HCA-Net: Hierarchical Context Attention Network for Intervertebral Disc Semantic Labeling

Accurate and automated segmentation of intervertebral discs (IVDs) in medical images is crucial for assessing spine-related disorders, such as osteoporosis, vertebral fractures, or IVD herniation. We present HCA-Net, a novel contextual attention network architecture for semantic labeling of IVDs, with a special focus on exploiting prior geometric information. Our approach excels at processing features across different scales and effectively consolidating them to capture the intricate spatial relationships within the spinal cord. To achieve this, HCA-Net models IVD labeling as a pose estimation problem, aiming to minimize the discrepancy between each predicted IVD location and its corresponding actual joint location. In addition, we introduce a skeletal loss term to reinforce the model's geometric dependence on the spine. This loss function is designed to constrain the model's predictions to a range that matches the general structure of the human vertebral skeleton. As a result, the network learns to reduce the occurrence of false predictions and adaptively improves the accuracy of IVD location estimation. Through extensive experimental evaluation on multi-center spine datasets, our approach consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both MRI T1w and T2w modalities. The codebase is accessible to the public on \href{https://github.com/xmindflow/HCA-Net}{GitHub}.

Foundational Models in Medical Imaging: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Vision

Foundation models, large-scale, pre-trained deep-learning models adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks have gained significant interest lately in various deep-learning problems undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of these models. Trained on large-scale dataset to bridge the gap between different modalities, foundation models facilitate contextual reasoning, generalization, and prompt capabilities at test time. The predictions of these models can be adjusted for new tasks by augmenting the model input with task-specific hints called prompts without requiring extensive labeled data and retraining. Capitalizing on the advances in computer vision, medical imaging has also marked a growing interest in these models. To assist researchers in navigating this direction, this survey intends to provide a comprehensive overview of foundation models in the domain of medical imaging. Specifically, we initiate our exploration by providing an exposition of the fundamental concepts forming the basis of foundation models. Subsequently, we offer a methodical taxonomy of foundation models within the medical domain, proposing a classification system primarily structured around training strategies, while also incorporating additional facets such as application domains, imaging modalities, specific organs of interest, and the algorithms integral to these models. Furthermore, we emphasize the practical use case of some selected approaches and then discuss the opportunities, applications, and future directions of these large-scale pre-trained models, for analyzing medical images. In the same vein, we address the prevailing challenges and research pathways associated with foundational models in medical imaging. These encompass the areas of interpretability, data management, computational requirements, and the nuanced issue of contextual comprehension.

Implicit Neural Representation in Medical Imaging: A Comparative Survey

Implicit neural representations (INRs) have gained prominence as a powerful paradigm in scene reconstruction and computer graphics, demonstrating remarkable results. By utilizing neural networks to parameterize data through implicit continuous functions, INRs offer several benefits. Recognizing the potential of INRs beyond these domains, this survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of INR models in the field of medical imaging. In medical settings, numerous challenging and ill-posed problems exist, making INRs an attractive solution. The survey explores the application of INRs in various medical imaging tasks, such as image reconstruction, segmentation, registration, novel view synthesis, and compression. It discusses the advantages and limitations of INRs, highlighting their resolution-agnostic nature, memory efficiency, ability to avoid locality biases, and differentiability, enabling adaptation to different tasks. Furthermore, the survey addresses the challenges and considerations specific to medical imaging data, such as data availability, computational complexity, and dynamic clinical scene analysis. It also identifies future research directions and opportunities, including integration with multi-modal imaging, real-time and interactive systems, and domain adaptation for clinical decision support. To facilitate further exploration and implementation of INRs in medical image analysis, we have provided a compilation of cited studies along with their available open-source implementations on \href{https://github.com/mindflow-institue/Awesome-Implicit-Neural-Representations-in-Medical-imaging}. Finally, we aim to consistently incorporate the most recent and relevant papers regularly.