In pediatric cardiology, the accurate and immediate assessment of cardiac function through echocardiography is important since it can determine whether urgent intervention is required in many emergencies. However, echocardiography is characterized by ambiguity and heavy background noise interference, bringing more difficulty to accurate segmentation. Present methods lack efficiency and are also prone to mistakenly segmenting some background noise areas as the left ventricular area due to noise disturbance. To relieve the two issues, we introduce P-Mamba for efficient pediatric echocardiographic left ventricular segmentation. Specifically, we turn to the recently proposed vision mamba layers in our vision mamba encoder branch to improve the computing and memory efficiency of our model while modeling global dependencies. In the other DWT-based PMD encoder branch, we devise DWT-based Perona-Malik Diffusion (PMD) Blocks that utilize PMD for noise suppression, while simultaneously preserving the local shape cues of the left ventricle. Leveraging the strengths of both the two encoder branches, P-Mamba achieves superior accuracy and efficiency to established models, such as vision transformers with quadratic and linear computational complexity. This innovative approach promises significant advancements in pediatric cardiac imaging and beyond.
Large language models (LLMs) are gaining increasing interests to improve clinical efficiency for medical diagnosis, owing to their unprecedented performance in modelling natural language. Ensuring the safe and reliable clinical applications, the evaluation of LLMs indeed becomes critical for better mitigating the potential risks, e.g., hallucinations. However, current evaluation methods heavily rely on labor-intensive human participation to achieve human-preferred judgements. To overcome this challenge, we propose an automatic evaluation paradigm tailored to assess the LLMs' capabilities in delivering clinical services, e.g., disease diagnosis and treatment. The evaluation paradigm contains three basic elements: metric, data, and algorithm. Specifically, inspired by professional clinical practice pathways, we formulate a LLM-specific clinical pathway (LCP) to define the clinical capabilities that a doctor agent should possess. Then, Standardized Patients (SPs) from the medical education are introduced as the guideline for collecting medical data for evaluation, which can well ensure the completeness of the evaluation procedure. Leveraging these steps, we develop a multi-agent framework to simulate the interactive environment between SPs and a doctor agent, which is equipped with a Retrieval-Augmented Evaluation (RAE) to determine whether the behaviors of a doctor agent are in accordance with LCP. The above paradigm can be extended to any similar clinical scenarios to automatically evaluate the LLMs' medical capabilities. Applying such paradigm, we construct an evaluation benchmark in the field of urology, including a LCP, a SPs dataset, and an automated RAE. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, providing more insights for LLMs' safe and reliable deployments in clinical practice.
Accurate motion prediction of pedestrians, cyclists, and other surrounding vehicles (all called agents) is very important for autonomous driving. Most existing works capture map information through an one-stage interaction with map by vector-based attention, to provide map constraints for social interaction and multi-modal differentiation. However, these methods have to encode all required map rules into the focal agent's feature, so as to retain all possible intentions' paths while at the meantime to adapt to potential social interaction. In this work, a progressive interaction network is proposed to enable the agent's feature to progressively focus on relevant maps, in order to better learn agents' feature representation capturing the relevant map constraints. The network progressively encode the complex influence of map constraints into the agent's feature through graph convolutions at the following three stages: after historical trajectory encoder, after social interaction, and after multi-modal differentiation. In addition, a weight allocation mechanism is proposed for multi-modal training, so that each mode can obtain learning opportunities from a single-mode ground truth. Experiments have validated the superiority of progressive interactions to the existing one-stage interaction, and demonstrate the effectiveness of each component. Encouraging results were obtained in the challenging benchmarks.
Curating annotations for medical image segmentation is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task that requires domain expertise, resulting in "narrowly" focused deep learning (DL) models with limited translational utility. Recently, foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have revolutionized semantic segmentation with exceptional zero-shot generalizability across various domains, including medical imaging, and hold a lot of promise for streamlining the annotation process. However, SAM has yet to be evaluated in a crowd-sourced setting to curate annotations for training 3D DL segmentation models. In this work, we explore the potential of SAM for crowd-sourcing "sparse" annotations from non-experts to generate "dense" segmentation masks for training 3D nnU-Net models, a state-of-the-art DL segmentation model. Our results indicate that while SAM-generated annotations exhibit high mean Dice scores compared to ground-truth annotations, nnU-Net models trained on SAM-generated annotations perform significantly worse than nnU-Net models trained on ground-truth annotations ($p<0.001$, all).
Bipolar disorder (BD) and schizophrenia (SZ) are severe mental disorders with profound societal impact. Identifying risk markers early is crucial for understanding disease progression and enabling preventive measures. The Danish High Risk and Resilience Study (VIA) focuses on understanding early disease processes, particularly in children with familial high risk (FHR). Understanding structural brain changes associated with these diseases during early stages is essential for effective interventions. The central sulcus (CS) is a prominent brain landmark related to brain regions involved in motor and sensory processing. Analyzing CS morphology can provide valuable insights into neurodevelopmental abnormalities in the FHR group. However, segmenting the central sulcus (CS) presents challenges due to its variability, especially in adolescents. This study introduces two novel approaches to improve CS segmentation: synthetic data generation to model CS variability and self-supervised pre-training with multi-task learning to adapt models to new cohorts. These methods aim to enhance segmentation performance across diverse populations, eliminating the need for extensive preprocessing.
In clinical applications that involve ultrasound-guided intervention, the visibility of the needle can be severely impeded due to steep insertion and strong distractors such as speckle noise and anatomical occlusion. To address this challenge, we propose VibNet, a learning-based framework tailored to enhance the robustness and accuracy of needle detection in ultrasound images, even when the target becomes invisible to the naked eye. Inspired by Eulerian Video Magnification techniques, we utilize an external step motor to induce low-amplitude periodic motion on the needle. These subtle vibrations offer the potential to generate robust frequency features for detecting the motion patterns around the needle. To robustly and precisely detect the needle leveraging these vibrations, VibNet integrates learning-based Short-Time-Fourier-Transform and Hough-Transform modules to achieve successive sub-goals, including motion feature extraction in the spatiotemporal space, frequency feature aggregation, and needle detection in the Hough space. Based on the results obtained on distinct ex vivo porcine and bovine tissue samples, the proposed algorithm exhibits superior detection performance with efficient computation and generalization capability.
Trajectory computing is a pivotal domain encompassing trajectory data management and mining, garnering widespread attention due to its crucial role in various practical applications such as location services, urban traffic, and public safety. Traditional methods, focusing on simplistic spatio-temporal features, face challenges of complex calculations, limited scalability, and inadequate adaptability to real-world complexities. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the development and recent advances in deep learning for trajectory computing (DL4Traj). We first define trajectory data and provide a brief overview of widely-used deep learning models. Systematically, we explore deep learning applications in trajectory management (pre-processing, storage, analysis, and visualization) and mining (trajectory-related forecasting, trajectory-related recommendation, trajectory classification, travel time estimation, anomaly detection, and mobility generation). Notably, we encapsulate recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) that hold the potential to augment trajectory computing. Additionally, we summarize application scenarios, public datasets, and toolkits. Finally, we outline current challenges in DL4Traj research and propose future directions. Relevant papers and open-source resources have been collated and are continuously updated at: \href{//github.com/yoshall/Awesome-Trajectory-Computing}{DL4Traj Repo}.
In recent research, contrastive learning has proven to be a highly effective method for representation learning and is widely used for dense retrieval. However, we identify that relying solely on contrastive learning can lead to suboptimal retrieval performance. On the other hand, despite many retrieval datasets supporting various learning objectives beyond contrastive learning, combining them efficiently in multi-task learning scenarios can be challenging. In this paper, we introduce M3, an advanced recursive Multi-hop dense sentence retrieval system built upon a novel Multi-task Mixed-objective approach for dense text representation learning, addressing the aforementioned challenges. Our approach yields state-of-the-art performance on a large-scale open-domain fact verification benchmark dataset, FEVER. Code and data are available at: //github.com/TonyBY/M3
Medical image segmentation is a fundamental and critical step in many image-guided clinical approaches. Recent success of deep learning-based segmentation methods usually relies on a large amount of labeled data, which is particularly difficult and costly to obtain especially in the medical imaging domain where only experts can provide reliable and accurate annotations. Semi-supervised learning has emerged as an appealing strategy and been widely applied to medical image segmentation tasks to train deep models with limited annotations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of recently proposed semi-supervised learning methods for medical image segmentation and summarized both the technical novelties and empirical results. Furthermore, we analyze and discuss the limitations and several unsolved problems of existing approaches. We hope this review could inspire the research community to explore solutions for this challenge and further promote the developments in medical image segmentation field.
The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at //github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.