pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SuperVessel: Segmenting High-resolution Vessel from Low-resolution Retinal Image
Authors: Yan Hu, Zhongxi Qiu, Dan Zeng, Li Jiang, Chen Lin, Jiang Liu
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Vascular segmentation extracts blood vessels from images and serves as the basis for diagnosing various diseases, like ophthalmic diseases. Ophthalmologists often require high-resolution segmentation results for analysis, which leads to super-computational load by most existing methods. If based on low-resolution input, they easily ignore tiny vessels or cause discontinuity of segmented vessels. To solve these problems, the paper proposes an algorithm named SuperVessel, which gives out high-resolution and accurate vessel segmentation using low-resolution images as input. We first take super-resolution as our auxiliary branch to provide potential high-resolution detail features, which can be deleted in the test phase. Secondly, we propose two modules to enhance the features of the interested segmentation region, including an upsampling with feature decomposition (UFD) module and a feature interaction module (FIM) with a constraining loss to focus on the interested features. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed SuperVessel can segment more tiny vessels with higher segmentation accuracy IoU over 6%, compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms. Besides, the stability of SuperVessel is also stronger than other algorithms. We will release the code after the paper is published.
Real Image Restoration via Structure-preserving Complementarity Attention
Authors: Yuanfan Zhang, Gen Li, Lei Sun
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Image Restoration, SSIM

Since convolutional neural networks perform well in learning generalizable image priors from large-scale data, these models have been widely used in image denoising tasks. However, the computational complexity increases dramatically as well on complex model. In this paper, We propose a novel lightweight Complementary Attention Module, which includes a density module and a sparse module, which can cooperatively mine dense and sparse features for feature complementary learning to build an efficient lightweight architecture. Moreover, to reduce the loss of details caused by denoising, this paper constructs a gradient-based structure-preserving branch. We utilize gradient-based branches to obtain additional structural priors for denoising, and make the model pay more attention to image geometric details through gradient loss optimization.Based on the above, we propose an efficiently Unet structured network with dual branch, the visual results show that can effectively preserve the structural details of the original image, we evaluate benchmarks including SIDD and DND, where SCANet achieves state-of-the-art performance in PSNR and SSIM while significantly reducing computational cost.
Extraction of Vascular Wall in Carotid Ultrasound via a Novel Boundary-Delineation Network
Authors: Qinghua Huang, Lizhi Jia, Guanqing Ren, Xiaoyi Wang, Chunying Liu
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Optimization, Segmentation

Ultrasound imaging plays an important role in the diagnosis of vascular lesions. Accurate segmentation of the vascular wall is important for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of vascular diseases. However, existing methods have inaccurate localization of the vascular wall boundary. Segmentation errors occur in discontinuous vascular wall boundaries and dark boundaries. To overcome these problems, we propose a new boundary-delineation network (BDNet). We use the boundary refinement module to re-delineate the boundary of the vascular wall to obtain the correct boundary location. We designed the feature extraction module to extract and fuse multi-scale features and different receptive field features to solve the problem of dark boundaries and discontinuous boundaries. We use a new loss function to optimize the model. The interference of class imbalance on model optimization is prevented to obtain finer and smoother boundaries. Finally, to facilitate clinical applications, we design the model to be lightweight. Experimental results show that our model achieves the best segmentation results and significantly reduces memory consumption compared to existing models for the dataset.
Extraction of Coronary Vessels in Fluoroscopic X-Ray Sequences Using Vessel Correspondence Optimization
Authors: Seung Yeon Shin, Soochahn Lee, Kyoung Jin Noh, Il Dong Yun, Kyoung Mu Lee
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00

We present a method to extract coronary vessels from fluoroscopic x-ray sequences. Given the vessel structure for the source frame, vessel correspondence candidates in the subsequent frame are generated by a novel hierarchical search scheme to overcome the aperture problem. Optimal correspondences are determined within a Markov random field optimization framework. Post-processing is performed to extract vessel branches newly visible due to the inflow of contrast agent. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation conducted on a dataset of 18 sequences demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.
3D-Morphomics, Morphological Features on CT scans for lung nodule malignancy diagnosis
Authors: Elias Munoz, Pierre Baudot, Van-Khoa Le, Charles Voyton, Benjamin Renoust, Danny Francis, Vladimir Groza, Jean-Christophe Brisset, Ezequiel Geremia, Antoine Iannessi, Yan Liu, Benoit Huet
Date: 2022-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT)

Pathologies systematically induce morphological changes, thus providing a major but yet insufficiently quantified source of observables for diagnosis. The study develops a predictive model of the pathological states based on morphological features (3D-morphomics) on Computed Tomography (CT) volumes. A complete workflow for mesh extraction and simplification of an organ's surface is developed, and coupled with an automatic extraction of morphological features given by the distribution of mean curvature and mesh energy. An XGBoost supervised classifier is then trained and tested on the 3D-morphomics to predict the pathological states. This framework is applied to the prediction of the malignancy of lung's nodules. On a subset of NLST database with malignancy confirmed biopsy, using 3D-morphomics only, the classification model of lung nodules into malignant vs. benign achieves 0.964 of AUC. Three other sets of classical features are trained and tested, (1) clinical relevant features gives an AUC of 0.58, (2) 111 radiomics gives an AUC of 0.976, (3) radiologist ground truth (GT) containing the nodule size, attenuation and spiculation qualitative annotations gives an AUC of 0.979. We also test the Brock model and obtain an AUC of 0.826. Combining 3D-morphomics and radiomics features achieves state-of-the-art results with an AUC of 0.978 where the 3D-morphomics have some of the highest predictive powers. As a validation on a public independent cohort, models are applied to the LIDC dataset, the 3D-morphomics achieves an AUC of 0.906 and the 3D-morphomics+radiomics achieves an AUC of 0.958, which ranks second in the challenge among deep models. It establishes the curvature distributions as efficient features for predicting lung nodule malignancy and a new method that can be applied directly to arbitrary computer aided diagnosis task.
Deep Learning for Classification of Thyroid Nodules on Ultrasound: Validation on an Independent Dataset
Authors: Jingxi Weng, Benjamin Wildman-Tobriner, Mateusz Buda, Jichen Yang, Lisa M. Ho, Brian C. Allen, Wendy L. Ehieli, Chad M. Miller, Jikai Zhang, Maciej A. Mazurowski
Date: 2022-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Objectives: The purpose is to apply a previously validated deep learning algorithm to a new thyroid nodule ultrasound image dataset and compare its performances with radiologists. Methods: Prior study presented an algorithm which is able to detect thyroid nodules and then make malignancy classifications with two ultrasound images. A multi-task deep convolutional neural network was trained from 1278 nodules and originally tested with 99 separate nodules. The results were comparable with that of radiologists. The algorithm was further tested with 378 nodules imaged with ultrasound machines from different manufacturers and product types than the training cases. Four experienced radiologists were requested to evaluate the nodules for comparison with deep learning. Results: The Area Under Curve (AUC) of the deep learning algorithm and four radiologists were calculated with parametric, binormal estimation. For the deep learning algorithm, the AUC was 0.69 (95% CI: 0.64 - 0.75). The AUC of radiologists were 0.63 (95% CI: 0.59 - 0.67), 0.66 (95% CI:0.61 - 0.71), 0.65 (95% CI: 0.60 - 0.70), and 0.63 (95%CI: 0.58 - 0.67). Conclusion: In the new testing dataset, the deep learning algorithm achieved similar performances with all four radiologists. The relative performance difference between the algorithm and the radiologists is not significantly affected by the difference of ultrasound scanner.
Fast Compressive Channel Estimation for MmWave MIMO Hybrid Beamforming Systems
Authors: Songjie Yang, Chenfei Xie, Dongli Wang, Zhongpei Zhang
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing

Given the high degree of computational complexity of the channel estimation technique based on the conventional one-dimensional (1-D) compressive sensing (CS) framework employed in the hybrid beamforming architecture, this study proposes two low-complexity channel estimation strategies. One is two-stage CS, which exploits row-group sparsity to estimate angle-of-arrival (AoA) first and uses the conventional 1-D CS method to obtain angle-of-departure (AoD). The other is two-dimensional (2-D) CS, which utilizes a 2-D dictionary to reconstruct the 2-D sparse signal. To conduct a meaningful comparison of the three CS frameworks, i.e., 1-D, two-stage and 2-D CS, the orthogonal match pursuit (OMP) algorithm is employed as the basic algorithm and is expanded to two variants for the proposed frameworks. Analysis and simulations demonstrate that when the 1-D CS method is compared, two-stage CS has somewhat lower performance but significantly lower computational complexity, while 2-D CS is not only the same as 1-D CS in terms of performance but also slightly lower in computational complexity than two-stage CS.
Low-complexity Sparse Array Synthesis Based on Off-grid Compressive Sensing
Authors: Songjie Yang, Baojuan Liu, Zhiqin Hong, Zhongpei Zhang
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Position

A novel sparse array synthesis method for non-uniform planar arrays is proposed, which belongs to compressive sensing (CS)-based systhesis. Particularly, we propose an off-grid refinement technique to simultaneously optimize the antenna element positions and excitations with a low complexity, in response to the antenna position optimization problem that is difficult for standard CS. More importantly, we take into account the minimum inter-element spacing constraint for ensuring the physically realizable solution. Specifically, the off-grid Orthogonal Match Pursuit (OMP) algorithm is first proposed with low complexity and then off-grid Look Ahead Orthogonal Match Pursuit (LAOMP) is designed with better synthesis performance but higher complexity. In addition, simulation results have shown the proposed schemes have more advantages in computational complexity and synthesis performances compared with the related method.
Online Inference for Mixture Model of Streaming Graph Signals with Non-White Excitation
Authors: Yiran He, Hoi-To Wai
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning

This paper considers a joint multi-graph inference and clustering problem for simultaneous inference of node centrality and association of graph signals with their graphs. We study a mixture model of filtered low pass graph signals with possibly non-white and low-rank excitation. While the mixture model is motivated from practical scenarios, it presents significant challenges to prior graph learning methods. As a remedy, we consider an inference problem focusing on the node centrality of graphs. We design an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm with a unique low-rank plus sparse prior derived from low pass signal property. We propose a novel online EM algorithm for inference from streaming data. As an example, we extend the online algorithm to detect if the signals are generated from an abnormal graph. We show that the proposed algorithms converge to a stationary point of the maximum-a-posterior (MAP) problem. Numerical experiments support our analysis.
Accuracy of Real-Time Echo-Planar Imaging Phase Contrast MRI
Authors: Pan Liu, Sidy Fall, Olivier Baledent
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00

Compared with CINE phase contrast MRI (CINE-PC), echo-planar imaging phase contrast (EPI-PC) can achieve realtime quantification of blood flow, with lower SNR. In this study, the pulsating real model of the simulated cerebral vasculature was used to verify the accuracy of EPI-PC. The imaging time of EPI-PC was 62ms/image at 100*60 spatial resolution. The reconstructed EPI-PC flow curve was extracted by homemade post-processing software. After comparison with the CINE-PC flow curve, it was concluded that EPI-PC can provide an average flow with less than 3% error, and its flow curve will be similar to the CINE-PC flow curve in shape.
Cerebro spinal fluid dynamic in front of cardiac and breathing influence
Authors: Olivier Baledent, Pan Liu, Serge Metanbou, Cyrille Capel, Sidy Fall, Roger Bouzerar
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00

It is still debated how breathing interacts with the CSF. New Phase contrast MRI sequence based on Echo Planar imaging (EPI-PC) can now produce continuously during minutes a velocity map, more or less every 100 ms. We did not found in the literature quantitative evaluation of the CSF stroke volume change during breathing. The aim of this work is to quantify CSF dynamics change in the aqueduct and in the spinal canal during the breathing and cardiac period using EPI-PC.
Morphological adjunctions represented by matrices in max-plus algebra for signal and image processing
Authors: Samy Blusseau, Santiago Velasco-Forero, Jesus Angulo, Isabelle Bloch
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00

In discrete signal and image processing, many dilations and erosions can be written as the max-plus and min-plus product of a matrix on a vector. Previous studies considered operators on symmetrical, unbounded complete lattices, such as Cartesian powers of the completed real line. This paper focuses on adjunctions on closed hypercubes, which are the complete lattices used in practice to represent digital signals and images. We show that this constrains the representing matrices to be doubly-0-astic and we characterise the adjunctions that can be represented by them. A graph interpretation of the defined operators naturally arises from the adjacency relationship encoded by the matrices, as well as a max-plus spectral interpretation.
Feature Extraction, Modulation and Recognition of Mixed Signal Based on SVM
Authors: Rong Han, Zihuai Lin
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00

This paper introduces likelihood-based and feature-based modulation recognition methods. In the feature-based modulation simulation part, instantaneous feature, cyclic spectrum, high-order cumulants, and wavelet transform features are used as the entry point, and six digital signals including 2ASK, 4ASK, BPSK, QPSK, 2FSK and 4FSK are simulated, showing the difference of signals in multiple dimensions
Entity Type Prediction Leveraging Graph Walks and Entity Descriptions
Authors: Russa Biswas, Jan Portisch, Heiko Paulheim, Harald Sack, Mehwish Alam
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Typing, Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Prediction, Type prediction, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

The entity type information in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) such as DBpedia, Freebase, etc. is often incomplete due to automated generation or human curation. Entity typing is the task of assigning or inferring the semantic type of an entity in a KG. This paper presents \textit{GRAND}, a novel approach for entity typing leveraging different graph walk strategies in RDF2vec together with textual entity descriptions. RDF2vec first generates graph walks and then uses a language model to obtain embeddings for each node in the graph. This study shows that the walk generation strategy and the embedding model have a significant effect on the performance of the entity typing task. The proposed approach outperforms the baseline approaches on the benchmark datasets DBpedia and FIGER for entity typing in KGs for both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes. The results show that the combination of order-aware RDF2vec variants together with the contextual embeddings of the textual entity descriptions achieve the best results.
Knowing Where and What: Unified Word Block Pretraining for Document Understanding
Authors: Song Tao, Zijian Wang, Tiantian Fan, Canjie Luo, Can Huang
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, document understanding, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Position, Word Embeddings

Due to the complex layouts of documents, it is challenging to extract information for documents. Most previous studies develop multimodal pre-trained models in a self-supervised way. In this paper, we focus on the embedding learning of word blocks containing text and layout information, and propose UTel, a language model with Unified TExt and Layout pre-training. Specifically, we propose two pre-training tasks: Surrounding Word Prediction (SWP) for the layout learning, and Contrastive learning of Word Embeddings (CWE) for identifying different word blocks. Moreover, we replace the commonly used 1D position embedding with a 1D clipped relative position embedding. In this way, the joint training of Masked Layout-Language Modeling (MLLM) and two newly proposed tasks enables the interaction between semantic and spatial features in a unified way. Additionally, the proposed UTel can process arbitrary-length sequences by removing the 1D position embedding, while maintaining competitive performance. Extensive experimental results show UTel learns better joint representations and achieves superior performance than previous methods on various downstream tasks, though requiring no image modality. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/taosong2019/UTel}.
HelixFold-Single: MSA-free Protein Structure Prediction by Using Protein Language Model as an Alternative
Authors: Xiaomin Fang, Fan Wang, Lihang Liu, Jingzhou He, Dayong Lin, Yingfei Xiang, Xiaonan Zhang, Hua Wu, Hui Li, Le Song
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Protein Language Model, Protein Structure Prediction, Self-Supervised Learning

AI-based protein structure prediction pipelines, such as AlphaFold2, have achieved near-experimental accuracy. These advanced pipelines mainly rely on Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSAs) as inputs to learn the co-evolution information from the homologous sequences. Nonetheless, searching MSAs from protein databases is time-consuming, usually taking dozens of minutes. Consequently, we attempt to explore the limits of fast protein structure prediction by using only primary sequences of proteins. HelixFold-Single is proposed to combine a large-scale protein language model with the superior geometric learning capability of AlphaFold2. Our proposed method, HelixFold-Single, first pre-trains a large-scale protein language model (PLM) with thousands of millions of primary sequences utilizing the self-supervised learning paradigm, which will be used as an alternative to MSAs for learning the co-evolution information. Then, by combining the pre-trained PLM and the essential components of AlphaFold2, we obtain an end-to-end differentiable model to predict the 3D coordinates of atoms from only the primary sequence. HelixFold-Single is validated in datasets CASP14 and CAMEO, achieving competitive accuracy with the MSA-based methods on the targets with large homologous families. Furthermore, HelixFold-Single consumes much less time than the mainstream pipelines for protein structure prediction, demonstrating its potential in tasks requiring many predictions. The code of HelixFold-Single is available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleHelix/tree/dev/apps/protein_folding/helixfold-single, and we also provide stable web services on https://paddlehelix.baidu.com/app/drug/protein-single/forecast.
A Novel Data Augmentation Technique for Out-of-Distribution Sample Detection using Compounded Corruptions
Authors: Ramya S. Hebbalaguppe, Soumya Suvra Goshal, Jatin Prakash, Harshad Khadilkar, Chetan Arora
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Modern deep neural network models are known to erroneously classify out-of-distribution (OOD) test data into one of the in-distribution (ID) training classes with high confidence. This can have disastrous consequences for safety-critical applications. A popular mitigation strategy is to train a separate classifier that can detect such OOD samples at the test time. In most practical settings OOD examples are not known at the train time, and hence a key question is: how to augment the ID data with synthetic OOD samples for training such an OOD detector? In this paper, we propose a novel Compounded Corruption technique for the OOD data augmentation termed CnC. One of the major advantages of CnC is that it does not require any hold-out data apart from the training set. Further, unlike current state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques, CnC does not require backpropagation or ensembling at the test time, making our method much faster at inference. Our extensive comparison with 20 methods from the major conferences in last 4 years show that a model trained using CnC based data augmentation, significantly outperforms SOTA, both in terms of OOD detection accuracy as well as inference time. We include a detailed post-hoc analysis to investigate the reasons for the success of our method and identify higher relative entropy and diversity of CnC samples as probable causes. We also provide theoretical insights via a piece-wise decomposition analysis on a two-dimensional dataset to reveal (visually and quantitatively) that our approach leads to a tighter boundary around ID classes, leading to better detection of OOD samples. Source code link: https://github.com/cnc-ood
Measuring Difficulty of Novelty Reaction
Authors: Ekaterina Nikonova, Cheng Xue, Vimukthini Pinto, Chathura Gamage, Peng Zhang, Jochen Renz
Date: 2022-07-28 00:00:00

Current AI systems are designed to solve close-world problems with the assumption that the underlying world is remaining more or less the same. However, when dealing with real-world problems such assumptions can be invalid as sudden and unexpected changes can occur. To effectively deploy AI-powered systems in the real world, AI systems should be able to deal with open-world novelty quickly. Inevitably, dealing with open-world novelty raises an important question of novelty difficulty. Knowing whether one novelty is harder to deal with than another, can help researchers to train their systems systematically. In addition, it can also serve as a measurement of the performance of novelty robust AI systems. In this paper, we propose to define the novelty reaction difficulty as a relative difficulty of performing the known task after the introduction of the novelty. We propose a universal method that can be applied to approximate the difficulty. We present the approximations of the difficulty using our method and show how it aligns with the results of the evaluation of AI agents designed to deal with novelty.