Deep Attention-guided Adaptive Subsampling

Although deep neural networks have provided impressive gains in performance, these improvements often come at the cost of increased computational complexity and expense. In many cases, such as 3D volume or video classification tasks, not all slices or frames are necessary due to inherent redundancies. To address this issue, we propose a novel learnable subsampling framework that can be integrated into any neural network architecture. Subsampling, being a nondifferentiable operation, poses significant challenges for direct adaptation into deep learning models. While some works, have proposed solutions using the Gumbel-max trick to overcome the problem of non-differentiability, they fall short in a crucial aspect: they are only task-adaptive and not inputadaptive. Once the sampling mechanism is learned, it remains static and does not adjust to different inputs, making it unsuitable for real-world applications. To this end, we propose an attention-guided sampling module that adapts to inputs even during inference. This dynamic adaptation results in performance gains and reduces complexity in deep neural network models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on 3D medical imaging datasets from MedMNIST3D as well as two ultrasound video datasets for classification tasks, one of them being a challenging in-house dataset collected under real-world clinical conditions.

Language Augmentation in CLIP for Improved Anatomy Detection on Multi-modal Medical Images

Vision-language models have emerged as a powerful tool for previously challenging multi-modal classification problem in the medical domain. This development has led to the exploration of automated image description generation for multi-modal clinical scans, particularly for radiology report generation. Existing research has focused on clinical descriptions for specific modalities or body regions, leaving a gap for a model providing entire-body multi-modal descriptions. In this paper, we address this gap by automating the generation of standardized body station(s) and list of organ(s) across the whole body in multi-modal MR and CT radiological images. Leveraging the versatility of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), we refine and augment the existing approach through multiple experiments, including baseline model fine-tuning, adding station(s) as a superset for better correlation between organs, along with image and language augmentations. Our proposed approach demonstrates 47.6% performance improvement over baseline PubMedCLIP.