Nuclei instance segmentation in histopathological images is of great importance for biological analysis and cancer diagnosis but remains challenging for two reasons. (1) Similar visual presentation of intranuclear and extranuclear regions of chromophobe nuclei often causes under-segmentation, and (2) current methods lack the exploration of nuclei structure, resulting in fragmented instance predictions. To address these problems, this paper proposes a structure encoding and interaction network, termed SEINE, which develops the structure modeling scheme of nuclei and exploits the structure similarity between nuclei to improve the integrality of each segmented instance. Concretely, SEINE introduces a contour-based structure encoding (SE) that considers the correlation between nuclei structure and semantics, realizing a reasonable representation of the nuclei structure. Based on the encoding, we propose a structure-guided attention (SGA) that takes the clear nuclei as prototypes to enhance the structure learning for the fuzzy nuclei. To strengthen the structural learning ability, a semantic feature fusion (SFF) is presented to boost the semantic consistency of semantic and structure branches. Furthermore, a position enhancement (PE) method is applied to suppress incorrect nuclei boundary predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approaches, and SEINE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four datasets. The code is available at \href{//github.com/zhangye-zoe/SEINE}{//github.com/zhangye-zoe/SEINE}.
With the explosive growth of medical data and the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, precision medicine has emerged as a key to enhancing the quality and efficiency of healthcare services. In this context, Large Language Models (LLMs) play an increasingly vital role in medical knowledge acquisition and question-answering systems. To further improve the performance of these systems in the medical domain, we introduce an innovative method that jointly trains an Information Retrieval (IR) system and an LLM during the fine-tuning phase. This approach, which we call Joint Medical LLM and Retrieval Training (JMLR), is designed to overcome the challenges faced by traditional models in handling medical question-answering tasks. By employing a synchronized training mechanism, JMLR reduces the demand for computational resources and enhances the model's ability to leverage medical knowledge for reasoning and answering questions. Our experimental results demonstrate that JMLR-13B (81.2% on Amboos, 61.3% on MedQA) outperforms models using conventional pre-training and fine-tuning Meditron-70B (76.4% on AMBOSS, 60.3% on MedQA). For models of the same 7B scale, JMLR-7B(68.7% on Amboos, 51.7% on MedQA) significantly outperforms other public models (Meditron-7B: 50.1%, 47.9%), proving its superiority in terms of cost (our training time: 37 hours, traditional method: 144 hours), efficiency, and effectiveness in medical question-answering tasks. Through this work, we provide a new and efficient knowledge enhancement tool for healthcare, demonstrating the great potential of integrating IR and LLM training in precision medical information retrieval and question-answering systems.
The growing integration of large language models (LLMs) into social operations amplifies their impact on decisions in crucial areas such as economics, law, education, and healthcare, raising public concerns about these models' discrimination-related safety and reliability. However, prior discrimination measuring frameworks solely assess the average discriminatory behavior of LLMs, often proving inadequate due to the overlook of an additional discrimination-leading factor, i.e., the LLMs' prediction variation across diverse contexts. In this work, we present the Prejudice-Caprice Framework (PCF) that comprehensively measures discrimination in LLMs by considering both their consistently biased preference and preference variation across diverse contexts. Specifically, we mathematically dissect the aggregated contextualized discrimination risk of LLMs into prejudice risk, originating from LLMs' persistent prejudice, and caprice risk, stemming from their generation inconsistency. In addition, we utilize a data-mining approach to gather preference-detecting probes from sentence skeletons, devoid of attribute indications, to approximate LLMs' applied contexts. While initially intended for assessing discrimination in LLMs, our proposed PCF facilitates the comprehensive and flexible measurement of any inductive biases, including knowledge alongside prejudice, across various modality models. We apply our discrimination-measuring framework to 12 common LLMs, yielding intriguing findings: i) modern LLMs demonstrate significant pro-male stereotypes, ii) LLMs' exhibited discrimination correlates with several social and economic factors, iii) prejudice risk dominates the overall discrimination risk and follows a normal distribution, and iv) caprice risk contributes minimally to the overall risk but follows a fat-tailed distribution, suggesting that it is wild risk requiring enhanced surveillance.
In the field of clinical medicine, computed tomography (CT) is an effective medical imaging modality for the diagnosis of various pathologies. Compared with X-ray images, CT images can provide more information, including multi-planar slices and three-dimensional structures for clinical diagnosis. However, CT imaging requires patients to be exposed to large doses of ionizing radiation for a long time, which may cause irreversible physical harm. In this paper, we propose an Uncertainty-aware MedNeRF (UMedNeRF) network based on generated radiation fields. The network can learn a continuous representation of CT projections from 2D X-ray images by obtaining the internal structure and depth information and using adaptive loss weights to ensure the quality of the generated images. Our model is trained on publicly available knee and chest datasets, and we show the results of CT projection rendering with a single X-ray and compare our method with other methods based on generated radiation fields.
Understanding the anatomy of renal pathology is crucial for advancing disease diagnostics, treatment evaluation, and clinical research. The complex kidney system comprises various components across multiple levels, including regions (cortex, medulla), functional units (glomeruli, tubules), and cells (podocytes, mesangial cells in glomerulus). Prior studies have predominantly overlooked the intricate spatial interrelations among objects from clinical knowledge. In this research, we introduce a novel universal proposition learning approach, called panoramic renal pathology segmentation (PrPSeg), designed to segment comprehensively panoramic structures within kidney by integrating extensive knowledge of kidney anatomy. In this paper, we propose (1) the design of a comprehensive universal proposition matrix for renal pathology, facilitating the incorporation of classification and spatial relationships into the segmentation process; (2) a token-based dynamic head single network architecture, with the improvement of the partial label image segmentation and capability for future data enlargement; and (3) an anatomy loss function, quantifying the inter-object relationships across the kidney.
Due to the three-dimensional nature of CT- or MR-scans, generative modeling of medical images is a particularly challenging task. Existing approaches mostly apply patch-wise, slice-wise, or cascaded generation techniques to fit the high-dimensional data into the limited GPU memory. However, these approaches may introduce artifacts and potentially restrict the model's applicability for certain downstream tasks. This work presents WDM, a wavelet-based medical image synthesis framework that applies a diffusion model on wavelet decomposed images. The presented approach is a simple yet effective way of scaling diffusion models to high resolutions and can be trained on a single 40 GB GPU. Experimental results on BraTS and LIDC-IDRI unconditional image generation at a resolution of $128 \times 128 \times 128$ show state-of-the-art image fidelity (FID) and sample diversity (MS-SSIM) scores compared to GANs, Diffusion Models, and Latent Diffusion Models. Our proposed method is the only one capable of generating high-quality images at a resolution of $256 \times 256 \times 256$.
The recent Mamba model has shown remarkable adaptability for visual representation learning, including in medical imaging tasks. This study introduces MambaMIR, a Mamba-based model for medical image reconstruction, as well as its Generative Adversarial Network-based variant, MambaMIR-GAN. Our proposed MambaMIR inherits several advantages, such as linear complexity, global receptive fields, and dynamic weights, from the original Mamba model. The innovated arbitrary-mask mechanism effectively adapt Mamba to our image reconstruction task, providing randomness for subsequent Monte Carlo-based uncertainty estimation. Experiments conducted on various medical image reconstruction tasks, including fast MRI and SVCT, which cover anatomical regions such as the knee, chest, and abdomen, have demonstrated that MambaMIR and MambaMIR-GAN achieve comparable or superior reconstruction results relative to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the estimated uncertainty maps offer further insights into the reliability of the reconstruction quality. The code is publicly available at //github.com/ayanglab/MambaMIR.
Financial stability is a key challenge for individuals living with bipolar disorder (BD). Symptomatic periods in BD are associated with poor financial decision-making, contributing to a negative cycle of worsening symptoms and an increased risk of bankruptcy. There has been an increased focus on designing supportive financial technologies (fintech) to address varying and intermittent needs across different stages of BD. However, little is known about this population's expectations and privacy preferences related to financial data sharing for longitudinal care management. To address this knowledge gap, we have deployed a factorial vignette survey using the Contextual Integrity framework. Our data from individuals with BD (N=480) shows that they are open to sharing financial data for long term care management. We have also identified significant differences in sharing preferences across age, gender, and diagnostic subtype. We discuss the implications of these findings in designing equitable fintech to support this marginalized community.
Medical report generation (MRG) is essential for computer-aided diagnosis and medication guidance, which can relieve the heavy burden of radiologists by automatically generating the corresponding medical reports according to the given radiology image. However, due to the spurious correlations within image-text data induced by visual and linguistic biases, it is challenging to generate accurate reports reliably describing lesion areas. Moreover, the cross-modal confounders are usually unobservable and challenging to be eliminated explicitly. In this paper, we aim to mitigate the cross-modal data bias for MRG from a new perspective, i.e., cross-modal causal intervention, and propose a novel Visual-Linguistic Causal Intervention (VLCI) framework for MRG, which consists of a visual deconfounding module (VDM) and a linguistic deconfounding module (LDM), to implicitly mitigate the visual-linguistic confounders by causal front-door intervention. Specifically, due to the absence of a generalized semantic extractor, the VDM explores and disentangles the visual confounders from the patch-based local and global features without expensive fine-grained annotations. Simultaneously, due to the lack of knowledge encompassing the entire field of medicine, the LDM eliminates the linguistic confounders caused by salient visual features and high-frequency context without constructing a terminology database. Extensive experiments on IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR datasets show that our VLCI significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art MRG methods. The code and models are available at //github.com/WissingChen/VLCI.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great breakthroughs in many fields such as image classification and natural language processing. However, the execution of DNNs needs to conduct massive numbers of multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations on hardware and thus incurs a large power consumption. To address this challenge, we propose a novel digital MAC design based on encoding. In this new design, the multipliers are replaced by simple logic gates to project the results onto a wide bit representation. These bits carry individual position weights, which can be trained for specific neural networks to enhance inference accuracy. The outputs of the new multipliers are added by bit-wise weighted accumulation and the accumulation results are compatible with existing computing platforms accelerating neural networks with either uniform or non-uniform quantization. Since the multiplication function is replaced by simple logic projection, the critical paths in the resulting circuits become much shorter. Correspondingly, pipelining stages in the MAC array can be reduced, leading to a significantly smaller area as well as a better power efficiency. The proposed design has been synthesized and verified by ResNet18-Cifar10, ResNet20-Cifar100 and ResNet50-ImageNet. The experimental results confirmed the reduction of circuit area by up to 79.63% and the reduction of power consumption of executing DNNs by up to 70.18%, while the accuracy of the neural networks can still be well maintained.
With the advent of deep neural networks, learning-based approaches for 3D reconstruction have gained popularity. However, unlike for images, in 3D there is no canonical representation which is both computationally and memory efficient yet allows for representing high-resolution geometry of arbitrary topology. Many of the state-of-the-art learning-based 3D reconstruction approaches can hence only represent very coarse 3D geometry or are limited to a restricted domain. In this paper, we propose occupancy networks, a new representation for learning-based 3D reconstruction methods. Occupancy networks implicitly represent the 3D surface as the continuous decision boundary of a deep neural network classifier. In contrast to existing approaches, our representation encodes a description of the 3D output at infinite resolution without excessive memory footprint. We validate that our representation can efficiently encode 3D structure and can be inferred from various kinds of input. Our experiments demonstrate competitive results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for the challenging tasks of 3D reconstruction from single images, noisy point clouds and coarse discrete voxel grids. We believe that occupancy networks will become a useful tool in a wide variety of learning-based 3D tasks.