pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
3D Graph Anatomy Geometry-Integrated Network for Pancreatic Mass Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Quantitative Patient Management
Authors: Tianyi Zhao, Kai Cao, Jiawen Yao, Isabella Nogues, Le Lu, Lingyun Huang, Jing Xiao, Zhaozheng Yin, Ling Zhang
Date: 2020-12-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Anatomy, General Classification, Management, Segmentation, Specificity

The pancreatic disease taxonomy includes ten types of masses (tumors or cysts)[20,8]. Previous work focuses on developing segmentation or classification methods only for certain mass types. Differential diagnosis of all mass types is clinically highly desirable [20] but has not been investigated using an automated image understanding approach. We exploit the feasibility to distinguish pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) from the nine other nonPDAC masses using multi-phase CT imaging. Both image appearance and the 3D organ-mass geometry relationship are critical. We propose a holistic segmentation-mesh-classification network (SMCN) to provide patient-level diagnosis, by fully utilizing the geometry and location information, which is accomplished by combining the anatomical structure and the semantic detection-by-segmentation network. SMCN learns the pancreas and mass segmentation task and builds an anatomical correspondence-aware organ mesh model by progressively deforming a pancreas prototype on the raw segmentation mask (i.e., mask-to-mesh). A new graph-based residual convolutional network (Graph-ResNet), whose nodes fuse the information of the mesh model and feature vectors extracted from the segmentation network, is developed to produce the patient-level differential classification results. Extensive experiments on 661 patients' CT scans (five phases per patient) show that SMCN can improve the mass segmentation and detection accuracy compared to the strong baseline method nnUNet (e.g., for nonPDAC, Dice: 0.611 vs. 0.478; detection rate: 89% vs. 70%), achieve similar sensitivity and specificity in differentiating PDAC and nonPDAC as expert radiologists (i.e., 94% and 90%), and obtain results comparable to a multimodality test [20] that combines clinical, imaging, and molecular testing for clinical management of patients.
Edited Media Understanding Frames: Reasoning About the Intent and Implications of Visual Misinformation
Authors: Jeff Da, Maxwell Forbes, Rowan Zellers, Anthony Zheng, Jena D. Hwang, Antoine Bosselut, Yejin Choi
Date: 2020-12-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Misinformation

Multimodal disinformation, from 'deepfakes' to simple edits that deceive, is an important societal problem. Yet at the same time, the vast majority of media edits are harmless -- such as a filtered vacation photo. The difference between this example, and harmful edits that spread disinformation, is one of intent. Recognizing and describing this intent is a major challenge for today's AI systems. We present the task of Edited Media Understanding, requiring models to answer open-ended questions that capture the intent and implications of an image edit. We introduce a dataset for our task, EMU, with 48k question-answer pairs written in rich natural language. We evaluate a wide variety of vision-and-language models for our task, and introduce a new model PELICAN, which builds upon recent progress in pretrained multimodal representations. Our model obtains promising results on our dataset, with humans rating its answers as accurate 40.35% of the time. At the same time, there is still much work to be done -- humans prefer human-annotated captions 93.56% of the time -- and we provide analysis that highlights areas for further progress.
2-Step Sparse-View CT Reconstruction with a Domain-Specific Perceptual Network
Authors: Haoyu Wei, Florian Schiffers, Tobias Würfl, Daming Shen, Daniel Kim, Aggelos K. Katsaggelos, Oliver Cossairt
Date: 2020-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: CT Reconstruction, Super-Resolution

Computed tomography is widely used to examine internal structures in a non-destructive manner. To obtain high-quality reconstructions, one typically has to acquire a densely sampled trajectory to avoid angular undersampling. However, many scenarios require a sparse-view measurement leading to streak-artifacts if unaccounted for. Current methods do not make full use of the domain-specific information, and hence fail to provide reliable reconstructions for highly undersampled data. We present a novel framework for sparse-view tomography by decoupling the reconstruction into two steps: First, we overcome its ill-posedness using a super-resolution network, SIN, trained on the sparse projections. The intermediate result allows for a closed-form tomographic reconstruction with preserved details and highly reduced streak-artifacts. Second, a refinement network, PRN, trained on the reconstructions reduces any remaining artifacts. We further propose a light-weight variant of the perceptual-loss that enhances domain-specific information, boosting restoration accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate an improvement over current solutions by 4 dB.
Conditional Generation of Medical Images via Disentangled Adversarial Inference
Authors: Mohammad Havaei, Ximeng Mao, Yiping Wang, Qicheng Lao
Date: 2020-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Disentanglement, Image Generation, Medical Image Generation

Synthetic medical image generation has a huge potential for improving healthcare through many applications, from data augmentation for training machine learning systems to preserving patient privacy. Conditional Adversarial Generative Networks (cGANs) use a conditioning factor to generate images and have shown great success in recent years. Intuitively, the information in an image can be divided into two parts: 1) content which is presented through the conditioning vector and 2) style which is the undiscovered information missing from the conditioning vector. Current practices in using cGANs for medical image generation, only use a single variable for image generation (i.e., content) and therefore, do not provide much flexibility nor control over the generated image. In this work we propose a methodology to learn from the image itself, disentangled representations of style and content, and use this information to impose control over the generation process. In this framework, style is learned in a fully unsupervised manner, while content is learned through both supervised learning (using the conditioning vector) and unsupervised learning (with the inference mechanism). We undergo two novel regularization steps to ensure content-style disentanglement. First, we minimize the shared information between content and style by introducing a novel application of the gradient reverse layer (GRL); second, we introduce a self-supervised regularization method to further separate information in the content and style variables. We show that in general, two latent variable models achieve better performance and give more control over the generated image. We also show that our proposed model (DRAI) achieves the best disentanglement score and has the best overall performance.
Machine Learning for Cataract Classification and Grading on Ophthalmic Imaging Modalities: A Survey
Authors: Xiaoqing Zhang, Yan Hu, Zunjie Xiao, Jiansheng Fang, Risa Higashita, Jiang Liu
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Classification, General Classification, Survey

Cataracts are the leading cause of visual impairment and blindness globally. Over the years, researchers have achieved significant progress in developing state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for automatic cataract classification and grading, aiming to prevent cataracts early and improve clinicians' diagnosis efficiency. This survey provides a comprehensive survey of recent advances in machine learning techniques for cataract classification/grading based on ophthalmic images. We summarize existing literature from two research directions: conventional machine learning methods and deep learning methods. This survey also provides insights into existing works of both merits and limitations. In addition, we discuss several challenges of automatic cataract classification/grading based on machine learning techniques and present possible solutions to these challenges for future research.
Skillearn: Machine Learning Inspired by Humans' Learning Skills
Authors: Pengtao Xie, Xuefeng Du, Hao Ban
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Neural Architecture Search

Humans, as the most powerful learners on the planet, have accumulated a lot of learning skills, such as learning through tests, interleaving learning, self-explanation, active recalling, to name a few. These learning skills and methodologies enable humans to learn new topics more effectively and efficiently. We are interested in investigating whether humans' learning skills can be borrowed to help machines to learn better. Specifically, we aim to formalize these skills and leverage them to train better machine learning (ML) models. To achieve this goal, we develop a general framework -- Skillearn, which provides a principled way to represent humans' learning skills mathematically and use the formally-represented skills to improve the training of ML models. In two case studies, we apply Skillearn to formalize two learning skills of humans: learning by passing tests and interleaving learning, and use the formalized skills to improve neural architecture search. Experiments on various datasets show that trained using the skills formalized by Skillearn, ML models achieve significantly better performance.
Discovering Clinically Meaningful Shape Features for the Analysis of Tumor Pathology Images
Authors: Esteban Fernández Morales, Cong Zhang, Guanghua Xiao, Chul Moon, Qiwei Li
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

With the advanced imaging technology, digital pathology imaging of tumor tissue slides is becoming a routine clinical procedure for cancer diagnosis. This process produces massive imaging data that capture histological details in high resolution. Recent developments in deep-learning methods have enabled us to automatically detect and characterize the tumor regions in pathology images at large scale. From each identified tumor region, we extracted 30 well-defined descriptors that quantify its shape, geometry, and topology. We demonstrated how those descriptor features were associated with patient survival outcome in lung adenocarcinoma patients from the National Lung Screening Trial (n=143). Besides, a descriptor-based prognostic model was developed and validated in an independent patient cohort from The Cancer Genome Atlas Program program (n=318). This study proposes new insights into the relationship between tumor shape, geometrical, and topological features and patient prognosis. We provide software in the form of R code on GitHub: https://github.com/estfernandez/Slide_Image_Segmentation_and_Extraction.
Annotation-efficient deep learning for automatic medical image segmentation
Authors: Shanshan Wang, Cheng Li, Rongpin Wang, Zaiyi Liu, Meiyun Wang, Hongna Tan, Yaping Wu, Xinfeng Liu, Hui Sun, Rui Yang, Xin Liu, Jie Chen, Huihui Zhou, Ismail Ben Ayed, Hairong Zheng
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Automatic medical image segmentation plays a critical role in scientific research and medical care. Existing high-performance deep learning methods typically rely on large training datasets with high-quality manual annotations, which are difficult to obtain in many clinical applications. Here, we introduce Annotation-effIcient Deep lEarning (AIDE), an open-source framework to handle imperfect training datasets. Methodological analyses and empirical evaluations are conducted, and we demonstrate that AIDE surpasses conventional fully-supervised models by presenting better performance on open datasets possessing scarce or noisy annotations. We further test AIDE in a real-life case study for breast tumor segmentation. Three datasets containing 11,852 breast images from three medical centers are employed, and AIDE, utilizing 10% training annotations, consistently produces segmentation maps comparable to those generated by fully-supervised counterparts or provided by independent radiologists. The 10-fold enhanced efficiency in utilizing expert labels has the potential to promote a wide range of biomedical applications.
ESAD: End-to-end Deep Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection
Authors: Chaoqin Huang, Fei Ye, Peisen Zhao, Ya zhang, Yan-Feng Wang, Qi Tian
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Decoder, Medical Diagnosis, Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection, Supervised Anomaly Detection

This paper explores semi-supervised anomaly detection, a more practical setting for anomaly detection where a small additional set of labeled samples are provided. We propose a new KL-divergence based objective function for semi-supervised anomaly detection, and show that two factors: the mutual information between the data and latent representations, and the entropy of latent representations, constitute an integral objective function for anomaly detection. To resolve the contradiction in simultaneously optimizing the two factors, we propose a novel encoder-decoder-encoder structure, with the first encoder focusing on optimizing the mutual information and the second encoder focusing on optimizing the entropy. The two encoders are enforced to share similar encoding with a consistent constraint on their latent representations. Extensive experiments have revealed that the proposed method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-arts on multiple benchmark datasets, including medical diagnosis and several classic anomaly detection benchmarks.
Conjugate Mixture Models for Clustering Multimodal Data
Authors: Vasil Khalidov, Florence Forbes, Radu Horaud
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, global-optimization, Model Selection

The problem of multimodal clustering arises whenever the data are gathered with several physically different sensors. Observations from different modalities are not necessarily aligned in the sense there there is no obvious way to associate or to compare them in some common space. A solution may consist in considering multiple clustering tasks independently for each modality. The main difficulty with such an approach is to guarantee that the unimodal clusterings are mutually consistent. In this paper we show that multimodal clustering can be addressed within a novel framework, namely conjugate mixture models. These models exploit the explicit transformations that are often available between an unobserved parameter space (objects) and each one of the observation spaces (sensors). We formulate the problem as a likelihood maximization task and we derive the associated conjugate expectation-maximization algorithm. The convergence properties of the proposed algorithm are thoroughly investigated. Several local/global optimization techniques are proposed in order to increase its convergence speed. Two initialization strategies are proposed and compared. A consistent model-selection criterion is proposed. The algorithm and its variants are tested and evaluated within the task of 3D localization of several speakers using both auditory and visual data.
Automated Scoring of Nuclear Pleomorphism Spectrum with Pathologist-level Performance in Breast Cancer
Authors: Caner Mercan, Maschenka Balkenhol, Roberto Salgado, Mark Sherman, Philippe Vielh, Willem Vreuls, Antonio Polonia, Hugo M. Horlings, Wilko Weichert, Jodi M. Carter, Peter Bult, Matthias Christgen, Carsten Denkert, Koen van de Vijver, Jeroen van der Laak, Francesco Ciompi
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: whole slide images

Nuclear pleomorphism, defined herein as the extent of abnormalities in the overall appearance of tumor nuclei, is one of the components of the three-tiered breast cancer grading. Given that nuclear pleomorphism reflects a continuous spectrum of variation, we trained a deep neural network on a large variety of tumor regions from the collective knowledge of several pathologists, without constraining the network to the traditional three-category classification. We also motivate an additional approach in which we discuss the additional benefit of normal epithelium as baseline, following the routine clinical practice where pathologists are trained to score nuclear pleomorphism in tumor, having the normal breast epithelium for comparison. In multiple experiments, our fully-automated approach could achieve top pathologist-level performance in select regions of interest as well as at whole slide images, compared to ten and four pathologists, respectively.
Driving Behavior Explanation with Multi-level Fusion
Authors: Hédi Ben-Younes, Éloi Zablocki, Patrick Pérez, Matthieu Cord
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Trajectory Prediction

In this era of active development of autonomous vehicles, it becomes crucial to provide driving systems with the capacity to explain their decisions. In this work, we focus on generating high-level driving explanations as the vehicle drives. We present BEEF, for BEhavior Explanation with Fusion, a deep architecture which explains the behavior of a trajectory prediction model. Supervised by annotations of human driving decisions justifications, BEEF learns to fuse features from multiple levels. Leveraging recent advances in the multi-modal fusion literature, BEEF is carefully designed to model the correlations between high-level decisions features and mid-level perceptual features. The flexibility and efficiency of our approach are validated with extensive experiments on the HDD and BDD-X datasets.
COVID-19 Detection in Chest X-Ray Images using a New Channel Boosted CNN
Authors: Saddam Hussain Khan, Anabia Sohail, Asifullah Khan
Date: 2020-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Transfer Learning

COVID-19 is a highly contagious respiratory infection that has affected a large population across the world and continues with its devastating consequences. It is imperative to detect COVID-19 at the earliest to limit the span of infection. In this work, a new classification technique CB-STM-RENet based on deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Channel Boosting is proposed for the screening of COVID-19 in chest X-Rays. In this connection, to learn the COVID-19 specific radiographic patterns, a new convolution block based on split-transform-merge (STM) is developed. This new block systematically incorporates region and edge-based operations at each branch to capture the diverse set of features at various levels, especially those related to region homogeneity, textural variations, and boundaries of the infected region. The learning and discrimination capability of the proposed CNN architecture is enhanced by exploiting the Channel Boosting idea that concatenates the auxiliary channels along with the original channels. The auxiliary channels are generated from the pre-trained CNNs using Transfer Learning. The effectiveness of the proposed technique CB-STM-RENet is evaluated on three different datasets of chest X-Rays namely CoV-Healthy-6k, CoV-NonCoV-10k, and CoV-NonCoV-15k. The performance comparison of the proposed CB-STM-RENet with the existing techniques exhibits high performance both in discriminating COVID-19 chest infections from Healthy, as well as, other types of chest infections. CB-STM-RENet provides the highest performance on all these three datasets; especially on the stringent CoV-NonCoV-15k dataset. The good detection rate (97%), and high precision (93%) of the proposed technique suggest that it can be adapted for the diagnosis of COVID-19 infected patients. The test code is available at https://github.com/PRLAB21/COVID-19-Detection-System-using-Chest-X-Ray-Images.
Towards Zero-shot Cross-lingual Image Retrieval
Authors: Pranav Aggarwal, Ajinkya Kale
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

There has been a recent spike in interest in multi-modal Language and Vision problems. On the language side, most of these models primarily focus on English since most multi-modal datasets are monolingual. We try to bridge this gap with a zero-shot approach for learning multi-modal representations using cross-lingual pre-training on the text side. We present a simple yet practical approach for building a cross-lingual image retrieval model which trains on a monolingual training dataset but can be used in a zero-shot cross-lingual fashion during inference. We also introduce a new objective function which tightens the text embedding clusters by pushing dissimilar texts from each other. Finally, we introduce a new 1K multi-lingual MSCOCO2014 caption test dataset (XTD10) in 7 languages that we collected using a crowdsourcing platform. We use this as the test set for evaluating zero-shot model performance across languages. XTD10 dataset is made publicly available here: https://github.com/adobe-research/Cross-lingual-Test-Dataset-XTD10
Convex Regularization Behind Neural Reconstruction
Authors: Arda Sahiner, Morteza Mardani, Batu Ozturkler, Mert Pilanci, John Pauly
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Denoising

Neural networks have shown tremendous potential for reconstructing high-resolution images in inverse problems. The non-convex and opaque nature of neural networks, however, hinders their utility in sensitive applications such as medical imaging. To cope with this challenge, this paper advocates a convex duality framework that makes a two-layer fully-convolutional ReLU denoising network amenable to convex optimization. The convex dual network not only offers the optimum training with convex solvers, but also facilitates interpreting training and prediction. In particular, it implies training neural networks with weight decay regularization induces path sparsity while the prediction is piecewise linear filtering. A range of experiments with MNIST and fastMRI datasets confirm the efficacy of the dual network optimization problem.
Spectral clustering via adaptive layer aggregation for multi-layer networks
Authors: Sihan Huang, Haolei Weng, Yang Feng
Date: 2020-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Community Detection

One of the fundamental problems in network analysis is detecting community structure in multi-layer networks, of which each layer represents one type of edge information among the nodes. We propose integrative spectral clustering approaches based on effective convex layer aggregations. Our aggregation methods are strongly motivated by a delicate asymptotic analysis of the spectral embedding of weighted adjacency matrices and the downstream $k$-means clustering, in a challenging regime where community detection consistency is impossible. In fact, the methods are shown to estimate the optimal convex aggregation, which minimizes the mis-clustering error under some specialized multi-layer network models. Our analysis further suggests that clustering using Gaussian mixture models is generally superior to the commonly used $k$-means in spectral clustering. Extensive numerical studies demonstrate that our adaptive aggregation techniques, together with Gaussian mixture model clustering, make the new spectral clustering remarkably competitive compared to several popularly used methods.