Monocular Microscope to CT Registration using Pose Estimation of the Incus for Augmented Reality Cochlear Implant Surgery

For those experiencing severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss, the cochlear implant (CI) is the preferred treatment. Augmented reality (AR) aided surgery can potentially improve CI procedures and hearing outcomes. Typically, AR solutions for image-guided surgery rely on optical tracking systems to register pre-operative planning information to the display so that hidden anatomy or other important information can be overlayed and co-registered with the view of the surgical scene. In this paper, our goal is to develop a method that permits direct 2D-to-3D registration of the microscope video to the pre-operative Computed Tomography (CT) scan without the need for external tracking equipment. Our proposed solution involves using surface mapping of a portion of the incus in surgical recordings and determining the pose of this structure relative to the surgical microscope by performing pose estimation via the perspective-n-point (PnP) algorithm. This registration can then be applied to pre-operative segmentations of other anatomy-of-interest, as well as the planned electrode insertion trajectory to co-register this information for the AR display. Our results demonstrate the accuracy with an average rotation error of less than 25 degrees and a translation error of less than 2 mm, 3 mm, and 0.55% for the x, y, and z axes, respectively. Our proposed method has the potential to be applicable and generalized to other surgical procedures while only needing a monocular microscope during intra-operation.

SAMSNeRF: Segment Anything Model (SAM) Guides Dynamic Surgical Scene Reconstruction by Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)

The accurate reconstruction of surgical scenes from surgical videos is critical for various applications, including intraoperative navigation and image-guided robotic surgery automation. However, previous approaches, mainly relying on depth estimation, have limited effectiveness in reconstructing surgical scenes with moving surgical tools. To address this limitation and provide accurate 3D position prediction for surgical tools in all frames, we propose a novel approach called SAMSNeRF that combines Segment Anything Model (SAM) and Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) techniques. Our approach generates accurate segmentation masks of surgical tools using SAM, which guides the refinement of the dynamic surgical scene reconstruction by NeRF. Our experimental results on public endoscopy surgical videos demonstrate that our approach successfully reconstructs high-fidelity dynamic surgical scenes and accurately reflects the spatial information of surgical tools. Our proposed approach can significantly enhance surgical navigation and automation by providing surgeons with accurate 3D position information of surgical tools during surgery.The source code will be released soon.

Self-supervised Registration and Segmentation of the Ossicles with A Single Ground Truth Label

AI-assisted surgeries have drawn the attention of the medical image research community due to their real-world impact on improving surgery success rates. For image-guided surgeries, such as Cochlear Implants (CIs), accurate object segmentation can provide useful information for surgeons before an operation. Recently published image segmentation methods that leverage machine learning usually rely on a large number of manually predefined ground truth labels. However, it is a laborious and time-consuming task to prepare the dataset. This paper presents a novel technique using a self-supervised 3D-UNet that produces a dense deformation field between an atlas and a target image that can be used for atlas-based segmentation of the ossicles. Our results show that our method outperforms traditional image segmentation methods and generates a more accurate boundary around the ossicles based on Dice similarity coefficient and point-to-point error comparison. The mean Dice coefficient is improved by 8.51% with our proposed method.

Two Stage Contextual Word Filtering for Context bias in Unified Streaming and Non-streaming Transducer

It is difficult for an end-to-end (E2E) ASR system to recognize words such as named entities appearing infrequently in the training data. A widely used method to mitigate this issue is feeding contextual information into the acoustic model. A contextual word list is necessary, which lists all possible contextual word candidates. Previous works have proven that the size and quality of the list are crucial. A compact and accurate list can boost the performance significantly. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to obtain a high quality contextual word list for a unified streaming and non-streaming based Conformer-Transducer (C-T) model. Specifically, we make use of the phone-level streaming output to first filter the predefined contextual word list. During the subsequent non-streaming inference, the words in the filtered list are regarded as contextual information fused into non-casual encoder and decoder to generate the final recognition results. Our approach can take advantage of streaming recognition hypothesis, improve the accuracy of the contextual ASR system and speed up the inference process as well. Experiments on two datasets demonstrates over 20% relative character error rate reduction (CERR) comparing to the baseline system. Meanwile, the RTF of our system can be stabilized within 0.15 when the size of the contextual word list grows over 6,000.

Leveraging Acoustic Contextual Representation by Audio-textual Cross-modal Learning for Conversational ASR

Leveraging context information is an intuitive idea to improve performance on conversational automatic speech recognition(ASR). Previous works usually adopt recognized hypotheses of historical utterances as preceding context, which may bias the current recognized hypothesis due to the inevitable historicalrecognition errors. To avoid this problem, we propose an audio-textual cross-modal representation extractor to learn contextual representations directly from preceding speech. Specifically, it consists of two modal-related encoders, extracting high-level latent features from speech and the corresponding text, and a cross-modal encoder, which aims to learn the correlation between speech and text. We randomly mask some input tokens and input sequences of each modality. Then a token-missing or modal-missing prediction with a modal-level CTC loss on the cross-modal encoder is performed. Thus, the model captures not only the bi-directional context dependencies in a specific modality but also relationships between different modalities. Then, during the training of the conversational ASR system, the extractor will be frozen to extract the textual representation of preceding speech, while such representation is used as context fed to the ASR decoder through attention mechanism. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated on several Mandarin conversation corpora and the highest character error rate (CER) reduction up to 16% is achieved on the MagicData dataset.

Censer: Curriculum Semi-supervised Learning for Speech Recognition Based on Self-supervised Pre-training

Recent studies have shown that the benefits provided by self-supervised pre-training and self-training (pseudo-labeling) are complementary. Semi-supervised fine-tuning strategies under the pre-training framework, however, remain insufficiently studied. Besides, modern semi-supervised speech recognition algorithms either treat unlabeled data indiscriminately or filter out noisy samples with a confidence threshold. The dissimilarities among different unlabeled data are often ignored. In this paper, we propose Censer, a semi-supervised speech recognition algorithm based on self-supervised pre-training to maximize the utilization of unlabeled data. The pre-training stage of Censer adopts wav2vec2.0 and the fine-tuning stage employs an improved semi-supervised learning algorithm from slimIPL, which leverages unlabeled data progressively according to their pseudo labels' qualities. We also incorporate a temporal pseudo label pool and an exponential moving average to control the pseudo labels' update frequency and to avoid model divergence. Experimental results on Libri-Light and LibriSpeech datasets manifest our proposed method achieves better performance compared to existing approaches while being more unified.

A practical framework for multi-domain speech recognition and an instance sampling method to neural language modeling

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems used on smart phones or vehicles are usually required to process speech queries from very different domains. In such situations, a vanilla ASR system usually fails to perform well on every domain. This paper proposes a multi-domain ASR framework for Tencent Map, a navigation app used on smart phones and in-vehicle infotainment systems. The proposed framework consists of three core parts: a basic ASR module to generate n-best lists of a speech query, a text classification module to determine which domain the speech query belongs to, and a reranking module to rescore n-best lists using domain-specific language models. In addition, an instance sampling based method to training neural network language models (NNLMs) is proposed to address the data imbalance problem in multi-domain ASR. In experiments, the proposed framework was evaluated on navigation domain and music domain, since navigating and playing music are two main features of Tencent Map. Compared to a general ASR system, the proposed framework achieves a relative 13% $\sim$ 22% character error rate reduction on several test sets collected from Tencent Map and our in-car voice assistant.

Improving CTC-based speech recognition via knowledge transferring from pre-trained language models

Recently, end-to-end automatic speech recognition models based on connectionist temporal classification (CTC) have achieved impressive results, especially when fine-tuned from wav2vec2.0 models. Due to the conditional independence assumption, CTC-based models are always weaker than attention-based encoder-decoder models and require the assistance of external language models (LMs). To solve this issue, we propose two knowledge transferring methods that leverage pre-trained LMs, such as BERT and GPT2, to improve CTC-based models. The first method is based on representation learning, in which the CTC-based models use the representation produced by BERT as an auxiliary learning target. The second method is based on joint classification learning, which combines GPT2 for text modeling with a hybrid CTC/attention architecture. Experiment on AISHELL-1 corpus yields a character error rate (CER) of 4.2% on the test set. When compared to the vanilla CTC-based models fine-tuned from the wav2vec2.0 models, our knowledge transferring method reduces CER by 16.1% relatively without external LMs.

Conversational Speech Recognition By Learning Conversation-level Characteristics

Conversational automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a task to recognize conversational speech including multiple speakers. Unlike sentence-level ASR, conversational ASR can naturally take advantages from specific characteristics of conversation, such as role preference and topical coherence. This paper proposes a conversational ASR model which explicitly learns conversation-level characteristics under the prevalent end-to-end neural framework. The highlights of the proposed model are twofold. First, a latent variational module (LVM) is attached to a conformer-based encoder-decoder ASR backbone to learn role preference and topical coherence. Second, a topic model is specifically adopted to bias the outputs of the decoder to words in the predicted topics. Experiments on two Mandarin conversational ASR tasks show that the proposed model achieves a maximum 12% relative character error rate (CER) reduction.