DarkShot: Lighting Dark Images with Low-Compute and High-Quality

Nighttime photography encounters escalating challenges in extremely low-light conditions, primarily attributable to the ultra-low signal-to-noise ratio. For real-world deployment, a practical solution must not only produce visually appealing results but also require minimal computation. However, most existing methods are either focused on improving restoration performance or employ lightweight models at the cost of quality. This paper proposes a lightweight network that outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in low-light enhancement tasks while minimizing computation. The proposed network incorporates Siamese Self-Attention Block (SSAB) and Skip-Channel Attention (SCA) modules, which enhance the model's capacity to aggregate global information and are well-suited for high-resolution images. Additionally, based on our analysis of the low-light image restoration process, we propose a Two-Stage Framework that achieves superior results. Our model can restore a UHD 4K resolution image with minimal computation while keeping SOTA restoration quality.

Generalizable vision-language pre-training for annotation-free pathology localization

Locating pathologies automatically from medical images aids the understanding of the emergence and progression of diseases, and such an ability can significantly benefit clinical diagnostics. However, existing deep learning models heavily rely on expert annotations and lack generalization capabilities in open clinical environments. In this study, we present a generalizable vision-language pre-training model for Annotation-Free pathology Localization (AFLoc). The core strength of AFLoc lies in its image annotation-free multi-level semantic structure-based contrastive learning, which comprehensively aligns multi-granularity medical concepts from reports with abundant image features, to adapt to the diverse expressions of observed and emerging unseen pathologies. We conducted extensive experimental validation across 4 distinct external datasets, encompassing 11 types of chest pathologies, to verify its generalization ability. The results demonstrate that AFLoc surpasses 6 state-of-the-art methods and even outperforms the human benchmark in locating 5 different pathologies, underscoring its suitability for complex clinical environments.

AID-DTI: Accelerating High-fidelity Diffusion Tensor Imaging with Detail-Preserving Model-based Deep Learning

Deep learning has shown great potential in accelerating diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Nevertheless, existing methods tend to suffer from Rician noise and detail loss in reconstructing the DTI-derived parametric maps especially when sparsely sampled q-space data are used. This paper proposes a novel method, AID-DTI (Accelerating hIgh fiDelity Diffusion Tensor Imaging), to facilitate fast and accurate DTI with only six measurements. AID-DTI is equipped with a newly designed Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based regularizer, which can effectively capture fine details while suppressing noise during network training. Experimental results on Human Connectome Project (HCP) data consistently demonstrate that the proposed method estimates DTI parameter maps with fine-grained details and outperforms three state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Modality Exchange Network for Retinogeniculate Visual Pathway Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of the retinogeniculate visual pathway (RGVP) aids in the diagnosis and treatment of visual disorders by identifying disruptions or abnormalities within the pathway. However, the complex anatomical structure and connectivity of RGVP make it challenging to achieve accurate segmentation. In this study, we propose a novel Modality Exchange Network (ME-Net) that effectively utilizes multi-modal magnetic resonance (MR) imaging information to enhance RGVP segmentation. Our ME-Net has two main contributions. Firstly, we introduce an effective multi-modal soft-exchange technique. Specifically, we design a channel and spatially mixed attention module to exchange modality information between T1-weighted and fractional anisotropy MR images. Secondly, we propose a cross-fusion module that further enhances the fusion of information between the two modalities. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of RGVP segmentation performance.

Simultaneous q-Space Sampling Optimization and Reconstruction for Fast and High-fidelity Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) plays a crucial role in the noninvasive investigation of tissue microstructural properties and structural connectivity in the \textit{in vivo} human brain. However, to effectively capture the intricate characteristics of water diffusion at various directions and scales, it is important to employ comprehensive q-space sampling. Unfortunately, this requirement leads to long scan times, limiting the clinical applicability of dMRI. To address this challenge, we propose SSOR, a Simultaneous q-Space sampling Optimization and Reconstruction framework. We jointly optimize a subset of q-space samples using a continuous representation of spherical harmonic functions and a reconstruction network. Additionally, we integrate the unique properties of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) in both the q-space and image domains by applying $l1$-norm and total-variation regularization. The experiments conducted on HCP data demonstrate that SSOR has promising strengths both quantitatively and qualitatively and exhibits robustness to noise.

LESEN: Label-Efficient deep learning for Multi-parametric MRI-based Visual Pathway Segmentation

Recent research has shown the potential of deep learning in multi-parametric MRI-based visual pathway (VP) segmentation. However, obtaining labeled data for training is laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, it is crucial to develop effective algorithms in situations with limited labeled samples. In this work, we propose a label-efficient deep learning method with self-ensembling (LESEN). LESEN incorporates supervised and unsupervised losses, enabling the student and teacher models to mutually learn from each other, forming a self-ensembling mean teacher framework. Additionally, we introduce a reliable unlabeled sample selection (RUSS) mechanism to further enhance LESEN's effectiveness. Our experiments on the human connectome project (HCP) dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our method when compared to state-of-the-art techniques, advancing multimodal VP segmentation for comprehensive analysis in clinical and research settings. The implementation code will be available at: https://github.com/aldiak/Semi-Supervised-Multimodal-Visual-Pathway- Delineation.

MLIP: Medical Language-Image Pre-training with Masked Local Representation Learning

Existing contrastive language-image pre-training aims to learn a joint representation by matching abundant image-text pairs. However, the number of image-text pairs in medical datasets is usually orders of magnitude smaller than that in natural datasets. Besides, medical image-text pairs often involve numerous complex fine-grained correspondences. This paper aims to enhance the data efficiency by introducing multiple-to-multiple local relationship modeling to capture denser supervisions. More specifically, we propose a Medical Language-Image Pre-training (MLIP) framework, which exploits the limited image-text medical data more efficiently through patch-sentence matching. Furthermore, we introduce a masked contrastive learning strategy with semantic integrity estimation to reduce redundancy in images while preserving the underlying semantics. Our evaluation results show that MLIP outperforms previous work in zero/few-shot classification and few-shot segmentation tasks by a large margin.

Enhancing the medical foundation model with multi-scale and cross-modality feature learning

The development of multi-modal medical foundation models has attracted significant attention in the field of medicine and healthcare due to their promising prospects in various clinical applications. One area of focus in this research direction is the extractions of features at different scales. While previous studies have explored feature learning at individual scales, investigation on integrating the diverse scales and modalities of information is lacking, which may hinder the potential for mutual reinforcement among these features. This paper aims to bridge this gap by proposing a method that effectively exploits multi-scale and cross-modality information to enhance the performance of medical foundation models. The proposed method simultaneously exploit features at the local, instance, modality and global aspects, facilitating comprehensive representation learning within the models. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on six open-source datasets across different clinical tasks, demonstrating its ability to enhance the performance of medical foundation models.

Multimodal self-supervised learning for lesion localization

Multimodal deep learning utilizing imaging and diagnostic reports has made impressive progress in the field of medical imaging diagnostics, demonstrating a particularly strong capability for auxiliary diagnosis in cases where sufficient annotation information is lacking. Nonetheless, localizing diseases accurately without detailed positional annotations remains a challenge. Although existing methods have attempted to utilize local information to achieve fine-grained semantic alignment, their capability in extracting the fine-grained semantics of the comprehensive contextual within reports is limited. To solve this problem, we introduce a new method that takes full sentences from textual reports as the basic units for local semantic alignment. Our approach combines chest X-ray images with their corresponding textual reports, performing contrastive learning at both global and local levels. The leading results obtained by our method on multiple datasets confirm its efficacy in the task of lesion localization.