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Domain shift and label scarcity heavily limit deep learning applications to various medical image analysis tasks. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) techniques have recently achieved promising cross-modality medical image segmentation by transferring knowledge from a label-rich source domain to an unlabeled target domain. However, it is also difficult to collect annotations from the source domain in many clinical applications, rendering most prior works suboptimal with the label-scarce source domain, particularly for few-shot scenarios, where only a few source labels are accessible. To achieve efficient few-shot cross-modality segmentation, we propose a novel transformation-consistent meta-hallucination framework, meta-hallucinator, with the goal of learning to diversify data distributions and generate useful examples for enhancing cross-modality performance. In our framework, hallucination and segmentation models are jointly trained with the gradient-based meta-learning strategy to synthesize examples that lead to good segmentation performance on the target domain. To further facilitate data hallucination and cross-domain knowledge transfer, we develop a self-ensembling model with a hallucination-consistent property. Our meta-hallucinator can seamlessly collaborate with the meta-segmenter for learning to hallucinate with mutual benefits from a combined view of meta-learning and self-ensembling learning. Extensive studies on MM-WHS 2017 dataset for cross-modality cardiac segmentation demonstrate that our method performs favorably against various approaches by a lot in the few-shot UDA scenario., Comment: Accepted by MICCAI 2022 (top 13% paper; early accept)

Domain shift has been a long-standing issue for medical image segmentation. Recently, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have achieved promising cross-modality segmentation performance by distilling knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a target domain without labels. In this work, we propose a multi-scale self-ensembling based UDA framework for automatic segmentation of two key brain structures i.e., Vestibular Schwannoma (VS) and Cochlea on high-resolution T2 images. First, a segmentation-enhanced contrastive unpaired image translation module is designed for image-level domain adaptation from source T1 to target T2. Next, multi-scale deep supervision and consistency regularization are introduced to a mean teacher network for self-ensemble learning to further close the domain gap. Furthermore, self-training and intensity augmentation techniques are utilized to mitigate label scarcity and boost cross-modality segmentation performance. Our method demonstrates promising segmentation performance with a mean Dice score of 83.8% and 81.4% and an average asymmetric surface distance (ASSD) of 0.55 mm and 0.26 mm for the VS and Cochlea, respectively in the validation phase of the crossMoDA 2022 challenge., Comment: Accepted by BrainLes MICCAI proceedings (5th solution for MICCAI 2022 Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation (crossMoDA) Challenge)

A popular track of network compression approach is Quantization aware Training (QAT), which accelerates the forward pass during the neural network training and inference. However, not much prior efforts have been made to quantize and accelerate the backward pass during training, even though that contributes around half of the training time. This can be partly attributed to the fact that errors of low-precision gradients during backward cannot be amortized by the training objective as in the QAT setting. In this work, we propose to solve this problem by incorporating the gradients into the computation graph of the next training iteration via a hypernetwork. Various experiments on CIFAR-10 dataset with different CNN network architectures demonstrate that our hypernetwork-based approach can effectively reduce the negative effect of gradient quantization noise and successfully quantizes the gradients to INT4 with only 0.64 accuracy drop for VGG-16 on CIFAR-10.

While deep learning methods hitherto have achieved considerable success in medical image segmentation, they are still hampered by two limitations: (i) reliance on large-scale well-labeled datasets, which are difficult to curate due to the expert-driven and time-consuming nature of pixel-level annotations in clinical practices, and (ii) failure to generalize from one domain to another, especially when the target domain is a different modality with severe domain shifts. Recent unsupervised domain adaptation~(UDA) techniques leverage abundant labeled source data together with unlabeled target data to reduce the domain gap, but these methods degrade significantly with limited source annotations. In this study, we address this underexplored UDA problem, investigating a challenging but valuable realistic scenario, where the source domain not only exhibits domain shift~w.r.t. the target domain but also suffers from label scarcity. In this regard, we propose a novel and generic framework called ``Label-Efficient Unsupervised Domain Adaptation"~(LE-UDA). In LE-UDA, we construct self-ensembling consistency for knowledge transfer between both domains, as well as a self-ensembling adversarial learning module to achieve better feature alignment for UDA. To assess the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on two different tasks for cross-modality segmentation between MRI and CT images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LE-UDA can efficiently leverage limited source labels to improve cross-domain segmentation performance, outperforming state-of-the-art UDA approaches in the literature. Code is available at: https://github.com/jacobzhaoziyuan/LE-UDA., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2022

Deep learning has achieved notable success in 3D object detection with the advent of large-scale point cloud datasets. However, severe performance degradation in the past trained classes, i.e., catastrophic forgetting, still remains a critical issue for real-world deployment when the number of classes is unknown or may vary. Moreover, existing 3D class-incremental detection methods are developed for the single-domain scenario, which fail when encountering domain shift caused by different datasets, varying environments, etc. In this paper, we identify the unexplored yet valuable scenario, i.e., class-incremental learning under domain shift, and propose a novel 3D domain adaptive class-incremental object detection framework, DA-CIL, in which we design a novel dual-domain copy-paste augmentation method to construct multiple augmented domains for diversifying training distributions, thereby facilitating gradual domain adaptation. Then, multi-level consistency is explored to facilitate dual-teacher knowledge distillation from different domains for domain adaptive class-incremental learning. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over baselines in the domain adaptive class-incremental learning scenario., Comment: Accepted by the 33rd British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC 2022)

While deep models have shown promising performance in medical image segmentation, they heavily rely on a large amount of well-annotated data, which is difficult to access, especially in clinical practice. On the other hand, high-accuracy deep models usually come in large model sizes, limiting their employment in real scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel asymmetric co-teacher framework, ACT-Net, to alleviate the burden on both expensive annotations and computational costs for semi-supervised knowledge distillation. We advance teacher-student learning with a co-teacher network to facilitate asymmetric knowledge distillation from large models to small ones by alternating student and teacher roles, obtaining tiny but accurate models for clinical employment. To verify the effectiveness of our ACT-Net, we employ the ACDC dataset for cardiac substructure segmentation in our experiments. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ACT-Net outperforms other knowledge distillation methods and achieves lossless segmentation performance with 250x fewer parameters.

With large-scale well-labeled datasets, deep learning has shown significant success in medical image segmentation. However, it is challenging to acquire abundant annotations in clinical practice due to extensive expertise requirements and costly labeling efforts. Recently, contrastive learning has shown a strong capacity for visual representation learning on unlabeled data, achieving impressive performance rivaling supervised learning in many domains. In this work, we propose a novel multi-scale multi-view global-local contrastive learning (MMGL) framework to thoroughly explore global and local features from different scales and views for robust contrastive learning performance, thereby improving segmentation performance with limited annotations. Extensive experiments on the MM-WHS dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of MMGL framework on semi-supervised cardiac image segmentation, outperforming the state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods by a large margin., Comment: Accepted by IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2022)

Intracranial arteries are critical blood vessels that supply the brain with oxygenated blood. Intracranial artery labels provide valuable guidance and navigation to numerous clinical applications and disease diagnoses. Various machine learning algorithms have been carried out for automation in the anatomical labeling of cerebral arteries. However, the task remains challenging because of the high complexity and variations of intracranial arteries. This study investigates a novel graph convolutional neural network with deep feature fusion for cerebral artery labeling. We introduce stacked graph convolutions in an encoder-core-decoder architecture, extracting high-level representations from graph nodes and their neighbors. Furthermore, we efficiently aggregate intermediate features from different hierarchies to enhance the proposed model's representation capability and labeling performance. We perform extensive experiments on public datasets, in which the results prove the superiority of our approach over baselines by a clear margin., Comment: Accepted by the 44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC 2022)

A glioma is a malignant brain tumor that seriously affects cognitive functions and lowers patients' life quality. Segmentation of brain glioma is challenging because of interclass ambiguities in tumor regions. Recently, deep learning approaches have achieved outstanding performance in the automatic segmentation of brain glioma. However, existing algorithms fail to exploit channel-wise feature interdependence to select semantic attributes for glioma segmentation. In this study, we implement a novel deep neural network that integrates residual channel attention modules to calibrate intermediate features for glioma segmentation. The proposed channel attention mechanism adaptively weights feature channel-wise to optimize the latent representation of gliomas. We evaluate our method on the established dataset BraTS2017. Experimental results indicate the superiority of our method., Comment: Accepted by the 44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC 2022)

Label scarcity has been a long-standing issue for biomedical image segmentation, due to high annotation costs and professional requirements. Recently, active learning (AL) strategies strive to reduce annotation costs by querying a small portion of data for annotation, receiving much traction in the field of medical imaging. However, most of the existing AL methods have to initialize models with some randomly selected samples followed by active selection based on various criteria, such as uncertainty and diversity. Such random-start initialization methods inevitably introduce under-value redundant samples and unnecessary annotation costs. For the purpose of addressing the issue, we propose a novel self-supervised assisted active learning framework in the cold-start setting, in which the segmentation model is first warmed up with self-supervised learning (SSL), and then SSL features are used for sample selection via latent feature clustering without accessing labels. We assess our proposed methodology on skin lesions segmentation task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach is capable of achieving promising performance with substantial improvements over existing baselines., Comment: Accepted by the 44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC 2022)

Automated facial age estimation has diverse real-world applications in multimedia analysis, e.g., video surveillance, and human-computer interaction. However, due to the randomness and ambiguity of the aging process, age assessment is challenging. Most research work over the topic regards the task as one of age regression, classification, and ranking problems, and cannot well leverage age distribution in representing labels with age ambiguity. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective loss function for robust facial age estimation via distribution learning, i.e., adaptive mean-residue loss, in which, the mean loss penalizes the difference between the estimated age distribution's mean and the ground-truth age, whereas the residue loss penalizes the entropy of age probability out of dynamic top-K in the distribution. Experimental results in the datasets FG-NET and CLAP2016 have validated the effectiveness of the proposed loss. Our code is available at https://github.com/jacobzhaoziyuan/AMR-Loss., Comment: Accepted by IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME 2022)

The success of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) benefits from high volumes of annotated data. However, annotating medical images is laborious, expensive, and requires human expertise, which induces the label scarcity problem. Especially when encountering the domain shift, the problem becomes more serious. Although deep unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) can leverage well-established source domain annotations and abundant target domain data to facilitate cross-modality image segmentation and also mitigate the label paucity problem on the target domain, the conventional UDA methods suffer from severe performance degradation when source domain annotations are scarce. In this paper, we explore a challenging UDA setting - limited source domain annotations. We aim to investigate how to efficiently leverage unlabeled data from the source and target domains with limited source annotations for cross-modality image segmentation. To achieve this, we propose a new label-efficient UDA framework, termed MT-UDA, in which the student model trained with limited source labels learns from unlabeled data of both domains by two teacher models respectively in a semi-supervised manner. More specifically, the student model not only distills the intra-domain semantic knowledge by encouraging prediction consistency but also exploits the inter-domain anatomical information by enforcing structural consistency. Consequently, the student model can effectively integrate the underlying knowledge beneath available data resources to mitigate the impact of source label scarcity and yield improved cross-modality segmentation performance. We evaluate our method on MM-WHS 2017 dataset and demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin under the source-label scarcity scenario., Comment: Accept by MICCAI 2021, code at: https://github.com/jacobzhaoziyuan/MT-UDA

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the most common eye conditions among diabetic patients. However, vision loss occurs primarily in the late stages of DR, and the symptoms of visual impairment, ranging from mild to severe, can vary greatly, adding to the burden of diagnosis and treatment in clinical practice. Deep learning methods based on retinal images have achieved remarkable success in automatic DR grading, but most of them neglect that the presence of diabetes usually affects both eyes, and ophthalmologists usually compare both eyes concurrently for DR diagnosis, leaving correlations between left and right eyes unexploited. In this study, simulating the diagnostic process, we propose a two-stream binocular network to capture the subtle correlations between left and right eyes, in which, paired images of eyes are fed into two identical subnetworks separately during training. We design a contrastive grading loss to learn binocular correlation for five-class DR detection, which maximizes inter-class dissimilarity while minimizing the intra-class difference. Experimental results on the EyePACS dataset show the superiority of the proposed binocular model, outperforming monocular methods by a large margin., Comment: Accepted in 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE EMBC 2021

Accurate automatic liver and tumor segmentation plays a vital role in treatment planning and disease monitoring. Recently, deep convolutional neural network (DCNNs) has obtained tremendous success in 2D and 3D medical image segmentation. However, 2D DCNNs cannot fully leverage the inter-slice information, while 3D DCNNs are computationally expensive and memory intensive. To address these issues, we first propose a novel dense-sparse training flow from a data perspective, in which, densely adjacent slices and sparsely adjacent slices are extracted as inputs for regularizing DCNNs, thereby improving the model performance. Moreover, we design a 2.5D light-weight nnU-Net from a network perspective, in which, depthwise separable convolutions are adopted to improve the efficiency. Extensive experiments on the LiTS dataset have demonstrated the superiority of the proposed method., Comment: Accepted in 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE EMBC 2021

Deep learning has achieved promising segmentation performance on 3D left atrium MR images. However, annotations for segmentation tasks are expensive, costly and difficult to obtain. In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical consistency regularized mean teacher framework for 3D left atrium segmentation. In each iteration, the student model is optimized by multi-scale deep supervision and hierarchical consistency regularization, concurrently. Extensive experiments have shown that our method achieves competitive performance as compared with full annotation, outperforming other state-of-the-art semi-supervised segmentation methods., Comment: Accepted in 43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, IEEE EMBC 2021

Image segmentation is one of the most essential biomedical image processing problems for different imaging modalities, including microscopy and X-ray in the Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) domain. However, annotating biomedical images is knowledge-driven, time-consuming, and labor-intensive, making it difficult to obtain abundant labels with limited costs. Active learning strategies come into ease the burden of human annotation, which queries only a subset of training data for annotation. Despite receiving attention, most of active learning methods generally still require huge computational costs and utilize unlabeled data inefficiently. They also tend to ignore the intermediate knowledge within networks. In this work, we propose a deep active semi-supervised learning framework, DSAL, combining active learning and semi-supervised learning strategies. In DSAL, a new criterion based on deep supervision mechanism is proposed to select informative samples with high uncertainties and low uncertainties for strong labelers and weak labelers respectively. The internal criterion leverages the disagreement of intermediate features within the deep learning network for active sample selection, which subsequently reduces the computational costs. We use the proposed criteria to select samples for strong and weak labelers to produce oracle labels and pseudo labels simultaneously at each active learning iteration in an ensemble learning manner, which can be examined with IoMT Platform. Extensive experiments on multiple medical image datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art active learning methods., Comment: Published as a journal paper at IEEE J-BHI

Diabetes is one of the most common disease in individuals. \textit{Diabetic retinopathy} (DR) is a complication of diabetes, which could lead to blindness. Automatic DR grading based on retinal images provides a great diagnostic and prognostic value for treatment planning. However, the subtle differences among severity levels make it difficult to capture important features using conventional methods. To alleviate the problems, a new deep learning architecture for robust DR grading is proposed, referred to as SEA-Net, in which, spatial attention and channel attention are alternatively carried out and boosted with each other, improving the classification performance. In addition, a hybrid loss function is proposed to further maximize the inter-class distance and reduce the intra-class variability. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed architecture., Comment: Accepted to ICIP 2020

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common type of primary liver cancer and the fourth most common cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Understanding the underlying gene mutations in HCC provides great prognostic value for treatment planning and targeted therapy. Radiogenomics has revealed an association between non-invasive imaging features and molecular genomics. However, imaging feature identification is laborious and error-prone. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework for mutation prediction in APOB, COL11A1 and ATRX genes using multiphasic CT scans. Considering intra-tumour heterogeneity (ITH) in HCC, multi-region sampling technology is implemented to generate the dataset for experiments. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model., Comment: Accepted version to be published in the 42nd IEEE Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2020, Montreal, Canada

Segmentation is a prerequisite yet challenging task for medical image analysis. In this paper, we introduce a novel deeply supervised active learning approach for finger bones segmentation. The proposed architecture is fine-tuned in an iterative and incremental learning manner. In each step, the deep supervision mechanism guides the learning process of hidden layers and selects samples to be labeled. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our method achieves competitive segmentation results using less labeled samples as compared with full annotation., Comment: Accepted version to be published in the 42nd IEEE Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2020, Montreal, Canada

Water quality has a direct impact on industry, agriculture, and public health. Algae species are common indicators of water quality. It is because algal communities are sensitive to changes in their habitats, giving valuable knowledge on variations in water quality. However, water quality analysis requires professional inspection of algal detection and classification under microscopes, which is very time-consuming and tedious. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-target deep learning framework for algal detection and classification. Extensive experiments were carried out on a large-scale colored microscopic algal dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method leads to the promising performance on algal detection, class identification and genus identification., Comment: Accepted version to be published in the 42nd IEEE Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2020, Montreal, Canada

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common retinal disease that leads to blindness. For diagnosis purposes, DR image grading aims to provide automatic DR grade classification, which is not addressed in conventional research methods of binary DR image classification. Small objects in the eye images, like lesions and microaneurysms, are essential to DR grading in medical imaging, but they could easily be influenced by other objects. To address these challenges, we propose a new deep learning architecture, called BiRA-Net, which combines the attention model for feature extraction and bilinear model for fine-grained classification. Furthermore, in considering the distance between different grades of different DR categories, we propose a new loss function, called grading loss, which leads to improved training convergence of the proposed approach. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach., Comment: Accepted at ICIP 2019

Bone age assessment is an important clinical trial to measure skeletal child maturity and diagnose of growth disorders. Conventional approaches such as the Tanner-Whitehouse (TW) and Greulich and Pyle (GP) may not perform well due to their large inter-observer and intra-observer variations. In this paper, we propose a finger joint localization strategy to filter out most non-informative parts of images. When combining with the conventional full image-based deep network, we observe a much-improved performance. % Our approach utilizes full hand and specific joints images for skeletal maturity prediction. In this study, we applied powerful deep neural network and explored a process in the forecast of skeletal bone age with the specifically combine joints images to increase the performance accuracy compared with the whole hand images., Comment: Some changes will be made

Segmentation stands at the forefront of many high-level vision tasks. In this study, we focus on segmenting finger bones within a newly introduced semi-supervised self-taught deep learning framework which consists of a student network and a stand-alone teacher module. The whole system is boosted in a life-long learning manner wherein each step the teacher module provides a refinement for the student network to learn with newly unlabeled data. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over conventional supervised deep learning methods., Comment: IEEE BHI 2019 accepted