Zero-shot Medical Image Translation via Frequency-Guided Diffusion Models

Recently, the diffusion model has emerged as a superior generative model that can produce high-quality images with excellent realism. There is a growing interest in applying diffusion models to image translation tasks. However, for medical image translation, the existing diffusion models are deficient in accurately retaining structural information since the structure details of source domain images are lost during the forward diffusion process and cannot be fully recovered through learned reverse diffusion, while the integrity of anatomical structures is extremely important in medical images. Training and conditioning diffusion models using paired source and target images with matching anatomy can help. However, such paired data are very difficult and costly to obtain, and may also reduce the robustness of the developed model to out-of-distribution testing data. We propose a frequency-guided diffusion model (FGDM) that employs frequency-domain filters to guide the diffusion model for structure-preserving image translation. Based on its design, FGDM allows zero-shot learning, as it can be trained solely on the data from the target domain, and used directly for source-to-target domain translation without any exposure to the source-domain data during training. We trained FGDM solely on the head-and-neck CT data, and evaluated it on both head-and-neck and lung cone-beam CT (CBCT)-to-CT translation tasks. FGDM outperformed the state-of-the-art methods (GAN-based, VAE-based, and diffusion-based) in all metrics, showing its significant advantages in zero-shot medical image translation.

Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Balanced Pre-training for Generative Adversarial Networks

Class imbalance occurs in many real-world applications, including image classification, where the number of images in each class differs significantly. With imbalanced data, the generative adversarial networks (GANs) leans to majority class samples. The two recent methods, Balancing GAN (BAGAN) and improved BAGAN (BAGAN-GP), are proposed as an augmentation tool to handle this problem and restore the balance to the data. The former pre-trains the autoencoder weights in an unsupervised manner. However, it is unstable when the images from different categories have similar features. The latter is improved based on BAGAN by facilitating supervised autoencoder training, but the pre-training is biased towards the majority classes. In this work, we propose a novel Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Balanced Pre-training for Generative Adversarial Networks (CAPGAN) as an augmentation tool to generate realistic synthetic images. In particular, we utilize a conditional convolutional variational autoencoder with supervised and balanced pre-training for the GAN initialization and training with gradient penalty. Our proposed method presents a superior performance of other state-of-the-art methods on the highly imbalanced version of MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and two medical imaging datasets. Our method can synthesize high-quality minority samples in terms of Fr\'echet inception distance, structural similarity index measure and perceptual quality.

Predicting Lung Nodule Malignancies by Combining Deep Convolutional Neural Network and Handcrafted Features

To predict lung nodule malignancy with a high sensitivity and specificity, we propose a fusion algorithm that combines handcrafted features (HF) into the features learned at the output layer of a 3D deep convolutional neural network (CNN). First, we extracted twenty-nine handcrafted features, including nine intensity features, eight geometric features, and twelve texture features based on grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) averaged from thirteen directions. We then trained 3D CNNs modified from three state-of-the-art 2D CNN architectures (AlexNet, VGG-16 Net and Multi-crop Net) to extract the CNN features learned at the output layer. For each 3D CNN, the CNN features combined with the 29 handcrafted features were used as the input for the support vector machine (SVM) coupled with the sequential forward feature selection (SFS) method to select the optimal feature subset and construct the classifiers. The fusion algorithm takes full advantage of the handcrafted features and the highest level CNN features learned at the output layer. It can overcome the disadvantage of the handcrafted features that may not fully reflect the unique characteristics of a particular lesion by combining the intrinsic CNN features. Meanwhile, it also alleviates the requirement of a large scale annotated dataset for the CNNs based on the complementary of handcrafted features. The patient cohort includes 431 malignant nodules and 795 benign nodules extracted from the LIDC/IDRI database. For each investigated CNN architecture, the proposed fusion algorithm achieved the highest AUC, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity scores among all competitive classification models.

Intelligent Parameter Tuning in Optimization-based Iterative CT Reconstruction via Deep Reinforcement Learning

A number of image-processing problems can be formulated as optimization problems. The objective function typically contains several terms specifically designed for different purposes. Parameters in front of these terms are used to control the relative weights among them. It is of critical importance to tune these parameters, as quality of the solution depends on their values. Tuning parameter is a relatively straightforward task for a human, as one can intelligently determine the direction of parameter adjustment based on the solution quality. Yet manual parameter tuning is not only tedious in many cases, but becomes impractical when a number of parameters exist in a problem. Aiming at solving this problem, this paper proposes an approach that employs deep reinforcement learning to train a system that can automatically adjust parameters in a human-like manner. We demonstrate our idea in an example problem of optimization-based iterative CT reconstruction with a pixel-wise total-variation regularization term. We set up a parameter tuning policy network (PTPN), which maps an CT image patch to an output that specifies the direction and amplitude by which the parameter at the patch center is adjusted. We train the PTPN via an end-to-end reinforcement learning procedure. We demonstrate that under the guidance of the trained PTPN for parameter tuning at each pixel, reconstructed CT images attain quality similar or better than in those reconstructed with manually tuned parameters.