Adapting Vision-Language Foundation Model for Next Generation Medical Ultrasound Image Analysis

Medical ultrasonography is an essential imaging technique for examining superficial organs and tissues, including lymph nodes, breast, and thyroid. It employs high-frequency ultrasound waves to generate detailed images of the internal structures of the human body. However, manually contouring regions of interest in these images is a labor-intensive task that demands expertise and often results in inconsistent interpretations among individuals. Vision-language foundation models, which have excelled in various computer vision applications, present new opportunities for enhancing ultrasound image analysis. Yet, their performance is hindered by the significant differences between natural and medical imaging domains. This research seeks to overcome these challenges by developing domain adaptation methods for vision-language foundation models. In this study, we explore the fine-tuning pipeline for vision-language foundation models by utilizing large language model as text refiner with special-designed adaptation strategies and task-driven heads. Our approach has been extensively evaluated on six ultrasound datasets and two tasks: segmentation and classification. The experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the performance of vision-language foundation models for ultrasound image analysis, and outperform the existing state-of-the-art vision-language and pure foundation models. The source code of this study is available at https://github.com/jinggqu/NextGen-UIA.

PIV-FlowDiffuser:Transfer-learning-based denoising diffusion models for PIV

Deep learning algorithms have significantly reduced the computational time and improved the spatial resolution of particle image velocimetry~(PIV). However, the models trained on synthetic datasets might have a degraded performance on practical particle images due to domain gaps. As a result, special residual patterns are often observed for the vector fields of deep learning-based estimators. To reduce the special noise step-by-step, we employ a denoising diffusion model~(FlowDiffuser) for PIV analysis. And the data-hungry iterative denoising diffusion model is trained via a transfer learning strategy, resulting in our PIV-FlowDiffuser method. Specifically, (1) pre-training a FlowDiffuser model with multiple optical flow datasets of the computer vision community, such as Sintel, KITTI, etc; (2) fine-tuning the pre-trained model on synthetic PIV datasets. Note that the PIV images are upsampled by a factor of two to resolve the small-scale turbulent flow structures. The visualized results indicate that our PIV-FlowDiffuser effectively suppresses the noise patterns. Therefore, the denoising diffusion model reduces the average end-point error~($AEE$) by 59.4% over RAFT256-PIV baseline on the classic Cai's dataset. Besides, PIV-FlowDiffuser exhibits enhanced generalization performance on unseen particle images due to transfer learning. Overall, this study highlights the transfer-learning-based denoising diffusion models for PIV. And a detailed implementation is recommended for interested readers in the repository https://github.com/Zhu-Qianyu/PIV-FlowDiffuser.