pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
WaveNet-Volterra Neural Networks for Active Noise Control: A Fully Causal Approach
Authors: Lu Bai, Mengtong Li, Siyuan Lian, Kai Chen, Jing Lu
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00

Active Noise Control (ANC) systems are challenged by nonlinear distortions, which degrade the performance of traditional adaptive filters. While deep learning-based ANC algorithms have emerged to address nonlinearity, existing approaches often overlook critical limitations: (1) end-to-end Deep Neural Network (DNN) models frequently violate causality constraints inherent to real-time ANC applications; (2) many studies compare DNN-based methods against simplified or low-order adaptive filters rather than fully optimized high-order counterparts. In this letter, we propose a causality-preserving time-domain ANC framework that synergizes WaveNet with Volterra Neural Networks (VNNs), explicitly addressing system nonlinearity while ensuring strict causal operation. Unlike prior DNN-based approaches, our method is benchmarked against both state-of-the-art deep learning architectures and rigorously optimized high-order adaptive filters, including Wiener solutions. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior performance over existing DNN methods and traditional algorithms, revealing that prior claims of DNN superiority stem from incomplete comparisons with suboptimal traditional baselines. Source code is available at https://github.com/Lu-Baihh/WaveNet-VNNs-for-ANC.git.
Zero-Shot Low-dose CT Denoising via Sinogram Flicking
Authors: Yongyi Shi, Ge Wang
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Many low-dose CT imaging methods rely on supervised learning, which requires a large number of paired noisy and clean images. However, obtaining paired images in clinical practice is challenging. To address this issue, zero-shot self-supervised methods train denoising networks using only the information within a single image, such as ZS-N2N. However, these methods often employ downsampling operations that degrade image resolution. Additionally, the training dataset is inherently constrained to the image itself. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot low-dose CT imaging method based on sinogram flicking, which operates within a single image but generates many copies via random conjugate ray matching. Specifically, two conjugate X-ray pencil beams measure the same path; their expected values should be identical, while their noise levels vary during measurements. By randomly swapping portions of the conjugate X-rays in the sinogram domain, we generate a large set of sinograms with consistent content but varying noise patterns. When displayed dynamically, these sinograms exhibit a flickering effect due to their identical structural content but differing noise patterns-hence the term sinogram flicking. We train the network on pairs of sinograms with the same content but different noise distributions using a lightweight model adapted from ZS-NSN. This process is repeated to obtain the final results. A simulation study demonstrates that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches such as ZS-N2N.
The Efficacy of Semantics-Preserving Transformations in Self-Supervised Learning for Medical Ultrasound
Authors: Blake VanBerlo, Alexander Wong, Jesse Hoey, Robert Arntfield
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, Diagnostic, Line Detection, Self-Supervised Learning

Data augmentation is a central component of joint embedding self-supervised learning (SSL). Approaches that work for natural images may not always be effective in medical imaging tasks. This study systematically investigated the impact of data augmentation and preprocessing strategies in SSL for lung ultrasound. Three data augmentation pipelines were assessed: (1) a baseline pipeline commonly used across imaging domains, (2) a novel semantic-preserving pipeline designed for ultrasound, and (3) a distilled set of the most effective transformations from both pipelines. Pretrained models were evaluated on multiple classification tasks: B-line detection, pleural effusion detection, and COVID-19 classification. Experiments revealed that semantics-preserving data augmentation resulted in the greatest performance for COVID-19 classification - a diagnostic task requiring global image context. Cropping-based methods yielded the greatest performance on the B-line and pleural effusion object classification tasks, which require strong local pattern recognition. Lastly, semantics-preserving ultrasound image preprocessing resulted in increased downstream performance for multiple tasks. Guidance regarding data augmentation and preprocessing strategies was synthesized for practitioners working with SSL in ultrasound.
HarmonySeg: Tubular Structure Segmentation with Deep-Shallow Feature Fusion and Growth-Suppression Balanced Loss
Authors: Yi Huang, Ke Zhang, Wei Liu, Yuanyuan Wang, Vishal M. Patel, Le Lu, Xu Han, Dakai Jin, Ke Yan
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00

Accurate segmentation of tubular structures in medical images, such as vessels and airway trees, is crucial for computer-aided diagnosis, radiotherapy, and surgical planning. However, significant challenges exist in algorithm design when faced with diverse sizes, complex topologies, and (often) incomplete data annotation of these structures. We address these difficulties by proposing a new tubular structure segmentation framework named HarmonySeg. First, we design a deep-to-shallow decoder network featuring flexible convolution blocks with varying receptive fields, which enables the model to effectively adapt to tubular structures of different scales. Second, to highlight potential anatomical regions and improve the recall of small tubular structures, we incorporate vesselness maps as auxiliary information. These maps are aligned with image features through a shallow-and-deep fusion module, which simultaneously eliminates unreasonable candidates to maintain high precision. Finally, we introduce a topology-preserving loss function that leverages contextual and shape priors to balance the growth and suppression of tubular structures, which also allows the model to handle low-quality and incomplete annotations. Extensive quantitative experiments are conducted on four public datasets. The results show that our model can accurately segment 2D and 3D tubular structures and outperform existing state-of-the-art methods. External validation on a private dataset also demonstrates good generalizability.
PRAD: Periapical Radiograph Analysis Dataset and Benchmark Model Development
Authors: Zhenhuan Zhou, Yuchen Zhang, Ruihong Xu, Xuansen Zhao, Tao Li
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning (DL), a pivotal technology in artificial intelligence, has recently gained substantial traction in the domain of dental auxiliary diagnosis. However, its application has predominantly been confined to imaging modalities such as panoramic radiographs and Cone Beam Computed Tomography, with limited focus on auxiliary analysis specifically targeting Periapical Radiographs (PR). PR are the most extensively utilized imaging modality in endodontics and periodontics due to their capability to capture detailed local lesions at a low cost. Nevertheless, challenges such as resolution limitations and artifacts complicate the annotation and recognition of PR, leading to a scarcity of publicly available, large-scale, high-quality PR analysis datasets. This scarcity has somewhat impeded the advancement of DL applications in PR analysis. In this paper, we present PRAD-10K, a dataset for PR analysis. PRAD-10K comprises 10,000 clinical periapical radiograph images, with pixel-level annotations provided by professional dentists for nine distinct anatomical structures, lesions, and artificial restorations or medical devices, We also include classification labels for images with typical conditions or lesions. Furthermore, we introduce a DL network named PRNet to establish benchmarks for PR segmentation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that PRNet surpasses previous state-of-the-art medical image segmentation models on the PRAD-10K dataset. The codes and dataset will be made publicly available.
PIDSR: Complementary Polarized Image Demosaicing and Super-Resolution
Authors: Shuangfan Zhou, Chu Zhou, Youwei Lyu, Heng Guo, Zhanyu Ma, Boxin Shi, Imari Sato
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Demosaicking, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Polarization cameras can capture multiple polarized images with different polarizer angles in a single shot, bringing convenience to polarization-based downstream tasks. However, their direct outputs are color-polarization filter array (CPFA) raw images, requiring demosaicing to reconstruct full-resolution, full-color polarized images; unfortunately, this necessary step introduces artifacts that make polarization-related parameters such as the degree of polarization (DoP) and angle of polarization (AoP) prone to error. Besides, limited by the hardware design, the resolution of a polarization camera is often much lower than that of a conventional RGB camera. Existing polarized image demosaicing (PID) methods are limited in that they cannot enhance resolution, while polarized image super-resolution (PISR) methods, though designed to obtain high-resolution (HR) polarized images from the demosaicing results, tend to retain or even amplify errors in the DoP and AoP introduced by demosaicing artifacts. In this paper, we propose PIDSR, a joint framework that performs complementary Polarized Image Demosaicing and Super-Resolution, showing the ability to robustly obtain high-quality HR polarized images with more accurate DoP and AoP from a CPFA raw image in a direct manner. Experiments show our PIDSR not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real data, but also facilitates downstream tasks.
Virtual-mask Informed Prior for Sparse-view Dual-Energy CT Reconstruction
Authors: Zini Chen, Yao Xiao, Junyan Zhang, Shaoyu Wang, Liu Shi, Qiegen Liu
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view sampling in dual-energy computed tomography (DECT) significantly reduces radiation dose and increases imaging speed, yet is highly prone to artifacts. Although diffusion models have demonstrated potential in effectively handling incomplete data, most existing methods in this field focus on the image do-main and lack global constraints, which consequently leads to insufficient reconstruction quality. In this study, we propose a dual-domain virtual-mask in-formed diffusion model for sparse-view reconstruction by leveraging the high inter-channel correlation in DECT. Specifically, the study designs a virtual mask and applies it to the high-energy and low-energy data to perform perturbation operations, thus constructing high-dimensional tensors that serve as the prior information of the diffusion model. In addition, a dual-domain collaboration strategy is adopted to integrate the information of the randomly selected high-frequency components in the wavelet domain with the information in the projection domain, for the purpose of optimizing the global struc-tures and local details. Experimental results indicated that the present method exhibits excellent performance across multiple datasets.
Conformalized Generative Bayesian Imaging: An Uncertainty Quantification Framework for Computational Imaging
Authors: Canberk Ekmekci, Mujdat Cetin
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Image Inpainting, Image Reconstruction, Uncertainty Quantification

Uncertainty quantification plays an important role in achieving trustworthy and reliable learning-based computational imaging. Recent advances in generative modeling and Bayesian neural networks have enabled the development of uncertainty-aware image reconstruction methods. Current generative model-based methods seek to quantify the inherent (aleatoric) uncertainty on the underlying image for given measurements by learning to sample from the posterior distribution of the underlying image. On the other hand, Bayesian neural network-based approaches aim to quantify the model (epistemic) uncertainty on the parameters of a deep neural network-based reconstruction method by approximating the posterior distribution of those parameters. Unfortunately, an ongoing need for an inversion method that can jointly quantify complex aleatoric uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty patterns still persists. In this paper, we present a scalable framework that can quantify both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. The proposed framework accepts an existing generative model-based posterior sampling method as an input and introduces an epistemic uncertainty quantification capability through Bayesian neural networks with latent variables and deep ensembling. Furthermore, by leveraging the conformal prediction methodology, the proposed framework can be easily calibrated to ensure rigorous uncertainty quantification. We evaluated the proposed framework on magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, and image inpainting problems and showed that the epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty estimates produced by the proposed framework display the characteristic features of true epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties. Furthermore, our results demonstrated that the use of conformal prediction on top of the proposed framework enables marginal coverage guarantees consistent with frequentist principles.
Subjective Visual Quality Assessment for High-Fidelity Learning-Based Image Compression
Authors: Mohsen Jenadeleh, Jon Sneyers, Panqi Jia, Shima Mohammadi, Joao Ascenso, Dietmar Saupe
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Image Compression, Image Reconstruction, Triplet

Learning-based image compression methods have recently emerged as promising alternatives to traditional codecs, offering improved rate-distortion performance and perceptual quality. JPEG AI represents the latest standardized framework in this domain, leveraging deep neural networks for high-fidelity image reconstruction. In this study, we present a comprehensive subjective visual quality assessment of JPEG AI-compressed images using the JPEG AIC-3 methodology, which quantifies perceptual differences in terms of Just Noticeable Difference (JND) units. We generated a dataset of 50 compressed images with fine-grained distortion levels from five diverse sources. A large-scale crowdsourced experiment collected 96,200 triplet responses from 459 participants. We reconstructed JND-based quality scales using a unified model based on boosted and plain triplet comparisons. Additionally, we evaluated the alignment of multiple objective image quality metrics with human perception in the high-fidelity range. The CVVDP metric achieved the overall highest performance; however, most metrics including CVVDP were overly optimistic in predicting the quality of JPEG AI-compressed images. These findings emphasize the necessity for rigorous subjective evaluations in the development and benchmarking of modern image codecs, particularly in the high-fidelity range. Another technical contribution is the introduction of the well-known Meng-Rosenthal-Rubin statistical test to the field of Quality of Experience research. This test can reliably assess the significance of difference in performance of quality metrics in terms of correlation between metrics and ground truth. The complete dataset, including all subjective scores, is publicly available at https://github.com/jpeg-aic/dataset-JPEG-AI-SDR25.
Heart Failure Prediction using Modal Decomposition and Masked Autoencoders for Scarce Echocardiography Databases
Authors: Andrés Bell-Navas, María Villalba-Orero, Enrique Lara-Pezzi, Jesús Garicano-Mena, Soledad Le Clainche
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Self-Supervised Learning

Heart diseases constitute the main cause of international human defunction. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 18 million deaths happen each year due to precisely heart diseases. In particular, heart failures (HF) press the healthcare industry to develop systems for their early, rapid, and effective prediction. This work presents an automatic system based on a novel deep learning framework which analyses in real-time echocardiography video sequences for the challenging and more specific task of heart failure time prediction. This system works in two stages. The first one transforms the data from a database of echocardiography video sequences into a machine learning-compatible collection of annotated images which can be used in the training phase of any machine learning-based framework, including a deep learning-based one. This stage includes the use of the Higher Order Dynamic Mode Decomposition (HODMD) algorithm for both data augmentation and feature extraction. The second stage builds and trains a Vision Transformer (ViT). Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, so far barely explored in the literature about heart failure prediction, are adopted to effectively train the ViT from scratch, even with scarce databases. The designed neural network analyses images from echocardiography sequences to estimate the time in which a heart failure will happen. The results obtained show the efficacy of the HODMD algorithm and the superiority of the proposed system with respect to several established ViT and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures. The source code will be incorporated into the next version release of the ModelFLOWs-app software (https://github.com/modelflows/ModelFLOWs-app).
Novel Pooling-based VGG-Lite for Pneumonia and Covid-19 Detection from Imbalanced Chest X-Ray Datasets
Authors: Santanu Roy, Ashvath Suresh, Palak Sahu, Tulika Rudra Gupta
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Pneumonia Detection

This paper proposes a novel pooling-based VGG-Lite model in order to mitigate class imbalance issues in Chest X-Ray (CXR) datasets. Automatic Pneumonia detection from CXR images by deep learning model has emerged as a prominent and dynamic area of research, since the inception of the new Covid-19 variant in 2020. However, the standard Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models encounter challenges associated with class imbalance, a prevalent issue found in many medical datasets. The innovations introduced in the proposed model architecture include: (I) A very lightweight CNN model, `VGG-Lite', is proposed as a base model, inspired by VGG-16 and MobileNet-V2 architecture. (II) On top of this base model, we leverage an ``Edge Enhanced Module (EEM)" through a parallel branch, consisting of a ``negative image layer", and a novel custom pooling layer ``2Max-Min Pooling". This 2Max-Min Pooling layer is entirely novel in this investigation, providing more attention to edge components within pneumonia CXR images. Thus, it works as an efficient spatial attention module (SAM). We have implemented the proposed framework on two separate CXR datasets. The first dataset is obtained from a readily available source on the internet, and the second dataset is a more challenging CXR dataset, assembled by our research team from three different sources. Experimental results reveal that our proposed framework has outperformed pre-trained CNN models, and three recent trend existing models ``Vision Transformer", ``Pooling-based Vision Transformer (PiT)'' and ``PneuNet", by substantial margins on both datasets. The proposed framework VGG-Lite with EEM, has achieved a macro average of 95% accuracy, 97.1% precision, 96.1% recall, and 96.6% F1 score on the ``Pneumonia Imbalance CXR dataset", without employing any pre-processing technique.
Synthetic CT Generation from Time-of-Flight Non-Attenutaion-Corrected PET for Whole-Body PET Attenuation Correction
Authors: WeiJie Chen, James Wang, Alan McMillan
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), CT Reconstruction

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging requires accurate attenuation correction (AC) to account for photon loss due to tissue density variations. In PET/MR systems, computed tomography (CT), which offers a straightforward estimation of AC is not available. This study presents a deep learning approach to generate synthetic CT (sCT) images directly from Time-of-Flight (TOF) non-attenuation corrected (NAC) PET images, enhancing AC for PET/MR. We first evaluated models pre-trained on large-scale natural image datasets for a CT-to-CT reconstruction task, finding that the pre-trained model outperformed those trained solely on medical datasets. The pre-trained model was then fine-tuned using an institutional dataset of 35 TOF NAC PET and CT volume pairs, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) of 74.49 HU and highest peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 28.66 dB within the body contour region. Visual assessments demonstrated improved reconstruction of both bone and soft tissue structures from TOF NAC PET images. This work highlights the effectiveness of using pre-trained deep learning models for medical image translation tasks. Future work will assess the impact of sCT on PET attenuation correction and explore additional neural network architectures and datasets to further enhance performance and practical applications in PET imaging.
Identifying regions of interest in whole slide images of renal cell carcinoma
Authors: Mohammed Lamine Benomar, Nesma Settouti, Eric Debreuve, Xavier Descombes, Damien Ambrosetti
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, image-classification, Image Classification, Transfer Learning, whole slide images

The histopathological images contain a huge amount of information, which can make diagnosis an extremely timeconsuming and tedious task. In this study, we developed a completely automated system to detect regions of interest (ROIs) in whole slide images (WSI) of renal cell carcinoma (RCC), to reduce time analysis and assist pathologists in making more accurate decisions. The proposed approach is based on an efficient texture descriptor named dominant rotated local binary pattern (DRLBP) and color transformation to reveal and exploit the immense texture variability at the microscopic high magnifications level. Thereby, the DRLBPs retain the structural information and utilize the magnitude values in a local neighborhood for more discriminative power. For the classification of the relevant ROIs, feature extraction of WSIs patches was performed on the color channels separately to form the histograms. Next, we used the most frequently occurring patterns as a feature selection step to discard non-informative features. The performances of different classifiers on a set of 1800 kidney cancer patches originating from 12 whole slide images were compared and evaluated. Furthermore, the small size of the image dataset allows to investigate deep learning approach based on transfer learning for image patches classification by using deep features and fine-tuning methods. High recognition accuracy was obtained and the classifiers are efficient, the best precision result was 99.17% achieved with SVM. Moreover, transfer learning models perform well with comparable performance, and the highest precision using ResNet-50 reached 98.50%. The proposed approach results revealed a very efficient image classification and demonstrated efficacy in identifying ROIs. This study presents an automatic system to detect regions of interest relevant to the diagnosis of kidney cancer in whole slide histopathology images.