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Facial Expression Recognition (FER) holds significant importance in human-computer interactions. Existing cross-domain FER methods often transfer knowledge solely from a single labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, neglecting the comprehensive information across multiple sources. Nevertheless, cross-multidomain FER (CMFER) is very challenging for (i) the inherent inter-domain shifts across multiple domains and (ii) the intra-domain shifts stemming from the ambiguous expressions and low inter-class distinctions. In this paper, we propose a novel Learning with Alignments CMFER framework, named LA-CMFER, to handle both inter- and intra-domain shifts. Specifically, LA-CMFER is constructed with a global branch and a local branch to extract features from the full images and local subtle expressions, respectively. Based on this, LA-CMFER presents a dual-level inter-domain alignment method to force the model to prioritize hard-to-align samples in knowledge transfer at a sample level while gradually generating a well-clustered feature space with the guidance of class attributes at a cluster level, thus narrowing the inter-domain shifts. To address the intra-domain shifts, LA-CMFER introduces a multi-view intra-domain alignment method with a multi-view clustering consistency constraint where a prediction similarity matrix is built to pursue consistency between the global and local views, thus refining pseudo labels and eliminating latent noise. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets have validated the superiority of our LA-CMFER.

Radiation hazards associated with standard-dose positron emission tomography (SPET) images remain a concern, whereas the quality of low-dose PET (LPET) images fails to meet clinical requirements. Therefore, there is great interest in reconstructing SPET images from LPET images. However, prior studies focus solely on image data, neglecting vital complementary information from other modalities, e.g., patients' clinical tabular, resulting in compromised reconstruction with limited diagnostic utility. Moreover, they often overlook the semantic consistency between real SPET and reconstructed images, leading to distorted semantic contexts. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Multi-modal Conditioned Adversarial Diffusion model (MCAD) to reconstruct SPET images from multi-modal inputs, including LPET images and clinical tabular. Specifically, our MCAD incorporates a Multi-modal conditional Encoder (Mc-Encoder) to extract multi-modal features, followed by a conditional diffusion process to blend noise with multi-modal features and gradually map blended features to the target SPET images. To balance multi-modal inputs, the Mc-Encoder embeds Optimal Multi-modal Transport co-Attention (OMTA) to narrow the heterogeneity gap between image and tabular while capturing their interactions, providing sufficient guidance for reconstruction. In addition, to mitigate semantic distortions, we introduce the Multi-Modal Masked Text Reconstruction (M3TRec), which leverages semantic knowledge extracted from denoised PET images to restore the masked clinical tabular, thereby compelling the network to maintain accurate semantics during reconstruction. To expedite the diffusion process, we further introduce an adversarial diffusive network with a reduced number of diffusion steps. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance both qualitatively and quantitatively., Comment: Early accepted by MICCAI2024

Universal Multi-source Domain Adaptation (UniMDA) transfers knowledge from multiple labeled source domains to an unlabeled target domain under domain shifts (different data distribution) and class shifts (unknown target classes). Existing solutions focus on excavating image features to detect unknown samples, ignoring abundant information contained in textual semantics. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Prompt learning with Negative textual semantics and uncErtainty modeling method based on Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (APNE-CLIP) for UniMDA classification tasks. Concretely, we utilize the CLIP with adaptive prompts to leverage textual information of class semantics and domain representations, helping the model identify unknown samples and address domain shifts. Additionally, we design a novel global instance-level alignment objective by utilizing negative textual semantics to achieve more precise image-text pair alignment. Furthermore, we propose an energy-based uncertainty modeling strategy to enlarge the margin distance between known and unknown samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method., Comment: Accepted by ICME2024

To obtain high-quality positron emission tomography (PET) while minimizing radiation exposure, a range of methods have been designed to reconstruct standard-dose PET (SPET) from corresponding low-dose PET (LPET) images. However, most current methods merely learn the mapping between single-dose-level LPET and SPET images, but omit the dose disparity of LPET images in clinical scenarios. In this paper, to reconstruct high-quality SPET images from multi-dose-level LPET images, we design a novel two-phase multi-dose-level PET reconstruction algorithm with dose level awareness, containing a pre-training phase and a SPET prediction phase. Specifically, the pre-training phase is devised to explore both fine-grained discriminative features and effective semantic representation. The SPET prediction phase adopts a coarse prediction network utilizing pre-learned dose level prior to generate preliminary result, and a refinement network to precisely preserve the details. Experiments on MICCAI 2022 Ultra-low Dose PET Imaging Challenge Dataset have demonstrated the superiority of our method., Comment: Accepted by ISBI2024

Semi-supervised learning is a sound measure to relieve the strict demand of abundant annotated datasets, especially for challenging multi-organ segmentation . However, most existing SSL methods predict pixels in a single image independently, ignoring the relations among images and categories. In this paper, we propose a two-stage Dual Contrastive Learning Network for semi-supervised MoS, which utilizes global and local contrastive learning to strengthen the relations among images and classes. Concretely, in Stage 1, we develop a similarity-guided global contrastive learning to explore the implicit continuity and similarity among images and learn global context. Then, in Stage 2, we present an organ-aware local contrastive learning to further attract the class representations. To ease the computation burden, we introduce a mask center computation algorithm to compress the category representations for local contrastive learning. Experiments conducted on the public 2017 ACDC dataset and an in-house RC-OARs dataset has demonstrated the superior performance of our method., Comment: Published at ICASSP 2024

Deep learning has facilitated the automation of radiotherapy by predicting accurate dose distribution maps. However, existing methods fail to derive the desirable radiotherapy parameters that can be directly input into the treatment planning system (TPS), impeding the full automation of radiotherapy. To enable more thorough automatic radiotherapy, in this paper, we propose a novel two-stage framework to directly regress the radiotherapy parameters, including a dose map prediction stage and a radiotherapy parameters regression stage. In stage one, we combine transformer and convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict realistic dose maps with rich global and local information, providing accurate dosimetric knowledge for the subsequent parameters regression. In stage two, two elaborate modules, i.e., an intra-relation modeling (Intra-RM) module and an inter-relation modeling (Inter-RM) module, are designed to exploit the organ-specific and organ-shared features for precise parameters regression. Experimental results on a rectal cancer dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method., Comment: Accepted by ISBI 2024

Radiotherapy is a primary treatment for cancers with the aim of applying sufficient radiation dose to the planning target volume (PTV) while minimizing dose hazards to the organs at risk (OARs). Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have automated the radiotherapy plan-making by predicting the dose maps. However, current CNN-based methods ignore the remarkable dose difference in the dose map, i.e., high dose value in the interior PTV while low value in the exterior PTV, leading to a suboptimal prediction. In this paper, we propose a triplet-constraint transformer (TCtrans) with multi-scale refinement to predict the high-quality dose distribution. Concretely, a novel PTV-guided triplet constraint is designed to refine dose feature representations in the interior and exterior PTV by utilizing the explicit geometry of PTV. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-scale refinement (MSR) module to effectively fulfill the triplet constraint in different decoding layers with multiple scales. Besides, a transformer encoder is devised to learn the important global dosimetric knowledge. Experiments on a clinical cervical cancer dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method., Comment: accepted by 2024 IEEE ISBI

To obtain high-quality Positron emission tomography (PET) images while minimizing radiation exposure, numerous methods have been proposed to reconstruct standard-dose PET (SPET) images from the corresponding low-dose PET (LPET) images. However, these methods heavily rely on voxel-based representations, which fall short of adequately accounting for the precise structure and fine-grained context, leading to compromised reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a 3D point-based context clusters GAN, namely PCC-GAN, to reconstruct high-quality SPET images from LPET. Specifically, inspired by the geometric representation power of points, we resort to a point-based representation to enhance the explicit expression of the image structure, thus facilitating the reconstruction with finer details. Moreover, a context clustering strategy is applied to explore the contextual relationships among points, which mitigates the ambiguities of small structures in the reconstructed images. Experiments on both clinical and phantom datasets demonstrate that our PCC-GAN outperforms the state-of-the-art reconstruction methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Code is available at https://github.com/gluucose/PCCGAN., Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 2024

Deep learning (DL) has successfully automated dose distribution prediction in radiotherapy planning, enhancing both efficiency and quality. However, existing methods suffer from the over-smoothing problem for their commonly used L1 or L2 loss with posterior average calculations. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a diffusion model-based method (DiffDose) for predicting the radiotherapy dose distribution of cancer patients. Specifically, the DiffDose model contains a forward process and a reverse process. In the forward process, DiffDose transforms dose distribution maps into pure Gaussian noise by gradually adding small noise and a noise predictor is simultaneously trained to estimate the noise added at each timestep. In the reverse process, it removes the noise from the pure Gaussian noise in multiple steps with the well-trained noise predictor and finally outputs the predicted dose distribution maps...

To obtain high-quality positron emission tomography (PET) scans while reducing radiation exposure to the human body, various approaches have been proposed to reconstruct standard-dose PET (SPET) images from low-dose PET (LPET) images. One widely adopted technique is the generative adversarial networks (GANs), yet recently, diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have emerged as a compelling alternative due to their improved sample quality and higher log-likelihood scores compared to GANs. Despite this, DPMs suffer from two major drawbacks in real clinical settings, i.e., the computationally expensive sampling process and the insufficient preservation of correspondence between the conditioning LPET image and the reconstructed PET (RPET) image. To address the above limitations, this paper presents a coarse-to-fine PET reconstruction framework that consists of a coarse prediction module (CPM) and an iterative refinement module (IRM). The CPM generates a coarse PET image via a deterministic process, and the IRM samples the residual iteratively. By delegating most of the computational overhead to the CPM, the overall sampling speed of our method can be significantly improved. Furthermore, two additional strategies, i.e., an auxiliary guidance strategy and a contrastive diffusion strategy, are proposed and integrated into the reconstruction process, which can enhance the correspondence between the LPET image and the RPET image, further improving clinical reliability. Extensive experiments on two human brain PET datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art PET reconstruction methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Show-han/PET-Reconstruction}., Comment: Accepted and presented in MICCAI 2023. To be published in Proceedings

To obtain high-quality positron emission tomography (PET) images while minimizing radiation exposure, various methods have been proposed for reconstructing standard-dose PET (SPET) images from low-dose PET (LPET) sinograms directly. However, current methods often neglect boundaries during sinogram-to-image reconstruction, resulting in high-frequency distortion in the frequency domain and diminished or fuzzy edges in the reconstructed images. Furthermore, the convolutional architectures, which are commonly used, lack the ability to model long-range non-local interactions, potentially leading to inaccurate representations of global structures. To alleviate these problems, we propose a transformer-based model that unites triple domains of sinogram, image, and frequency for direct PET reconstruction, namely TriDo-Former. Specifically, the TriDo-Former consists of two cascaded networks, i.e., a sinogram enhancement transformer (SE-Former) for denoising the input LPET sinograms and a spatial-spectral reconstruction transformer (SSR-Former) for reconstructing SPET images from the denoised sinograms. Different from the vanilla transformer that splits an image into 2D patches, based specifically on the PET imaging mechanism, our SE-Former divides the sinogram into 1D projection view angles to maintain its inner-structure while denoising, preventing the noise in the sinogram from prorogating into the image domain. Moreover, to mitigate high-frequency distortion and improve reconstruction details, we integrate global frequency parsers (GFPs) into SSR-Former. The GFP serves as a learnable frequency filter that globally adjusts the frequency components in the frequency domain, enforcing the network to restore high-frequency details resembling real SPET images. Validations on a clinical dataset demonstrate that our TriDo-Former outperforms the state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively.

Currently, deep learning (DL) has achieved the automatic prediction of dose distribution in radiotherapy planning, enhancing its efficiency and quality. However, existing methods suffer from the over-smoothing problem for their commonly used L_1 or L_2 loss with posterior average calculations. To alleviate this limitation, we innovatively introduce a diffusion-based dose prediction (DiffDP) model for predicting the radiotherapy dose distribution of cancer patients. Specifically, the DiffDP model contains a forward process and a reverse process. In the forward process, DiffDP gradually transforms dose distribution maps into Gaussian noise by adding small noise and trains a noise predictor to predict the noise added in each timestep. In the reverse process, it removes the noise from the original Gaussian noise in multiple steps with the well-trained noise predictor and finally outputs the predicted dose distribution map. To ensure the accuracy of the prediction, we further design a structure encoder to extract anatomical information from patient anatomy images and enable the noise predictor to be aware of the dose constraints within several essential organs, i.e., the planning target volume and organs at risk. Extensive experiments on an in-house dataset with 130 rectum cancer patients demonstrate the s, Comment: to be published in MICCAI 2023

Spectral computed tomography (CT) is an emerging technology, that generates a multienergy attenuation map for the interior of an object and extends the traditional image volume into a 4D form. Compared with traditional CT based on energy-integrating detectors, spectral CT can make full use of spectral information, resulting in high resolution and providing accurate material quantification. Numerous model-based iterative reconstruction methods have been proposed for spectral CT reconstruction. However, these methods usually suffer from difficulties such as laborious parameter selection and expensive computational costs. In addition, due to the image similarity of different energy bins, spectral CT usually implies a strong low-rank prior, which has been widely adopted in current iterative reconstruction models. Singular value thresholding (SVT) is an effective algorithm to solve the low-rank constrained model. However, the SVT method requires manual selection of thresholds, which may lead to suboptimal results. To relieve these problems, in this paper, we propose a Sparse and lOw-rank UnroLling Network for spectral CT image reconstruction (SOUL-Net), that learns the parameters and thresholds in a data-driven manner. Furthermore, a Taylor expansion-based neural network backpropagation method is introduced to improve the numerical stability. The qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several representative state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of detail preservation and artifact reduction.

Pansharpening in remote sensing image aims at acquiring a high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) image directly by fusing a low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) image with a panchromatic (PAN) image. The main concern is how to effectively combine the rich spectral information of LRMS image with the abundant spatial information of PAN image. Recently, many methods based on deep learning have been proposed for the pansharpening task. However, these methods usually has two main drawbacks: 1) requiring HRMS for supervised learning; and 2) simply ignoring the latent relation between the MS and PAN image and fusing them directly. To solve these problems, we propose a novel unsupervised network based on learnable degradation processes, dubbed as LDP-Net. A reblurring block and a graying block are designed to learn the corresponding degradation processes, respectively. In addition, a novel hybrid loss function is proposed to constrain both spatial and spectral consistency between the pansharpened image and the PAN and LRMS images at different resolutions. Experiments on Worldview2 and Worldview3 images demonstrate that our proposed LDP-Net can fuse PAN and LRMS images effectively without the help of HRMS samples, achieving promising performance in terms of both qualitative visual effects and quantitative metrics.

Positron emission tomography (PET) reconstruction has become an ill-posed inverse problem due to low-count projection data, and a robust algorithm is urgently required to improve imaging quality. Recently, the deep image prior (DIP) has drawn much attention and has been successfully applied in several image restoration tasks, such as denoising and inpainting, since it does not need any labels (reference image). However, overfitting is a vital defect of this framework. Hence, many methods have been proposed to mitigate this problem, and DeepRED is a typical representation that combines DIP and regularization by denoising (RED). In this article, we leverage DeepRED from a Bayesian perspective to reconstruct PET images from a single corrupted sinogram without any supervised or auxiliary information. In contrast to the conventional denoisers customarily used in RED, a DnCNN-like denoiser, which can add an adaptive constraint to DIP and facilitate the computation of derivation, is employed. Moreover, to further enhance the regularization, Gaussian noise is injected into the gradient updates, deriving a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler. Experimental studies on brain and whole-body datasets demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve better performance in terms of qualitative and quantitative results compared to several classic and state-of-the-art methods.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisition, reconstruction, and segmentation are usually processed independently in the conventional practice of MRI workflow. It is easy to notice that there are significant relevances among these tasks and this procedure artificially cuts off these potential connections, which may lead to losing clinically important information for the final diagnosis. To involve these potential relations for further performance improvement, a sequential multi-task joint learning network model is proposed to train a combined end-to-end pipeline in a differentiable way, aiming at exploring the mutual influence among those tasks simultaneously. Our design consists of three cascaded modules: 1) deep sampling pattern learning module optimizes the $k$-space sampling pattern with predetermined sampling rate; 2) deep reconstruction module is dedicated to reconstructing MR images from the undersampled data using the learned sampling pattern; 3) deep segmentation module encodes MR images reconstructed from the previous module to segment the interested tissues. The proposed model retrieves the latently interactive and cyclic relations among those tasks, from which each task will be mutually beneficial. The proposed framework is verified on MRB dataset, which achieves superior performance on other SOTA methods in terms of both reconstruction and segmentation., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures

Purpose: Different Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modalities of the same anatomical structure are required to present different pathological information from the physical level for diagnostic needs. However, it is often difficult to obtain full-sequence MRI images of patients owing to limitations such as time consumption and high cost. The purpose of this work is to develop an algorithm for target MRI sequences prediction with high accuracy, and provide more information for clinical diagnosis. Methods: We propose a deep learning based multi-modal computing model for MRI synthesis with feature disentanglement strategy. To take full advantage of the complementary information provided by different modalities, multi-modal MRI sequences are utilized as input. Notably, the proposed approach decomposes each input modality into modality-invariant space with shared information and modality-specific space with specific information, so that features are extracted separately to effectively process the input data. Subsequently, both of them are fused through the adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN) layer in the decoder. In addition, to address the lack of specific information of the target modality in the test phase, a local adaptive fusion (LAF) module is adopted to generate a modality-like pseudo-target with specific information similar to the ground truth. Results: To evaluate the synthesis performance, we verify our method on the BRATS2015 dataset of 164 subjects. The experimental results demonstrate our approach significantly outperforms the benchmark method and other state-of-the-art medical image synthesis methods in both quantitative and qualitative measures. Compared with the pix2pixGANs method, the PSNR improves from 23.68 to 24.8. Conclusion: The proposed method could be effective in prediction of target MRI sequences, and useful for clinical diagnosis and treatment.

Due to the presence of metallic implants, the imaging quality of computed tomography (CT) would be heavily degraded. With the rapid development of deep learning, several network models have been proposed for metal artifact reduction (MAR). Since the dual-domain MAR methods can leverage the hybrid information from both sinogram and image domains, they have significantly improved the performance compared to single-domain methods. However,current dual-domain methods usually operate on both domains in a specific order, which implicitly imposes a certain priority prior into MAR and may ignore the latent information interaction between both domains. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel interactive dualdomain parallel network for CT MAR, dubbed as IDOLNet. Different from existing dual-domain methods, the proposed IDOL-Net is composed of two modules. The disentanglement module is utilized to generate high-quality prior sinogram and image as the complementary inputs. The follow-up refinement module consists of two parallel and interactive branches that simultaneously operate on image and sinogram domain, fully exploiting the latent information interaction between both domains. The simulated and clinical results demonstrate that the proposed IDOL-Net outperforms several state-of-the-art models in both qualitative and quantitative aspects., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures

Lowering the radiation dose in computed tomography (CT) can greatly reduce the potential risk to public health. However, the reconstructed images from the dose-reduced CT or low-dose CT (LDCT) suffer from severe noise, compromising the subsequent diagnosis and analysis. Recently, convolutional neural networks have achieved promising results in removing noise from LDCT images; the network architectures used are either handcrafted or built on top of conventional networks such as ResNet and U-Net. Recent advance on neural network architecture search (NAS) has proved that the network architecture has a dramatic effect on the model performance, which indicates that current network architectures for LDCT may be sub-optimal. Therefore, in this paper, we make the first attempt to apply NAS to LDCT and propose a multi-scale and multi-level NAS for LDCT denoising, termed MANAS. On the one hand, the proposed MANAS fuses features extracted by different scale cells to capture multi-scale image structural details. On the other hand, the proposed MANAS can search a hybrid cell- and network-level structure for better performance. Extensively experimental results on three different dose levels demonstrate that the proposed MANAS can achieve better performance in terms of preserving image structural details than several state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we also validate the effectiveness of the multi-scale and multi-level architecture for LDCT denoising.

Hyperspectral Image(HSI) classification is the most vibrant field of research in the hyperspectral community, which aims to assign each pixel in the image to one certain category based on its spectral-spatial characteristics. Recently, some spectral-spatial-feature based DCNNs have been proposed and demonstrated remarkable classification performance. When facing a real HSI, however, these Networks have to deal with the pixels in the image one by one. The pixel-wise processing strategy is inefficient since there are numerous repeated calculations between adjacent pixels. In this paper, firstly, a brand new Network design mechanism TPPI (training based on pixel and prediction based on image) is proposed for HSI classification, which makes it possible to provide efficient and practical HSI classification with the restrictive conditions attached to the hyperspectral dataset. And then, according to the TPPI mechanism, TPPI-Net is derived based on the state of the art networks for HSI classification. Experimental results show that the proposed TPPI-Net can not only obtain high classification accuracy equivalent to the state of the art networks for HSI classification, but also greatly reduce the computational complexity of hyperspectral image prediction.

Metal implants can heavily attenuate X-rays in computed tomography (CT) scans, leading to severe artifacts in reconstructed images, which significantly jeopardize image quality and negatively impact subsequent diagnoses and treatment planning. With the rapid development of deep learning in the field of medical imaging, several network models have been proposed for metal artifact reduction (MAR) in CT. Despite the encouraging results achieved by these methods, there is still much room to further improve performance. In this paper, a novel Dual-domain Adaptive-scaling Non-local network (DAN-Net) for MAR. We correct the corrupted sinogram using adaptive scaling first to preserve more tissue and bone details as a more informative input. Then, an end-to-end dual-domain network is adopted to successively process the sinogram and its corresponding reconstructed image generated by the analytical reconstruction layer. In addition, to better suppress the existing artifacts and restrain the potential secondary artifacts caused by inaccurate results of the sinogram-domain network, a novel residual sinogram learning strategy and nonlocal module are leveraged in the proposed network model. In the experiments, the proposed DAN-Net demonstrates performance competitive with several state-of-the-art MAR methods in both qualitative and quantitative aspects., Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures

Compressed sensing (CS) computed tomography has been proven to be important for several clinical applications, such as sparse-view computed tomography (CT), digital tomosynthesis and interior tomography. Traditional compressed sensing focuses on the design of handcrafted prior regularizers, which are usually image-dependent and time-consuming. Inspired by recently proposed deep learning-based CT reconstruction models, we extend the state-of-the-art LEARN model to a dual-domain version, dubbed LEARN++. Different from existing iteration unrolling methods, which only involve projection data in the data consistency layer, the proposed LEARN++ model integrates two parallel and interactive subnetworks to perform image restoration and sinogram inpainting operations on both the image and projection domains simultaneously, which can fully explore the latent relations between projection data and reconstructed images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LEARN++ model achieves competitive qualitative and quantitative results compared to several state-of-the-art methods in terms of both artifact reduction and detail preservation., Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures

Spectral computed tomography (CT) can reconstruct spectral images from different energy bins using photon counting detectors (PCDs). However, due to the limited photons and counting rate in the corresponding spectral fraction, the reconstructed spectral images usually suffer from severe noise. In this paper, a fourth-order nonlocal tensor decomposition model for spectral CT image reconstruction (FONT-SIR) method is proposed. Similar patches are collected in both spatial and spectral dimensions simultaneously to form the basic tensor unit. Additionally, principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to extract latent features from the patches for a robust and efficient similarity measure. Then, low-rank and sparsity decomposition is performed on the produced fourth-order tensor unit, and the weighted nuclear norm and total variation (TV) norm are used to enforce the low-rank and sparsity constraints, respectively. The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is adopted to optimize the objective function. The experimental results with our proposed FONT-SIR demonstrates a superior qualitative and quantitative performance for both simulated and real data sets relative to several state-of-the-art methods, in terms of noise suppression and detail preservation., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Current mainstream of CT reconstruction methods based on deep learning usually needs to fix the scanning geometry and dose level, which will significantly aggravate the training cost and need more training data for clinical application. In this paper, we propose a parameter-dependent framework (PDF) which trains data with multiple scanning geometries and dose levels simultaneously. In the proposed PDF, the geometry and dose level are parameterized and fed into two multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). The MLPs are leveraged to modulate the feature maps of CT reconstruction network, which condition the network outputs on different scanning geometries and dose levels. The experiments show that our proposed method can obtain competing performance similar to the original network trained with specific geometry and dose level, which can efficiently save the extra training cost for multiple scanning geometries and dose levels., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures

With the increasing amounts of high-dimensional heterogeneous data to be processed, multi-modality feature selection has become an important research direction in medical image analysis. Traditional methods usually depict the data structure using fixed and predefined similarity matrix for each modality separately, without considering the potential relationship structure across different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modality feature selection method, which performs feature selection and local similarity learning simultaniously. Specially, a similarity matrix is learned by jointly considering different imaging modalities. And at the same time, feature selection is conducted by imposing sparse l_{2, 1} norm constraint. The effectiveness of our proposed joint learning method can be well demonstrated by the experimental results on Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset, which outperforms existing the state-of-the-art multi-modality approaches., Comment: 27 pages, 10 figures

Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scans, which can effectively alleviate the radiation problem, will degrade the imaging quality. In this paper, we propose a novel LDCT reconstruction network that unrolls the iterative scheme and performs in both image and manifold spaces. Because patch manifolds of medical images have low-dimensional structures, we can build graphs from the manifolds. Then, we simultaneously leverage the spatial convolution to extract the local pixel-level features from the images and incorporate the graph convolution to analyze the nonlocal topological features in manifold space. The experiments show that our proposed method outperforms both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of state-of-the-art methods. In addition, aided by a projection loss component, our proposed method also demonstrates superior performance for semi-supervised learning. The network can remove most noise while maintaining the details of only 10% (40 slices) of the training data labeled., Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures. Submitted for possible publication

Due to its noninvasive character, optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become a popular diagnostic method in clinical settings. However, the low-coherence interferometric imaging procedure is inevitably contaminated by heavy speckle noise, which impairs both visual quality and diagnosis of various ocular diseases. Although deep learning has been applied for image denoising and achieved promising results, the lack of well-registered clean and noisy image pairs makes it impractical for supervised learning-based approaches to achieve satisfactory OCT image denoising results. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised OCT image speckle reduction algorithm that does not rely on well-registered image pairs. Specifically, by employing the ideas of disentangled representation and generative adversarial network, the proposed method first disentangles the noisy image into content and noise spaces by corresponding encoders. Then, the generator is used to predict the denoised OCT image with the extracted content features. In addition, the noise patches cropped from the noisy image are utilized to facilitate more accurate disentanglement. Extensive experiments have been conducted, and the results suggest that our proposed method is superior to the classic methods and demonstrates competitive performance to several recently proposed learning-based approaches in both quantitative and qualitative aspects.

Moving object detection is critical for automated video analysis in many vision-related tasks, such as surveillance tracking, video compression coding, etc. Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA), as one of the most popular moving object modelling methods, aims to separate the temporally varying (i.e., moving) foreground objects from the static background in video, assuming the background frames to be low-rank while the foreground to be spatially sparse. Classic RPCA imposes sparsity of the foreground component using l1-norm, and minimizes the modeling error via 2-norm. We show that such assumptions can be too restrictive in practice, which limits the effectiveness of the classic RPCA, especially when processing videos with dynamic background, camera jitter, camouflaged moving object, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel RPCA-based model, called Hyper RPCA, to detect moving objects on the fly. Different from classic RPCA, the proposed Hyper RPCA jointly applies the maximum correntropy criterion (MCC) for the modeling error, and Laplacian scale mixture (LSM) model for foreground objects. Extensive experiments have been conducted, and the results demonstrate that the proposed Hyper RPCA has competitive performance for foreground detection to the state-of-the-art algorithms on several well-known benchmark datasets.

Precise and accurate segmentation of the most common head-and-neck tumor, nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), in MRI sheds light on treatment and regulatory decisions making. However, the large variations in the lesion size and shape of NPC, boundary ambiguity, as well as the limited available annotated samples conspire NPC segmentation in MRI towards a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a Dense SegU-net (DSU-net) framework for automatic NPC segmentation in MRI. Our contribution is threefold. First, different from the traditional decoder in U-net using upconvolution for upsamling, we argue that the restoration from low resolution features to high resolution output should be capable of preserving information significant for precise boundary localization. Hence, we use unpooling to unsample and propose SegU-net. Second, to combat the potential vanishing-gradient problem, we introduce dense blocks which can facilitate feature propagation and reuse. Third, using only cross entropy (CE) as loss function may bring about troubles such as miss-prediction, therefore we propose to use a loss function comprised of both CE loss and Dice loss to train the network. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons are carried out extensively on in-house datasets, the experimental results show that our proposed architecture outperforms the existing state-of-the-art segmentation networks., Comment: This research needs to be advanced in the future

Compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) is a theoretical framework that can accurately reconstruct images from undersampled k-space data with a much lower sampling rate than the one set by the classical Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. Therefore, CS-MRI can efficiently accelerate acquisition time and relieve the psychological burden on patients while maintaining high imaging quality. The problems with traditional CS-MRI reconstruction are solved by iterative numerical solvers, which usually suffer from expensive computational cost and the lack of accurate handcrafted priori. In this paper, inspired by deep learning's (DL's) fast inference and excellent end-to-end performance, we propose a novel cascaded convolutional neural network called MD-Recon-Net to facilitate fast and accurate MRI reconstruction. Especially, different from existing DL-based methods, which operate on single domain data or both domains in a certain order, our proposed MD-Recon-Net contains two parallel and interactive branches that simultaneously perform on k-space and spatial-domain data, exploring the latent relationship between k-space and the spatial domain. The simulated experimental results show that the proposed method not only achieves competitive visual effects to several state-of-the-art methods, but also outperforms other DL-based methods in terms of model scale and computational cost., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Sciences

Over the past few years, dictionary learning (DL)-based methods have been successfully used in various image reconstruction problems. However, traditional DL-based computed tomography (CT) reconstruction methods are patch-based and ignore the consistency of pixels in overlapped patches. In addition, the features learned by these methods always contain shifted versions of the same features. In recent years, convolutional sparse coding (CSC) has been developed to address these problems. In this paper, inspired by several successful applications of CSC in the field of signal processing, we explore the potential of CSC in sparse-view CT reconstruction. By directly working on the whole image, without the necessity of dividing the image into overlapped patches in DL-based methods, the proposed methods can maintain more details and avoid artifacts caused by patch aggregation. With predetermined filters, an alternating scheme is developed to optimize the objective function. Extensive experiments with simulated and real CT data were performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve better performance than several existing state-of-the-art methods., Comment: Accepted by IEEE TMI

Traditional dictionary learning based CT reconstruction methods are patch-based and the features learned with these methods often contain shifted versions of the same features. To deal with these problems, the convolutional sparse coding (CSC) has been proposed and introduced into various applications. In this paper, inspired by the successful applications of CSC in the field of signal processing, we propose a novel sparse-view CT reconstruction method based on CSC with gradient regularization on feature maps. By directly working on whole image, which need not to divide the image into overlapped patches like dictionary learning based methods, the proposed method can maintain more details and avoid the artifacts caused by patch aggregation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has better performance than several existing algorithms in both qualitative and quantitative aspects.

Structure-preserved denoising of 3D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images is a critical step in medical image analysis. Over the past few years, many algorithms with impressive performances have been proposed. In this paper, inspired by the idea of deep learning, we introduce an MRI denoising method based on the residual encoder-decoder Wasserstein generative adversarial network (RED-WGAN). Specifically, to explore the structure similarity between neighboring slices, a 3D configuration is utilized as the basic processing unit. Residual autoencoders combined with deconvolution operations are introduced into the generator network. Furthermore, to alleviate the oversmoothing shortcoming of the traditional mean squared error (MSE) loss function, the perceptual similarity, which is implemented by calculating the distances in the feature space extracted by a pretrained VGG-19 network, is incorporated with the MSE and adversarial losses to form the new loss function. Extensive experiments are implemented to assess the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed RED-WGAN achieves performance superior to several state-of-the-art methods in both simulated and real clinical data. In particular, our method demonstrates powerful abilities in both noise suppression and structure preservation., Comment: To appear on Medical Image Analysis. 29 pages, 15 figures, 7 tables

Classical total variation (TV) based iterative reconstruction algorithms assume that the signal is piecewise smooth, which causes reconstruction results to suffer from the over-smoothing effect. To address this problem, this work presents a novel computed tomography (CT) reconstruction method for the few-view problem called the group-sparsity regularization-based simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (GSR-SART). Group-based sparse representation, which utilizes the concept of a group as the basic unit of sparse representation instead of a patch, is introduced as the image domain prior regularization term to eliminate the over-smoothing effect. By grouping the nonlocal patches into different clusters with similarity measured by Euclidean distance, the sparsity and nonlocal similarity in a single image are simultaneously explored. The split Bregman iteration algorithm is applied to obtain the numerical scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that our method both qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms several existing reconstruction methods, including filtered back projection, expectation maximization, SART, and TV-based projections onto convex sets., Comment: submitted to IJNMBE