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Abstract Accurate tissue segmentation is critical to characterize early cerebellar development in the first two postnatal years. However, challenges in tissue segmentation arising from tightly-folded cortex, low and dynamic tissue contrast, and large inter-site data heterogeneity have limited our understanding of early cerebellar development. In this paper, we propose an accurate self-supervised learning framework for infant cerebellum segmentation. We validate its accuracy using 358 subjects from three datasets. Our results suggest the first six months exhibit the most rapid and dynamic changes, with gray matter (GM) playing a dominant role in cerebellar growth over white matter (WM). We also find both GM and WM volumes are larger in males than females, and GM and WM volumes are larger in autistic males than neurotypical males. Application of our method to a larger population will fuel more cerebellar studies, ultimately advancing our comprehension of its structure and function in neurotypical and disordered development.

In scientific computing, neural networks have been widely used to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). In this paper, we propose a novel RBF-assisted hybrid neural network for approximating solutions to PDEs. Inspired by the tendency of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to become local approximations after training, the proposed method utilizes a radial basis function (RBF) to provide the normalization and localization properties to the input data. The objective of this strategy is to assist the network in solving PDEs more effectively. During the RBF-assisted processing part, the method selects the center points and collocation points separately to effectively manage data size and computational complexity. Subsequently, the RBF processed data are put into the network for predicting the solutions to PDEs. Finally, a series of experiments are conducted to evaluate the novel method. The numerical results confirm that the proposed method can accelerate the convergence speed of the loss function and improve predictive accuracy.

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is commonly used for the Electroencephalogram (EEG) based motor-imagery (MI) decoding. However, its performance is generally limited due to the small size sample problem. An alternative way to address such issue is to segment EEG trials into small slices for data augmentation, but this approach usually inevitably loses the valuable long-range dependencies of temporal information in EEG signals. To this end, we propose a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) based channel attention MLP-Mixer network (S-CAMLP-Net) for MI decoding with EEG. Specifically, a new EEG slice prediction task is designed as the pretext task to capture the long-range information of EEG trials in the time domain. In the downstream task, a newly proposed MLP-Mixer is applied to the classification task for signals rather than for images. Moreover, in order to effectively learn the discriminative spatial representations in EEG slices, an attention mechanism is integrated into MLP-Mixer to adaptively estimate the importance of each EEG channel without any prior information. Thus, the proposed S-CAMLP-Net can effectively learn more long-range temporal information and global spatial features of EEG signals. Extensive experiments are conducted on the public MI-2 dataset and the BCI Competition IV Dataset 2A. The experimental results indicate that our proposed S-CAMLP-Net achieves superior classification performance over all the compared algorithms.

Metric plays a key role in the description of similarity between samples. An appropriate metric for data can well represent their distribution and further promote the performance of learning tasks. In this paper, to better describe the heterogeneous distributions of data, we propose a semi-supervised local-to-global metric learning framework from the geometric insight. Our contributions can be summarized as: Firstly, to enlarge the application scope of local metric learning, we introduce the unsupervised information as the regularization term into our smoothly glued nonlinear metric model. Secondly, we propose two different nonlinear semi-supervised metric learning models with two different loss terms, and find that the smooth loss performs better than the hinge loss by comparison results. Thirdly, we have established not only two metric learning models, but also a nonlinear metric learning framework based on local metrics, which includes supervised and semi-supervised as well as linear and nonlinear metric learning. Moreover, we present an intrinsic steepest descent algorithm on the positive definite manifold for implementation of our semi-supervised nonlinear metric learning models with smooth triplet constrain loss. Finally, we compare our approaches with several state-of-the-art methods on a variety of datasets. The results validate that the robustness and accuracy of classification are both improved under our metrics.

Partial registration for point clouds plays an important role in various fields such as 3D mapping reconstruction, remote sensing, unmanned driving, and cultural heritage protection. Unfortunately, partial registration is challenging due to difficulties such as the low overlap ratio of two point clouds and the perturbation in the orderless and sparse 3D point clouds. Thus, a variety of the 3D shape context descriptors are introduced for finding the optimal matching. However, extracting geometric features and descriptors are time consuming and easily degenerated by noise. To overcome these problems, we introduce a parallel coarse-to-fine partial registration method. Our contributions can be summarized as: Firstly, a robust coarse trimmed method is proposed to estimate the coarse overlap area and the initial transformation via fast bilateral denoising and parallel point feature histogram (PPFH) descriptor aligning. Secondly, an accelerated fine registration procedure is conducted by a parallel trimmed iterative closest point (PTrICP) method. Moreover, most parts of our coarse-to-fine workflow are accelerated under the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) parallel execution mode for efficiency. Thirdly, we extend our method from the rigid registration to the isotropic scaling registration, which improves its applicability. Experiments have demonstrated that our method is feasible and robust in various situations, including the low overlap ratio, outlier, noise and scaling.

In this paper, we introduce a modified Generalized Iterative Closest Point (GICP) algorithm by presenting a coarse-to-fine strategy. Our contributions can be summarized as: Firstly, we use adaptively a plane-to-plane probabilistic matching model by gradually reducing the neighborhood range for given two point sets. It is an inner coarse-to-fine iteration process. Secondly, we use an outer coarse-to-fine strategy to bridge the point-to-point and plane-to-plane registration for refining the matching. Thirdly, we use the trimmed method to gradually eliminate the effects of incorrect correspondences, which improves the robustness of the methods especially for the low overlap cases. Moreover, we also extend our method to the scale registration case. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our method is more reliable and robust in various situations, including missing points, noise and different scale factors. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art registration methods.

Low-rank matrix completion aims to recover an unknown matrix from a subset of observed entries. In this paper, we solve the problem via optimization of the matrix manifold. Specially, we apply QR factorization to retraction during optimization. We devise two fast algorithms based on steepest gradient descent and conjugate gradient descent, and demonstrate their superiority over the promising baseline with the ratio of at least 24%.

The accuracy of classification and retrieval significantly depends on the metric used to compute the similarity between samples. For preserving the geometric structure, the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold is introduced into the metric learning problem. However, the SPD constraint is too strict to describe the real data distribution. In this paper, we extend the intrinsic metric learning problem to semi-definite case, by which the data distribution is better described for various classification tasks. First, we formulate the metric learning as a minimization problem to the SPD manifold on subspace, which not only considers to balance the information between inner classes and inter classes by an adaptive tradeoff parameter but also improves the robustness by the low-rank subspaces presentation. Thus, it benefits to design a structure-preserving algorithm on subspace by using the geodesic structure of the SPD subspace. To solve this model, we develop an iterative strategy to update the intrinsic metric and the subspace structure, respectively. Finally, we compare our proposed method with ten state-of-the-art methods on four data sets. The numerical results validate that our method can significantly improve the description of the data distribution, and hence, the performance of the image classification task.

In this paper, we propose a deep wavelet neural network (DWNN) model to approximate the natural phenomena that are described by some classical PDEs. Concretely, we introduce wavelets to deep architecture to obtain a fine feature description and extraction. That is, we constructs a wavelet expansion layer based on a family of vanishing momentum wavelets. Second, the Gaussian error function is considered as the activation function owing to its fast convergence rate and zero-centered output. Third, we design the cost function by considering the residual of governing equation, the initial/boundary conditions and an adjustable residual term of observations. The last term is added to deal with the shock wave problems and interface problems, which is conducive to rectify the model. Finally, a variety of numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The numerical results validate that our proposed method is more accurate than the state-of-the-art approach.

Image registration aims to align two images through a spatial transformation. It plays a significant role in brain imaging analysis. In this research, we propose a symmetric diffeomorphic image registration model based on multi-label segmentation masks to solve the problems in brain MRI registration. We first introduce the similarity metric of the multi-label masks to the energy function, which improves the alignment of the brain region boundaries and the robustness to the noise. Next, we establish the model on the diffeomorphism group through the relaxation method and the inverse consistent constraint. The algorithm is designed through the local linearization and least-squares method. We then give spatially adaptive parameters to coordinate the descent of the energy function in different regions. The results show that our approach, compared with the mainstream methods, has better accuracy and noise resistance, and the transformations are more smooth and more reasonable.

The insular cortex appears to have a crucial role in emotional processing and cognitive control in bipolar disorder (BD). However, most previous studies focused on the entire insular region of BD, neglecting the topological profile of its subregions. Our study aimed to investigate its subregion topological characteristics using the resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) in patients with BD on depression episode. The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of 28 depressed BD patients and 28 age- and gender-matched healthy controls (HCs) were acquired. We observed that compared to HCs, depressed patients with BD exhibited significantly decreased rsFC between the right ventral anterior insula (vAI) and the left middle temporal gyrus/the right angular, the right dorsal anterior insula (dAI) and the left precuneus, as well as the right posterior insula and the right lingual gyrus. Furthermore, hyperconnectivity was observed between the left dAI and the left medial frontal gyrus, as well as right dAI and left superior temporal gyrus in BD depression. However, no significant group effect was observed between aberrant FC patterns and clinical variables. These findings revealed the functional connectivity patterns of insular subregions for the depressed BD patients, suggesting the potential neural substrate of insular subregions involved in depressive episode of BD. Hence, these results may provide a neural substrate for the potential treatment target of BD on depression episode.

In the field of autonomous driving, carriers are equipped with a variety of sensors, including cameras and LiDARs. However, the camera suffers from problems of illumination and occlusion, and the LiDAR encounters motion distortion, degenerate environment and limited ranging distance. Therefore, fusing the information from these two sensors deserves to be explored. In this paper, we propose a fusion network which robustly captures both the image and point cloud descriptors to solve the place recognition problem. Our contribution can be summarized as: (1) applying the trimmed strategy in the point cloud global feature aggregation to improve the recognition performance, (2) building a compact fusion framework which captures both the robust representation of the image and 3D point cloud, and (3) learning a proper metric to describe the similarity of our fused global feature. The experiments on KITTI and KAIST datasets show that the proposed fused descriptor is more robust and discriminative than the single sensor descriptor.

Nonlinear registration is an important technique to align two different images and widely applied in medical image analysis. In this paper, we develop a novel nonlinear registration framework based on the diffeomorphic demons, where a reciprocal regularizer is introduced to assume that the deformation between two images is an exact diffeomorphism. In detail, first, we adopt a bidirectional metric to improve the symmetry of the energy functional, whose variables are two reciprocal deformations. Secondly, we slack these two deformations into two independent variables and introduce a reciprocal regularizer to assure the deformations being the exact diffeomorphism. Then, we utilize an alternating iterative strategy to decouple the model into two minimizing subproblems, where a new closed form for the approximate velocity of deformation is calculated. Finally, we compare our proposed algorithm on two data sets of real brain MR images with two relative and conventional methods. The results validate that our proposed method improves accuracy and robustness of registration, as well as the gained bidirectional deformations are actually reciprocal.

In this study, the authors address a two‐dimensional (2D) shape registration problem on data with anisotropic‐scale deformation and noise. First, the model is formulated under the iterative closest point (ICP) framework, which is one of the most popular methods for shape registration. To overcome the effect of noise, the expectation maximisation algorithm is used to improve the model. Then, the structure of Lie groups is adopted to parameterise the proposed model, which provides a unified framework to deal with the shape registration problems. Such representation makes it possible to introduce some suitable constraints to the model, which improves the robustness of the algorithm. Thereby, the 2D shape registration problem is turned to an optimisation problem on the matrix Lie group. Furthermore, a sequence of quadratic programming is designed to approximate the solution for the model. Finally, several comparative experiments are carried out to validate that the authors’ algorithm performs well in terms of robustness, especially in the presence of outliers.

Effective and efficient spatial normalization of a large population of brain images is critical for many clinical and research studies, but it is technically very challenging. A commonly used approach is to choose a certain image as the template and then align all other images in the population to this template by applying pairwise registration. To avoid the potential bias induced by the inappropriate template selection, groupwise registration methods have been proposed to simultaneously register all images to a latent common space. However, current groupwise registration methods do not make full use of image distribution information for more accurate registration. In this paper, we present a novel groupwise registration method that harnesses the image distribution information by capturing the image distribution manifold using a hierarchical graph with its nodes representing the individual images. More specifically, a low-level graph describes the image distribution in each subgroup, and a high-level graph encodes the relationship between representative images of subgroups. Given the graph representation, we can register all images to the common space by dynamically shrinking the graph on the image manifold. The topology of the entire image distribution is always maintained during graph shrinkage. Evaluations on two datasets, one for 80 elderly individuals and one for 285 infants, indicate that our method can yield promising results.