mechanisms. Specifically, we utilize 1) a style conditioning mechanism which allows to inject style information of previously unseen images during image generation and 2) a content conditioning which can be targeted to a downstream task, e.g., layout for segmentation. We introduce a trainable style encoder to extract style information from images, and an aggregation block that merges style information from multiple style inputs. This architecture enables the generation of images with unseen styles in a zero-shot manner, by leveraging styles from unseen images, resulting in more diverse generations. In this work, we use the image layout as target condition and first show the capability of our method on a natural image dataset as a proof-of-concept. We further demonstrate its versatility in histopathology, where we combine prior knowledge about tissue composition and unannotated data to create diverse synthetic images with known layouts. This allows us to generate additional synthetic data to train a segmentation network in a semi-supervised fashion. We verify the added value of the generated images by showing improved segmentation results and lower performance variability between patients when synthetic images are included during segmentation training. Our code will be made publicly available at [LINK].

Arc2Face: A Foundation Model of Human Faces

This paper presents Arc2Face, an identity-conditioned face foundation model, which, given the ArcFace embedding of a person, can generate diverse photo-realistic images with an unparalleled degree of face similarity than existing models. Despite previous attempts to decode face recognition features into detailed images, we find that common high-resolution datasets (e.g. FFHQ) lack sufficient identities to reconstruct any subject. To that end, we meticulously upsample a significant portion of the WebFace42M database, the largest public dataset for face recognition (FR). Arc2Face builds upon a pretrained Stable Diffusion model, yet adapts it to the task of ID-to-face generation, conditioned solely on ID vectors. Deviating from recent works that combine ID with text embeddings for zero-shot personalization of text-to-image models, we emphasize on the compactness of FR features, which can fully capture the essence of the human face, as opposed to hand-crafted prompts. Crucially, text-augmented models struggle to decouple identity and text, usually necessitating some description of the given face to achieve satisfactory similarity. Arc2Face, however, only needs the discriminative features of ArcFace to guide the generation, offering a robust prior for a plethora of tasks where ID consistency is of paramount importance. As an example, we train a FR model on synthetic images from our model and achieve superior performance to existing synthetic datasets.