Towards Universal Learning-based Model for Cardiac Image Reconstruction: Summary of the CMRxRecon2024 Challenge

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) offers diverse imaging contrasts for assessment of cardiac function and tissue characterization. However, acquiring each single CMR modality is often time-consuming, and comprehensive clinical protocols require multiple modalities with various sampling patterns, further extending the overall acquisition time and increasing susceptibility to motion artifacts. Existing deep learning-based reconstruction methods are often designed for specific acquisition parameters, which limits their ability to generalize across a variety of scan scenarios. As part of the CMRxRecon Series, the CMRxRecon2024 challenge provides diverse datasets encompassing multi-modality multi-view imaging with various sampling patterns, and a platform for the international community to develop and benchmark reconstruction solutions in two well-crafted tasks. Task 1 is a modality-universal setting, evaluating the out-of-distribution generalization of the reconstructed model, while Task 2 follows sampling-universal setting assessing the one-for-all adaptability of the universal model. Main contributions include providing the first and largest publicly available multi-modality, multi-view cardiac k-space dataset; developing a benchmarking platform that simulates clinical acceleration protocols, with a shared code library and tutorial for various k-t undersampling patterns and data processing; giving technical insights of enhanced data consistency based on physic-informed networks and adaptive prompt-learning embedding to be versatile to different clinical settings; additional finding on evaluation metrics to address the limitations of conventional ground-truth references in universal reconstruction tasks.

Enabling Roll-up and Drill-down Operations in News Exploration with Knowledge Graphs for Due Diligence and Risk Management

Efficient news exploration is crucial in real-world applications, particularly within the financial sector, where numerous control and risk assessment tasks rely on the analysis of public news reports. The current processes in this domain predominantly rely on manual efforts, often involving keywordbased searches and the compilation of extensive keyword lists. In this paper, we introduce NCEXPLORER, a framework designed with OLAP-like operations to enhance the news exploration experience. NCEXPLORER empowers users to use roll-up operations for a broader content overview and drill-down operations for detailed insights. These operations are achieved through integration with external knowledge graphs (KGs), encompassing both fact-based and ontology-based structures. This integration significantly augments exploration capabilities, offering a more comprehensive and efficient approach to unveiling the underlying structures and nuances embedded in news content. Extensive empirical studies through master-qualified evaluators on Amazon Mechanical Turk demonstrate NCEXPLORER's superiority over existing state-of-the-art news search methodologies across an array of topic domains, using real-world news datasets.

Web News Timeline Generation with Extended Task Prompting

The creation of news timeline is essential for a comprehensive and contextual understanding of events as they unfold over time. This approach aids in discerning patterns and trends that might be obscured when news is viewed in isolation. By organizing news in a chronological sequence, it becomes easier to track the development of stories, understand the interrelation of events, and grasp the broader implications of news items. This is particularly helpful in sectors like finance and insurance, where timely understanding of the event development-ranging from extreme weather to political upheavals and health crises-is indispensable for effective risk management. While traditional natural language processing (NLP) techniques have had some success, they often fail to capture the news with nuanced relevance that are readily apparent to domain experts, hindering broader industry integration. The advance of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a renewed opportunity to tackle this challenge. However, direct prompting LLMs for this task is often ineffective. Our study investigates the application of an extended task prompting technique to assess past news relevance. We demonstrate that enhancing conventional prompts with additional tasks boosts their effectiveness on various news dataset, rendering news timeline generation practical for professional use. This work has been deployed as a publicly accessible browser extension which is adopted within our network.

Flexible single multimode fiber imaging using white LED

Multimode fiber (MMF) has been proven to have good potential in imaging and optical communication because of its advantages of small diameter and large mode numbers. However, due to the mode coupling and modal dispersion, it is very sensitive to environmental changes. Minor changes in the fiber shape can lead to difficulties in information reconstruction. Here, white LED and cascaded Unet are used to achieve MMF imaging to eliminate the effect of fiber perturbations. The output speckle patterns in three different color channels of the CCD camera produced by transferring images through the MMF are concatenated and inputted into the cascaded Unet using channel stitching technology to improve the reconstruction effects. The average Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) of the reconstructed images from the Fashion-MINIST dataset is 0.83. In order to check the flexibility of such a system, perturbation tests on the image reconstruction capability by changing the fiber shapes are conducted. The experimental results show that the MMF imaging system has good robustness properties, i. e. the average PCC remains 0.83 even after completely changing the shape of the MMF. This research potentially provides a flexible approach for the practical application of MMF imaging.