EvidenceCap: Towards trustworthy medical image segmentation via evidential identity cap

Medical image segmentation (MIS) is essential for supporting disease diagnosis and treatment effect assessment. Despite considerable advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for MIS, clinicians remain skeptical of its utility, maintaining low confidence in such black box systems, with this problem being exacerbated by low generalization for out-of-distribution (OOD) data. To move towards effective clinical utilization, we propose a foundation model named EvidenceCap, which makes the box transparent in a quantifiable way by uncertainty estimation. EvidenceCap not only makes AI visible in regions of uncertainty and OOD data, but also enhances the reliability, robustness, and computational efficiency of MIS. Uncertainty is modeled explicitly through subjective logic theory to gather strong evidence from features. We show the effectiveness of EvidenceCap in three segmentation datasets and apply it to the clinic. Our work sheds light on clinical safe applications and explainable AI, and can contribute towards trustworthiness in the medical domain.

Reliable Joint Segmentation of Retinal Edema Lesions in OCT Images

Focusing on the complicated pathological features, such as blurred boundaries, severe scale differences between symptoms, background noise interference, etc., in the task of retinal edema lesions joint segmentation from OCT images and enabling the segmentation results more reliable. In this paper, we propose a novel reliable multi-scale wavelet-enhanced transformer network, which can provide accurate segmentation results with reliability assessment. Specifically, aiming at improving the model's ability to learn the complex pathological features of retinal edema lesions in OCT images, we develop a novel segmentation backbone that integrates a wavelet-enhanced feature extractor network and a multi-scale transformer module of our newly designed. Meanwhile, to make the segmentation results more reliable, a novel uncertainty segmentation head based on the subjective logical evidential theory is introduced to generate the final segmentation results with a corresponding overall uncertainty evaluation score map. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the public database of AI-Challenge 2018 for retinal edema lesions segmentation, and the results show that our proposed method achieves better segmentation accuracy with a high degree of reliability as compared to other state-of-the-art segmentation approaches. The code will be released on: https://github.com/LooKing9218/ReliableRESeg.

Desire Backpropagation: A Lightweight Training Algorithm for Multi-Layer Spiking Neural Networks based on Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity

Spiking neural networks (SNN) are a viable alternative to conventional artificial neural networks when energy efficiency and computational complexity are of importance. A major advantage of SNNs is their binary information transfer through spike trains. The training of SNN has, however, been a challenge, since neuron models are non-differentiable and traditional gradient-based backpropagation algorithms cannot be applied directly. Furthermore, spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), albeit being a spike-based learning rule, updates weights locally and does not optimize for the output error of the network. We present desire backpropagation, a method to derive the desired spike activity of neurons from the output error. The loss function can then be evaluated locally for every neuron. Incorporating the desire values into the STDP weight update leads to global error minimization and increasing classification accuracy. At the same time, the neuron dynamics and computational efficiency of STDP are maintained, making it a spike-based supervised learning rule. We trained three-layer networks to classify MNIST and Fashion-MNIST images and reached an accuracy of 98.41% and 87.56%, respectively. Furthermore, we show that desire backpropagation is computationally less complex than backpropagation in traditional neural networks.

Localizing Anatomical Landmarks in Ocular Images using Zoom-In Attentive Networks

Localizing anatomical landmarks are important tasks in medical image analysis. However, the landmarks to be localized often lack prominent visual features. Their locations are elusive and easily confused with the background, and thus precise localization highly depends on the context formed by their surrounding areas. In addition, the required precision is usually higher than segmentation and object detection tasks. Therefore, localization has its unique challenges different from segmentation or detection. In this paper, we propose a zoom-in attentive network (ZIAN) for anatomical landmark localization in ocular images. First, a coarse-to-fine, or "zoom-in" strategy is utilized to learn the contextualized features in different scales. Then, an attentive fusion module is adopted to aggregate multi-scale features, which consists of 1) a co-attention network with a multiple regions-of-interest (ROIs) scheme that learns complementary features from the multiple ROIs, 2) an attention-based fusion module which integrates the multi-ROIs features and non-ROI features. We evaluated ZIAN on two open challenge tasks, i.e., the fovea localization in fundus images and scleral spur localization in AS-OCT images. Experiments show that ZIAN achieves promising performances and outperforms state-of-the-art localization methods. The source code and trained models of ZIAN are available at https://github.com/leixiaofeng-astar/OMIA9-ZIAN.

A Resource-efficient Spiking Neural Network Accelerator Supporting Emerging Neural Encoding

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) recently gained momentum due to their low-power multiplication-free computing and the closer resemblance of biological processes in the nervous system of humans. However, SNNs require very long spike trains (up to 1000) to reach an accuracy similar to their artificial neural network (ANN) counterparts for large models, which offsets efficiency and inhibits its application to low-power systems for real-world use cases. To alleviate this problem, emerging neural encoding schemes are proposed to shorten the spike train while maintaining the high accuracy. However, current accelerators for SNN cannot well support the emerging encoding schemes. In this work, we present a novel hardware architecture that can efficiently support SNN with emerging neural encoding. Our implementation features energy and area efficient processing units with increased parallelism and reduced memory accesses. We verified the accelerator on FPGA and achieve 25% and 90% improvement over previous work in power consumption and latency, respectively. At the same time, high area efficiency allows us to scale for large neural network models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to deploy the large neural network model VGG on physical FPGA-based neuromorphic hardware.

Optimizing for In-memory Deep Learning with Emerging Memory Technology

In-memory deep learning computes neural network models where they are stored, thus avoiding long distance communication between memory and computation units, resulting in considerable savings in energy and time. In-memory deep learning has already demonstrated orders of magnitude higher performance density and energy efficiency. The use of emerging memory technology promises to increase the gains in density, energy, and performance even further. However, emerging memory technology is intrinsically unstable, resulting in random fluctuations of data reads. This can translate to non-negligible accuracy loss, potentially nullifying the gains. In this paper, we propose three optimization techniques that can mathematically overcome the instability problem of emerging memory technology. They can improve the accuracy of the in-memory deep learning model while maximizing its energy efficiency. Experiments show that our solution can fully recover most models' state-of-the-art accuracy, and achieves at least an order of magnitude higher energy efficiency than the state-of-the-art.

E3NE: An End-to-End Framework for Accelerating Spiking Neural Networks with Emerging Neural Encoding on FPGAs

Compiler frameworks are crucial for the widespread use of FPGA-based deep learning accelerators. They allow researchers and developers, who are not familiar with hardware engineering, to harness the performance attained by domain-specific logic. There exists a variety of frameworks for conventional artificial neural networks. However, not much research effort has been put into the creation of frameworks optimized for spiking neural networks (SNNs). This new generation of neural networks becomes increasingly interesting for the deployment of AI on edge devices, which have tight power and resource constraints. Our end-to-end framework E3NE automates the generation of efficient SNN inference logic for FPGAs. Based on a PyTorch model and user parameters, it applies various optimizations and assesses trade-offs inherent to spike-based accelerators. Multiple levels of parallelism and the use of an emerging neural encoding scheme result in an efficiency superior to previous SNN hardware implementations. For a similar model, E3NE uses less than 50% of hardware resources and 20% less power, while reducing the latency by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, scalability and generality allowed the deployment of the large-scale SNN models AlexNet and VGG.

Efficient Sharpness-aware Minimization for Improved Training of Neural Networks

Overparametrized Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) often achieve astounding performances, but may potentially result in severe generalization error. Recently, the relation between the sharpness of the loss landscape and the generalization error has been established by Foret et al. (2020), in which the Sharpness Aware Minimizer (SAM) was proposed to mitigate the degradation of the generalization. Unfortunately, SAM s computational cost is roughly double that of base optimizers, such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). This paper thus proposes Efficient Sharpness Aware Minimizer (ESAM), which boosts SAM s efficiency at no cost to its generalization performance. ESAM includes two novel and efficient training strategies-StochasticWeight Perturbation and Sharpness-Sensitive Data Selection. In the former, the sharpness measure is approximated by perturbing a stochastically chosen set of weights in each iteration; in the latter, the SAM loss is optimized using only a judiciously selected subset of data that is sensitive to the sharpness. We provide theoretical explanations as to why these strategies perform well. We also show, via extensive experiments on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets, that ESAM enhances the efficiency over SAM from requiring 100% extra computations to 40% vis-a-vis base optimizers, while test accuracies are preserved or even improved.

Few-Shot Domain Adaptation with Polymorphic Transformers

Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on one set of medical images often experience severe performance drop on unseen test images, due to various domain discrepancy between the training images (source domain) and the test images (target domain), which raises a domain adaptation issue. In clinical settings, it is difficult to collect enough annotated target domain data in a short period. Few-shot domain adaptation, i.e., adapting a trained model with a handful of annotations, is highly practical and useful in this case. In this paper, we propose a Polymorphic Transformer (Polyformer), which can be incorporated into any DNN backbones for few-shot domain adaptation. Specifically, after the polyformer layer is inserted into a model trained on the source domain, it extracts a set of prototype embeddings, which can be viewed as a "basis" of the source-domain features. On the target domain, the polyformer layer adapts by only updating a projection layer which controls the interactions between image features and the prototype embeddings. All other model weights (except BatchNorm parameters) are frozen during adaptation. Thus, the chance of overfitting the annotations is greatly reduced, and the model can perform robustly on the target domain after being trained on a few annotated images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Polyformer on two medical segmentation tasks (i.e., optic disc/cup segmentation, and polyp segmentation). The source code of Polyformer is released at https://github.com/askerlee/segtran.

Adversarial Semantic Hallucination for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation

Convolutional neural networks may perform poorly when the test and train data are from different domains. While this problem can be mitigated by using the target domain data to align the source and target domain feature representations, the target domain data may be unavailable due to privacy concerns. Consequently, there is a need for methods that generalize well without access to target domain data during training. In this work, we propose an adversarial hallucination approach, which combines a class-wise hallucination module and a semantic segmentation module. Since the segmentation performance varies across different classes, we design a semantic-conditioned style hallucination layer to adaptively stylize each class. The classwise stylization parameters are generated from the semantic knowledge in the segmentation probability maps of the source domain image. Both modules compete adversarially, with the hallucination module generating increasingly 'difficult' style images to challenge the segmentation module. In response, the segmentation module improves its performance as it is trained with generated samples at an appropriate class-wise difficulty level. Experiments on state of the art domain adaptation work demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method when no target domain data are available for training.