Although supervised deep-learning has achieved promising performance in medical image segmentation, many methods cannot generalize well on unseen data, limiting their real-world applicability. To address this problem, we propose a deep learning-based Bayesian framework, which jointly models image and label statistics, utilizing the domain-irrelevant contour of a medical image for segmentation. Specifically, we first decompose an image into components of contour and basis. Then, we model the expected label as a variable only related to the contour. Finally, we develop a variational Bayesian framework to infer the posterior distributions of these variables, including the contour, the basis, and the label. The framework is implemented with neural networks, thus is referred to as deep Bayesian segmentation. Results on the task of cross-sequence cardiac MRI segmentation show that our method set a new state of the art for model generalizability. Particularly, the BayeSeg model trained with LGE MRI generalized well on T2 images and outperformed other models with great margins, i.e., over 0.47 in terms of average Dice. Our code is available at //zmiclab.github.io/projects.html.
As different people perceive others' emotional expressions differently, their annotation in terms of arousal and valence are per se subjective. To address this, these emotion annotations are typically collected by multiple annotators and averaged across annotators in order to obtain labels for arousal and valence. However, besides the average, also the uncertainty of a label is of interest, and should also be modeled and predicted for automatic emotion recognition. In the literature, for simplicity, label uncertainty modeling is commonly approached with a Gaussian assumption on the collected annotations. However, as the number of annotators is typically rather small due to resource constraints, we argue that the Gaussian approach is a rather crude assumption. In contrast, in this work we propose to model the label distribution using a Student's t-distribution which allows us to account for the number of annotations available. With this model, we derive the corresponding Kullback-Leibler divergence based loss function and use it to train an estimator for the distribution of emotion labels, from which the mean and uncertainty can be inferred. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we show the benefits of the t-distribution over a Gaussian distribution. We validate our proposed method on the AVEC'16 dataset. Results reveal that our t-distribution based approach improves over the Gaussian approach with state-of-the-art uncertainty modeling results in speech-based emotion recognition, along with an optimal and even faster convergence.
Existing approaches to image captioning usually generate the sentence word-by-word from left to right, with the constraint of conditioned on local context including the given image and history generated words. There have been many studies target to make use of global information during decoding, e.g., iterative refinement. However, it is still under-explored how to effectively and efficiently incorporate the future context. To respond to this issue, inspired by that Non-Autoregressive Image Captioning (NAIC) can leverage two-side relation with modified mask operation, we aim to graft this advance to the conventional Autoregressive Image Captioning (AIC) model while maintaining the inference efficiency without extra time cost. Specifically, AIC and NAIC models are first trained combined with shared visual encoders, forcing the visual encoder to contain sufficient and valid future context; then the AIC model is encouraged to capture the causal dynamics of cross-layer interchanging from NAIC model on its unconfident words, which follows a teacher-student paradigm and optimized with the distribution calibration training objective. Empirical evidences demonstrate that our proposed approach clearly surpass the state-of-the-art baselines in both automatic metrics and human evaluations on the MS COCO benchmark. The source code is available at: //github.com/feizc/Future-Caption.
Automated data augmentation, which aims at engineering augmentation policy automatically, recently draw a growing research interest. Many previous auto-augmentation methods utilized a Density Matching strategy by evaluating policies in terms of the test-time augmentation performance. In this paper, we theoretically and empirically demonstrated the inconsistency between the train and validation set of small-scale medical image datasets, referred to as in-domain sampling bias. Next, we demonstrated that the in-domain sampling bias might cause the inefficiency of Density Matching. To address the problem, an improved augmentation search strategy, named Augmented Density Matching, was proposed by randomly sampling policies from a prior distribution for training. Moreover, an efficient automatical machine learning(AutoML) algorithm was proposed by unifying the search on data augmentation and neural architecture. Experimental results indicated that the proposed methods outperformed state-of-the-art approaches on MedMNIST, a pioneering benchmark designed for AutoML in medical image analysis.
Temporal relational modeling in video is essential for human action understanding, such as action recognition and action segmentation. Although Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) have shown promising advantages in relation reasoning on many tasks, it is still a challenge to apply graph convolution networks on long video sequences effectively. The main reason is that large number of nodes (i.e., video frames) makes GCNs hard to capture and model temporal relations in videos. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we introduce an effective GCN module, Dilated Temporal Graph Reasoning Module (DTGRM), designed to model temporal relations and dependencies between video frames at various time spans. In particular, we capture and model temporal relations via constructing multi-level dilated temporal graphs where the nodes represent frames from different moments in video. Moreover, to enhance temporal reasoning ability of the proposed model, an auxiliary self-supervised task is proposed to encourage the dilated temporal graph reasoning module to find and correct wrong temporal relations in videos. Our DTGRM model outperforms state-of-the-art action segmentation models on three challenging datasets: 50Salads, Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), and the Breakfast dataset. The code is available at //github.com/redwang/DTGRM.
Deep learning-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms have led to promising results in medical images segmentation and can alleviate doctors' expensive annotations by leveraging unlabeled data. However, most of the existing SSL algorithms in literature tend to regularize the model training by perturbing networks and/or data. Observing that multi/dual-task learning attends to various levels of information which have inherent prediction perturbation, we ask the question in this work: can we explicitly build task-level regularization rather than implicitly constructing networks- and/or data-level perturbation-and-transformation for SSL? To answer this question, we propose a novel dual-task-consistency semi-supervised framework for the first time. Concretely, we use a dual-task deep network that jointly predicts a pixel-wise segmentation map and a geometry-aware level set representation of the target. The level set representation is converted to an approximated segmentation map through a differentiable task transform layer. Simultaneously, we introduce a dual-task consistency regularization between the level set-derived segmentation maps and directly predicted segmentation maps for both labeled and unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that our method can largely improve the performance by incorporating the unlabeled data. Meanwhile, our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised medical image segmentation methods. Code is available at: //github.com/Luoxd1996/DTC
A key requirement for the success of supervised deep learning is a large labeled dataset - a condition that is difficult to meet in medical image analysis. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can help in this regard by providing a strategy to pre-train a neural network with unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning for a downstream task with limited annotations. Contrastive learning, a particular variant of SSL, is a powerful technique for learning image-level representations. In this work, we propose strategies for extending the contrastive learning framework for segmentation of volumetric medical images in the semi-supervised setting with limited annotations, by leveraging domain-specific and problem-specific cues. Specifically, we propose (1) novel contrasting strategies that leverage structural similarity across volumetric medical images (domain-specific cue) and (2) a local version of the contrastive loss to learn distinctive representations of local regions that are useful for per-pixel segmentation (problem-specific cue). We carry out an extensive evaluation on three Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets. In the limited annotation setting, the proposed method yields substantial improvements compared to other self-supervision and semi-supervised learning techniques. When combined with a simple data augmentation technique, the proposed method reaches within 8% of benchmark performance using only two labeled MRI volumes for training, corresponding to only 4% (for ACDC) of the training data used to train the benchmark.
In this paper, we adopt 3D Convolutional Neural Networks to segment volumetric medical images. Although deep neural networks have been proven to be very effective on many 2D vision tasks, it is still challenging to apply them to 3D tasks due to the limited amount of annotated 3D data and limited computational resources. We propose a novel 3D-based coarse-to-fine framework to effectively and efficiently tackle these challenges. The proposed 3D-based framework outperforms the 2D counterpart to a large margin since it can leverage the rich spatial infor- mation along all three axes. We conduct experiments on two datasets which include healthy and pathological pancreases respectively, and achieve the current state-of-the-art in terms of Dice-S{\o}rensen Coefficient (DSC). On the NIH pancreas segmentation dataset, we outperform the previous best by an average of over 2%, and the worst case is improved by 7% to reach almost 70%, which indicates the reliability of our framework in clinical applications.
Deep neural network architectures have traditionally been designed and explored with human expertise in a long-lasting trial-and-error process. This process requires huge amount of time, expertise, and resources. To address this tedious problem, we propose a novel algorithm to optimally find hyperparameters of a deep network architecture automatically. We specifically focus on designing neural architectures for medical image segmentation task. Our proposed method is based on a policy gradient reinforcement learning for which the reward function is assigned a segmentation evaluation utility (i.e., dice index). We show the efficacy of the proposed method with its low computational cost in comparison with the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation networks. We also present a new architecture design, a densely connected encoder-decoder CNN, as a strong baseline architecture to apply the proposed hyperparameter search algorithm. We apply the proposed algorithm to each layer of the baseline architectures. As an application, we train the proposed system on cine cardiac MR images from Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) MICCAI 2017. Starting from a baseline segmentation architecture, the resulting network architecture obtains the state-of-the-art results in accuracy without performing any trial-and-error based architecture design approaches or close supervision of the hyperparameters changes.
In this paper, we focus on three problems in deep learning based medical image segmentation. Firstly, U-net, as a popular model for medical image segmentation, is difficult to train when convolutional layers increase even though a deeper network usually has a better generalization ability because of more learnable parameters. Secondly, the exponential ReLU (ELU), as an alternative of ReLU, is not much different from ReLU when the network of interest gets deep. Thirdly, the Dice loss, as one of the pervasive loss functions for medical image segmentation, is not effective when the prediction is close to ground truth and will cause oscillation during training. To address the aforementioned three problems, we propose and validate a deeper network that can fit medical image datasets that are usually small in the sample size. Meanwhile, we propose a new loss function to accelerate the learning process and a combination of different activation functions to improve the network performance. Our experimental results suggest that our network is comparable or superior to state-of-the-art methods.
Recent advances in 3D fully convolutional networks (FCN) have made it feasible to produce dense voxel-wise predictions of volumetric images. In this work, we show that a multi-class 3D FCN trained on manually labeled CT scans of several anatomical structures (ranging from the large organs to thin vessels) can achieve competitive segmentation results, while avoiding the need for handcrafting features or training class-specific models. To this end, we propose a two-stage, coarse-to-fine approach that will first use a 3D FCN to roughly define a candidate region, which will then be used as input to a second 3D FCN. This reduces the number of voxels the second FCN has to classify to ~10% and allows it to focus on more detailed segmentation of the organs and vessels. We utilize training and validation sets consisting of 331 clinical CT images and test our models on a completely unseen data collection acquired at a different hospital that includes 150 CT scans, targeting three anatomical organs (liver, spleen, and pancreas). In challenging organs such as the pancreas, our cascaded approach improves the mean Dice score from 68.5 to 82.2%, achieving the highest reported average score on this dataset. We compare with a 2D FCN method on a separate dataset of 240 CT scans with 18 classes and achieve a significantly higher performance in small organs and vessels. Furthermore, we explore fine-tuning our models to different datasets. Our experiments illustrate the promise and robustness of current 3D FCN based semantic segmentation of medical images, achieving state-of-the-art results. Our code and trained models are available for download: //github.com/holgerroth/3Dunet_abdomen_cascade.