MD-IQA: Learning Multi-scale Distributed Image Quality Assessment with Semi Supervised Learning for Low Dose CT

Image quality assessment (IQA) plays a critical role in optimizing radiation dose and developing novel medical imaging techniques in computed tomography (CT). Traditional IQA methods relying on hand-crafted features have limitations in summarizing the subjective perceptual experience of image quality. Recent deep learning-based approaches have demonstrated strong modeling capabilities and potential for medical IQA, but challenges remain regarding model generalization and perceptual accuracy. In this work, we propose a multi-scale distributions regression approach to predict quality scores by constraining the output distribution, thereby improving model generalization. Furthermore, we design a dual-branch alignment network to enhance feature extraction capabilities. Additionally, semi-supervised learning is introduced by utilizing pseudo-labels for unlabeled data to guide model training. Extensive qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for advancing the state-of-the-art in deep learning-based medical IQA. Code is available at: https://github.com/zunzhumu/MD-IQA.

UniBrain: Universal Brain MRI Diagnosis with Hierarchical Knowledge-enhanced Pre-training

Magnetic resonance imaging~(MRI) have played a crucial role in brain disease diagnosis, with which a range of computer-aided artificial intelligence methods have been proposed. However, the early explorations usually focus on the limited types of brain diseases in one study and train the model on the data in a small scale, yielding the bottleneck of generalization. Towards a more effective and scalable paradigm, we propose a hierarchical knowledge-enhanced pre-training framework for the universal brain MRI diagnosis, termed as UniBrain. Specifically, UniBrain leverages a large-scale dataset of 24,770 imaging-report pairs from routine diagnostics. Different from previous pre-training techniques for the unitary vision or textual feature, or with the brute-force alignment between vision and language information, we leverage the unique characteristic of report information in different granularity to build a hierarchical alignment mechanism, which strengthens the efficiency in feature learning. Our UniBrain is validated on three real world datasets with severe class imbalance and the public BraTS2019 dataset. It not only consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art diagnostic methods by a large margin and provides a superior grounding performance but also shows comparable performance compared to expert radiologists on certain disease types.