From Denoising Training to Test-Time Adaptation: Enhancing Domain Generalization for Medical Image Segmentation

In medical image segmentation, domain generalization poses a significant challenge due to domain shifts caused by variations in data acquisition devices and other factors. These shifts are particularly pronounced in the most common scenario, which involves only single-source domain data due to privacy concerns. To address this, we draw inspiration from the self-supervised learning paradigm that effectively discourages overfitting to the source domain. We propose the Denoising Y-Net (DeY-Net), a novel approach incorporating an auxiliary denoising decoder into the basic U-Net architecture. The auxiliary decoder aims to perform denoising training, augmenting the domain-invariant representation that facilitates domain generalization. Furthermore, this paradigm provides the potential to utilize unlabeled data. Building upon denoising training, we propose Denoising Test Time Adaptation (DeTTA) that further: (i) adapts the model to the target domain in a sample-wise manner, and (ii) adapts to the noise-corrupted input. Extensive experiments conducted on widely-adopted liver segmentation benchmarks demonstrate significant domain generalization improvements over our baseline and state-of-the-art results compared to other methods. Code is available at https://github.com/WenRuxue/DeTTA.

FetusMapV2: Enhanced Fetal Pose Estimation in 3D Ultrasound

Fetal pose estimation in 3D ultrasound (US) involves identifying a set of associated fetal anatomical landmarks. Its primary objective is to provide comprehensive information about the fetus through landmark connections, thus benefiting various critical applications, such as biometric measurements, plane localization, and fetal movement monitoring. However, accurately estimating the 3D fetal pose in US volume has several challenges, including poor image quality, limited GPU memory for tackling high dimensional data, symmetrical or ambiguous anatomical structures, and considerable variations in fetal poses. In this study, we propose a novel 3D fetal pose estimation framework (called FetusMapV2) to overcome the above challenges. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we propose a heuristic scheme that explores the complementary network structure-unconstrained and activation-unreserved GPU memory management approaches, which can enlarge the input image resolution for better results under limited GPU memory. Second, we design a novel Pair Loss to mitigate confusion caused by symmetrical and similar anatomical structures. It separates the hidden classification task from the landmark localization task and thus progressively eases model learning. Last, we propose a shape priors-based self-supervised learning by selecting the relatively stable landmarks to refine the pose online. Extensive experiments and diverse applications on a large-scale fetal US dataset including 1000 volumes with 22 landmarks per volume demonstrate that our method outperforms other strong competitors.

A Foundation Model for General Moving Object Segmentation in Medical Images

Medical image segmentation aims to delineate the anatomical or pathological structures of interest, playing a crucial role in clinical diagnosis. A substantial amount of high-quality annotated data is crucial for constructing high-precision deep segmentation models. However, medical annotation is highly cumbersome and time-consuming, especially for medical videos or 3D volumes, due to the huge labeling space and poor inter-frame consistency. Recently, a fundamental task named Moving Object Segmentation (MOS) has made significant advancements in natural images. Its objective is to delineate moving objects from the background within image sequences, requiring only minimal annotations. In this paper, we propose the first foundation model, named iMOS, for MOS in medical images. Extensive experiments on a large multi-modal medical dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed iMOS. Specifically, with the annotation of only a small number of images in the sequence, iMOS can achieve satisfactory tracking and segmentation performance of moving objects throughout the entire sequence in bi-directions. We hope that the proposed iMOS can help accelerate the annotation speed of experts, and boost the development of medical foundation models.

FFPN: Fourier Feature Pyramid Network for Ultrasound Image Segmentation

Ultrasound (US) image segmentation is an active research area that requires real-time and highly accurate analysis in many scenarios. The detect-to-segment (DTS) frameworks have been recently proposed to balance accuracy and efficiency. However, existing approaches may suffer from inadequate contour encoding or fail to effectively leverage the encoded results. In this paper, we introduce a novel Fourier-anchor-based DTS framework called Fourier Feature Pyramid Network (FFPN) to address the aforementioned issues. The contributions of this paper are two fold. First, the FFPN utilizes Fourier Descriptors to adequately encode contours. Specifically, it maps Fourier series with similar amplitudes and frequencies into the same layer of the feature map, thereby effectively utilizing the encoded Fourier information. Second, we propose a Contour Sampling Refinement (CSR) module based on the contour proposals and refined features produced by the FFPN. This module extracts rich features around the predicted contours to further capture detailed information and refine the contours. Extensive experimental results on three large and challenging datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other DTS methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, our framework can generalize well to other detection or segmentation tasks.

PE-MED: Prompt Enhancement for Interactive Medical Image Segmentation

Interactive medical image segmentation refers to the accurate segmentation of the target of interest through interaction (e.g., click) between the user and the image. It has been widely studied in recent years as it is less dependent on abundant annotated data and more flexible than fully automated segmentation. However, current studies have not fully explored user-provided prompt information (e.g., points), including the knowledge mined in one interaction, and the relationship between multiple interactions. Thus, in this paper, we introduce a novel framework equipped with prompt enhancement, called PE-MED, for interactive medical image segmentation. First, we introduce a Self-Loop strategy to generate warm initial segmentation results based on the first prompt. It can prevent the highly unfavorable scenarios, such as encountering a blank mask as the initial input after the first interaction. Second, we propose a novel Prompt Attention Learning Module (PALM) to mine useful prompt information in one interaction, enhancing the responsiveness of the network to user clicks. Last, we build a Time Series Information Propagation (TSIP) mechanism to extract the temporal relationships between multiple interactions and increase the model stability. Comparative experiments with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) medical image segmentation algorithms show that our method exhibits better segmentation accuracy and stability.

RLIPv2: Fast Scaling of Relational Language-Image Pre-training

Relational Language-Image Pre-training (RLIP) aims to align vision representations with relational texts, thereby advancing the capability of relational reasoning in computer vision tasks. However, hindered by the slow convergence of RLIPv1 architecture and the limited availability of existing scene graph data, scaling RLIPv1 is challenging. In this paper, we propose RLIPv2, a fast converging model that enables the scaling of relational pre-training to large-scale pseudo-labelled scene graph data. To enable fast scaling, RLIPv2 introduces Asymmetric Language-Image Fusion (ALIF), a mechanism that facilitates earlier and deeper gated cross-modal fusion with sparsified language encoding layers. ALIF leads to comparable or better performance than RLIPv1 in a fraction of the time for pre-training and fine-tuning. To obtain scene graph data at scale, we extend object detection datasets with free-form relation labels by introducing a captioner (e.g., BLIP) and a designed Relation Tagger. The Relation Tagger assigns BLIP-generated relation texts to region pairs, thus enabling larger-scale relational pre-training. Through extensive experiments conducted on Human-Object Interaction Detection and Scene Graph Generation, RLIPv2 shows state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks under fully-finetuning, few-shot and zero-shot settings. Notably, the largest RLIPv2 achieves 23.29mAP on HICO-DET without any fine-tuning, yields 32.22mAP with just 1% data and yields 45.09mAP with 100% data. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/JacobYuan7/RLIPv2.

OnUVS: Online Feature Decoupling Framework for High-Fidelity Ultrasound Video Synthesis

Ultrasound (US) imaging is indispensable in clinical practice. To diagnose certain diseases, sonographers must observe corresponding dynamic anatomic structures to gather comprehensive information. However, the limited availability of specific US video cases causes teaching difficulties in identifying corresponding diseases, which potentially impacts the detection rate of such cases. The synthesis of US videos may represent a promising solution to this issue. Nevertheless, it is challenging to accurately animate the intricate motion of dynamic anatomic structures while preserving image fidelity. To address this, we present a novel online feature-decoupling framework called OnUVS for high-fidelity US video synthesis. Our highlights can be summarized by four aspects. First, we introduced anatomic information into keypoint learning through a weakly-supervised training strategy, resulting in improved preservation of anatomical integrity and motion while minimizing the labeling burden. Second, to better preserve the integrity and textural information of US images, we implemented a dual-decoder that decouples the content and textural features in the generator. Third, we adopted a multiple-feature discriminator to extract a comprehensive range of visual cues, thereby enhancing the sharpness and fine details of the generated videos. Fourth, we constrained the motion trajectories of keypoints during online learning to enhance the fluidity of generated videos. Our validation and user studies on in-house echocardiographic and pelvic floor US videos showed that OnUVS synthesizes US videos with high fidelity.

Semi-Supervised Dual-Stream Self-Attentive Adversarial Graph Contrastive Learning for Cross-Subject EEG-based Emotion Recognition

Electroencephalography (EEG) is an objective tool for emotion recognition with promising applications. However, the scarcity of labeled data remains a major challenge in this field, limiting the widespread use of EEG-based emotion recognition. In this paper, a semi-supervised Dual-stream Self-Attentive Adversarial Graph Contrastive learning framework (termed as DS-AGC) is proposed to tackle the challenge of limited labeled data in cross-subject EEG-based emotion recognition. The DS-AGC framework includes two parallel streams for extracting non-structural and structural EEG features. The non-structural stream incorporates a semi-supervised multi-domain adaptation method to alleviate distribution discrepancy among labeled source domain, unlabeled source domain, and unknown target domain. The structural stream develops a graph contrastive learning method to extract effective graph-based feature representation from multiple EEG channels in a semi-supervised manner. Further, a self-attentive fusion module is developed for feature fusion, sample selection, and emotion recognition, which highlights EEG features more relevant to emotions and data samples in the labeled source domain that are closer to the target domain. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark databases (SEED and SEED-IV) using a semi-supervised cross-subject leave-one-subject-out cross-validation evaluation scheme show that the proposed model outperforms existing methods under different incomplete label conditions (with an average improvement of 5.83% on SEED and 6.99% on SEED-IV), demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing the label scarcity problem in cross-subject EEG-based emotion recognition.

Multi-IMU with Online Self-Consistency for Freehand 3D Ultrasound Reconstruction

Ultrasound (US) imaging is a popular tool in clinical diagnosis, offering safety, repeatability, and real-time capabilities. Freehand 3D US is a technique that provides a deeper understanding of scanned regions without increasing complexity. However, estimating elevation displacement and accumulation error remains challenging, making it difficult to infer the relative position using images alone. The addition of external lightweight sensors has been proposed to enhance reconstruction performance without adding complexity, which has been shown to be beneficial. We propose a novel online self-consistency network (OSCNet) using multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs) to improve reconstruction performance. OSCNet utilizes a modal-level self-supervised strategy to fuse multiple IMU information and reduce differences between reconstruction results obtained from each IMU data. Additionally, a sequence-level self-consistency strategy is proposed to improve the hierarchical consistency of prediction results among the scanning sequence and its sub-sequences. Experiments on large-scale arm and carotid datasets with multiple scanning tactics demonstrate that our OSCNet outperforms previous methods, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction performance.