Adversarial Attack and Defense for Medical Image Analysis: Methods and Applications

Deep learning techniques have achieved superior performance in computer-aided medical image analysis, yet they are still vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial attacks, resulting in potential misdiagnosis in clinical practice. Oppositely, recent years have also witnessed remarkable progress in defense against these tailored adversarial examples in deep medical diagnosis systems. In this exposition, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in adversarial attack and defense for medical image analysis with a novel taxonomy in terms of the application scenario. We also provide a unified theoretical framework for different types of adversarial attack and defense methods for medical image analysis. For a fair comparison, we establish a new benchmark for adversarially robust medical diagnosis models obtained by adversarial training under various scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey paper that provides a thorough evaluation of adversarially robust medical diagnosis models. By analyzing qualitative and quantitative results, we conclude this survey with a detailed discussion of current challenges for adversarial attack and defense in medical image analysis systems to shed light on future research directions.

Towards Scalable Neural Representation for Diverse Videos

Implicit neural representations (INR) have gained increasing attention in representing 3D scenes and images, and have been recently applied to encode videos (e.g., NeRV, E-NeRV). While achieving promising results, existing INR-based methods are limited to encoding a handful of short videos (e.g., seven 5-second videos in the UVG dataset) with redundant visual content, leading to a model design that fits individual video frames independently and is not efficiently scalable to a large number of diverse videos. This paper focuses on developing neural representations for a more practical setup -- encoding long and/or a large number of videos with diverse visual content. We first show that instead of dividing videos into small subsets and encoding them with separate models, encoding long and diverse videos jointly with a unified model achieves better compression results. Based on this observation, we propose D-NeRV, a novel neural representation framework designed to encode diverse videos by (i) decoupling clip-specific visual content from motion information, (ii) introducing temporal reasoning into the implicit neural network, and (iii) employing the task-oriented flow as intermediate output to reduce spatial redundancies. Our new model largely surpasses NeRV and traditional video compression techniques on UCF101 and UVG datasets on the video compression task. Moreover, when used as an efficient data-loader, D-NeRV achieves 3%-10% higher accuracy than NeRV on action recognition tasks on the UCF101 dataset under the same compression ratios.

A Permutable Hybrid Network for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation

The advent of Vision Transformer (ViT) has brought substantial advancements in 3D volumetric benchmarks, particularly in 3D medical image segmentation. Concurrently, Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) networks have regained popularity among researchers due to their comparable results to ViT, albeit with the exclusion of the heavy self-attention module. This paper introduces a permutable hybrid network for volumetric medical image segmentation, named PHNet, which exploits the advantages of convolution neural network (CNN) and MLP. PHNet addresses the intrinsic isotropy problem of 3D volumetric data by utilizing both 2D and 3D CNN to extract local information. Besides, we propose an efficient Multi-Layer Permute Perceptron module, named MLPP, which enhances the original MLP by obtaining long-range dependence while retaining positional information. Extensive experimental results validate that PHNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets, namely, COVID-19-20 and Synapse. Moreover, the ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness of PHNet in harnessing the strengths of both CNN and MLP. The code will be accessible to the public upon acceptance.

Few Shot Medical Image Segmentation with Cross Attention Transformer

Medical image segmentation has made significant progress in recent years. Deep learning-based methods are recognized as data-hungry techniques, requiring large amounts of data with manual annotations. However, manual annotation is expensive in the field of medical image analysis, which requires domain-specific expertise. To address this challenge, few-shot learning has the potential to learn new classes from only a few examples. In this work, we propose a novel framework for few-shot medical image segmentation, termed CAT-Net, based on cross masked attention Transformer. Our proposed network mines the correlations between the support image and query image, limiting them to focus only on useful foreground information and boosting the representation capacity of both the support prototype and query features. We further design an iterative refinement framework that refines the query image segmentation iteratively and promotes the support feature in turn. We validated the proposed method on three public datasets: Abd-CT, Abd-MRI, and Card-MRI. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to state-of-the-art methods and the effectiveness of each component. we will release the source codes of our method upon acceptance.

Two-level Graph Network for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to design machine learning algorithms that can continually learn new concepts from a few data points, without forgetting knowledge of old classes. The difficulty lies in that limited data from new classes not only lead to significant overfitting issues but also exacerbates the notorious catastrophic forgetting problems. However, existing FSCIL methods ignore the semantic relationships between sample-level and class-level. % Using the advantage that graph neural network (GNN) can mine rich information among few samples, In this paper, we designed a two-level graph network for FSCIL named Sample-level and Class-level Graph Neural Network (SCGN). Specifically, a pseudo incremental learning paradigm is designed in SCGN, which synthesizes virtual few-shot tasks as new tasks to optimize SCGN model parameters in advance. Sample-level graph network uses the relationship of a few samples to aggregate similar samples and obtains refined class-level features. Class-level graph network aims to mitigate the semantic conflict between prototype features of new classes and old classes. SCGN builds two-level graph networks to guarantee the latent semantic of each few-shot class can be effectively represented in FSCIL. Experiments on three popular benchmark datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the baselines and sets new state-of-the-art results with remarkable advantages.

Exploring Visual Prompts for Whole Slide Image Classification with Multiple Instance Learning

Multiple instance learning (MIL) has emerged as a popular method for classifying histopathology whole slide images (WSIs). However, existing approaches typically rely on pre-trained models from large natural image datasets, such as ImageNet, to generate instance features, which can be sub-optimal due to the significant differences between natural images and histopathology images that lead to a domain shift. In this paper, we present a novel, simple yet effective method for learning domain-specific knowledge transformation from pre-trained models to histopathology images. Our approach entails using a prompt component to assist the pre-trained model in discerning differences between the pre-trained dataset and the target histopathology dataset, resulting in improved performance of MIL models. We validate our method on two publicly available datasets, Camelyon16 and TCGA-NSCLC. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the significant performance improvement of our method for different MIL models and backbones. Upon publication of this paper, we will release the source code for our method.

Label-Efficient Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis: Challenges and Future Directions

Deep learning has seen rapid growth in recent years and achieved state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of applications. However, training models typically requires expensive and time-consuming collection of large quantities of labeled data. This is particularly true within the scope of medical imaging analysis (MIA), where data are limited and labels are expensive to be acquired. Thus, label-efficient deep learning methods are developed to make comprehensive use of the labeled data as well as the abundance of unlabeled and weak-labeled data. In this survey, we extensively investigated over 300 recent papers to provide a comprehensive overview of recent progress on label-efficient learning strategies in MIA. We first present the background of label-efficient learning and categorize the approaches into different schemes. Next, we examine the current state-of-the-art methods in detail through each scheme. Specifically, we provide an in-depth investigation, covering not only canonical semi-supervised, self-supervised, and multi-instance learning schemes, but also recently emerged active and annotation-efficient learning strategies. Moreover, as a comprehensive contribution to the field, this survey not only elucidates the commonalities and unique features of the surveyed methods but also presents a detailed analysis of the current challenges in the field and suggests potential avenues for future research.

Implicit Ray-Transformers for Multi-view Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

The mainstream CNN-based remote sensing (RS) image semantic segmentation approaches typically rely on massive labeled training data. Such a paradigm struggles with the problem of RS multi-view scene segmentation with limited labeled views due to the lack of considering 3D information within the scene. In this paper, we propose ''Implicit Ray-Transformer (IRT)'' based on Implicit Neural Representation (INR), for RS scene semantic segmentation with sparse labels (such as 4-6 labels per 100 images). We explore a new way of introducing multi-view 3D structure priors to the task for accurate and view-consistent semantic segmentation. The proposed method includes a two-stage learning process. In the first stage, we optimize a neural field to encode the color and 3D structure of the remote sensing scene based on multi-view images. In the second stage, we design a Ray Transformer to leverage the relations between the neural field 3D features and 2D texture features for learning better semantic representations. Different from previous methods that only consider 3D prior or 2D features, we incorporate additional 2D texture information and 3D prior by broadcasting CNN features to different point features along the sampled ray. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we construct a challenging dataset containing six synthetic sub-datasets collected from the Carla platform and three real sub-datasets from Google Maps. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the CNN-based methods and the state-of-the-art INR-based segmentation methods in quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Traj-MAE: Masked Autoencoders for Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory prediction has been a crucial task in building a reliable autonomous driving system by anticipating possible dangers. One key issue is to generate consistent trajectory predictions without colliding. To overcome the challenge, we propose an efficient masked autoencoder for trajectory prediction (Traj-MAE) that better represents the complicated behaviors of agents in the driving environment. Specifically, our Traj-MAE employs diverse masking strategies to pre-train the trajectory encoder and map encoder, allowing for the capture of social and temporal information among agents while leveraging the effect of environment from multiple granularities. To address the catastrophic forgetting problem that arises when pre-training the network with multiple masking strategies, we introduce a continual pre-training framework, which can help Traj-MAE learn valuable and diverse information from various strategies efficiently. Our experimental results in both multi-agent and single-agent settings demonstrate that Traj-MAE achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods and significantly outperforms our baseline model.

A Monkey Swing Counting Algorithm Based on Object Detection

This paper focuses on proposing a deep learning-based monkey swing counting algorithm. Nowadays, there are very few papers on monkey detection, and even fewer papers on monkey swing counting. This research focuses on this gap and attempts to count the number of monkeys swinging their heads by deep learning. This paper further extends the traditional target detection algorithm. By analyzing the results of object detection, we localize the monkey's actions over a period of time. This paper analyzes the task of counting monkey head swings, and proposes the standard that accurately describes a monkey swinging its head. Under the guidance of this standard, the head-swing count in 50 monkey movement videos in this paper has achieved 94%.