DDSB: An Unsupervised and Training-free Method for Phase Detection in Echocardiography

Accurate identification of End-Diastolic (ED) and End-Systolic (ES) frames is key for cardiac function assessment through echocardiography. However, traditional methods face several limitations: they require extensive amounts of data, extensive annotations by medical experts, significant training resources, and often lack robustness. Addressing these challenges, we proposed an unsupervised and training-free method, our novel approach leverages unsupervised segmentation to enhance fault tolerance against segmentation inaccuracies. By identifying anchor points and analyzing directional deformation, we effectively reduce dependence on the accuracy of initial segmentation images and enhance fault tolerance, all while improving robustness. Tested on Echo-dynamic and CAMUS datasets, our method achieves comparable accuracy to learning-based models without their associated drawbacks. The code is available at https://github.com/MRUIL/DDSB

3D Face Parsing via Surface Parameterization and 2D Semantic Segmentation Network

Face parsing assigns pixel-wise semantic labels as the face representation for computers, which is the fundamental part of many advanced face technologies. Compared with 2D face parsing, 3D face parsing shows more potential to achieve better performance and further application, but it is still challenging due to 3D mesh data computation. Recent works introduced different methods for 3D surface segmentation, while the performance is still limited. In this paper, we propose a method based on the "3D-2D-3D" strategy to accomplish 3D face parsing. The topological disk-like 2D face image containing spatial and textural information is transformed from the sampled 3D face data through the face parameterization algorithm, and a specific 2D network called CPFNet is proposed to achieve the semantic segmentation of the 2D parameterized face data with multi-scale technologies and feature aggregation. The 2D semantic result is then inversely re-mapped to 3D face data, which finally achieves the 3D face parsing. Experimental results show that both CPFNet and the "3D-2D-3D" strategy accomplish high-quality 3D face parsing and outperform state-of-the-art 2D networks as well as 3D methods in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons.

Generalize Ultrasound Image Segmentation via Instant and Plug & Play Style Transfer

Deep segmentation models that generalize to images with unknown appearance are important for real-world medical image analysis. Retraining models leads to high latency and complex pipelines, which are impractical in clinical settings. The situation becomes more severe for ultrasound image analysis because of their large appearance shifts. In this paper, we propose a novel method for robust segmentation under unknown appearance shifts. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we advance a one-stage plug-and-play solution by embedding hierarchical style transfer units into a segmentation architecture. Our solution can remove appearance shifts and perform segmentation simultaneously. Second, we adopt Dynamic Instance Normalization to conduct precise and dynamic style transfer in a learnable manner, rather than previously fixed style normalization. Third, our solution is fast and lightweight for routine clinical adoption. Given 400*400 image input, our solution only needs an additional 0.2ms and 1.92M FLOPs to handle appearance shifts compared to the baseline pipeline. Extensive experiments are conducted on a large dataset from three vendors demonstrate our proposed method enhances the robustness of deep segmentation models.

Contrastive Rendering for Ultrasound Image Segmentation

Ultrasound (US) image segmentation embraced its significant improvement in deep learning era. However, the lack of sharp boundaries in US images still remains an inherent challenge for segmentation. Previous methods often resort to global context, multi-scale cues or auxiliary guidance to estimate the boundaries. It is hard for these methods to approach pixel-level learning for fine-grained boundary generating. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective framework to improve boundary estimation in US images. Our work has three highlights. First, we propose to formulate the boundary estimation as a rendering task, which can recognize ambiguous points (pixels/voxels) and calibrate the boundary prediction via enriched feature representation learning. Second, we introduce point-wise contrastive learning to enhance the similarity of points from the same class and contrastively decrease the similarity of points from different classes. Boundary ambiguities are therefore further addressed. Third, both rendering and contrastive learning tasks contribute to consistent improvement while reducing network parameters. As a proof-of-concept, we performed validation experiments on a challenging dataset of 86 ovarian US volumes. Results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and has the potential to be used in clinical practice.