pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Gaussian Random Fields as an Abstract Representation of Patient Metadata for Multimodal Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Bill Cassidy, Christian Mcbride, Connah Kendrick, Neil D. Reeves, Joseph M. Pappachan, Shaghayegh Raad, Moi Hoon Yap
Date: 2025-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The growing rate of chronic wound occurrence, especially in patients with diabetes, has become a concerning trend in recent years. Chronic wounds are difficult and costly to treat, and have become a serious burden on health care systems worldwide. Chronic wounds can have devastating consequences for the patient, with infection often leading to reduced quality of life and increased mortality risk. Innovative deep learning methods for the detection and monitoring of such wounds have the potential to reduce the impact to both patient and clinician. We present a novel multimodal segmentation method which allows for the introduction of patient metadata into the training workflow whereby the patient data are expressed as Gaussian random fields. Our results indicate that the proposed method improved performance when utilising multiple models, each trained on different metadata categories. Using the Diabetic Foot Ulcer Challenge 2022 test set, when compared to the baseline results (intersection over union = 0.4670, Dice similarity coefficient = 0.5908) we demonstrate improvements of +0.0220 and +0.0229 for intersection over union and Dice similarity coefficient respectively. This paper presents the first study to focus on integrating patient data into a chronic wound segmentation workflow. Our results show significant performance gains when training individual models using specific metadata categories, followed by average merging of prediction masks using distance transforms. All source code for this study is available at: https://github.com/mmu-dermatology-research/multimodal-grf
We Care Each Pixel: Calibrating on Medical Segmentation Model
Authors: Wenhao Liang, Wei zhang, Lin Yue, Miao Xu, Olaf Maennel, Weitong Chen
Date: 2025-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is fundamental for computer-aided diagnostics, providing accurate delineation of anatomical structures and pathological regions. While common metrics such as Accuracy, DSC, IoU, and HD primarily quantify spatial agreement between predictions and ground-truth labels, they do not assess the calibration quality of segmentation models, which is crucial for clinical reliability. To address this limitation, we propose pixel-wise Expected Calibration Error (pECE), a novel metric that explicitly measures miscalibration at the pixel level, thereby ensuring both spatial precision and confidence reliability. We further introduce a morphological adaptation strategy that applies morphological operations to ground-truth masks before computing calibration losses, particularly benefiting margin-based losses such as Margin SVLS and NACL. Additionally, we present the Signed Distance Calibration Loss (SDC), which aligns boundary geometry with calibration objectives by penalizing discrepancies between predicted and ground-truth signed distance functions (SDFs). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only enhances segmentation performance but also improves calibration quality, yielding more trustworthy confidence estimates. Code is available at: https://github.com/EagleAdelaide/SDC-Loss.
Lightweight Hypercomplex MRI Reconstruction: A Generalized Kronecker-Parameterized Approach
Authors: Haosen Zhang, Jiahao Huang, Yinzhe Wu, Congren Dai, Fanwen Wang, Zhenxuan Zhang, Guang Yang
Date: 2025-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI Reconstruction, SSIM

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is crucial for clinical diagnostics but is hindered by prolonged scan times. Current deep learning models enhance MRI reconstruction but are often memory-intensive and unsuitable for resource-limited systems. This paper introduces a lightweight MRI reconstruction model leveraging Kronecker-Parameterized Hypercomplex Neural Networks to achieve high performance with reduced parameters. By integrating Kronecker-based modules, including Kronecker MLP, Kronecker Window Attention, and Kronecker Convolution, the proposed model efficiently extracts spatial features while preserving representational power. We introduce Kronecker U-Net and Kronecker SwinMR, which maintain high reconstruction quality with approximately 50% fewer parameters compared to existing models. Experimental evaluation on the FastMRI dataset demonstrates competitive PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS metrics, even at high acceleration factors (8x and 16x), with no significant performance drop. Additionally, Kronecker variants exhibit superior generalization and reduced overfitting on limited datasets, facilitating efficient MRI reconstruction on hardware-constrained systems. This approach sets a new benchmark for parameter-efficient medical imaging models.
Accelerated Patient-specific Non-Cartesian MRI Reconstruction using Implicit Neural Representations
Authors: Di Xu, Hengjie Liu, Xin Miao, Daniel O'Connor, Jessica E. Scholey, Wensha Yang, Mary Feng, Michael Ohliger, Hui Lin, Dan Ruan, Yang Yang, Ke Sheng
Date: 2025-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, compressed sensing, Generative Adversarial Network, MRI Reconstruction

The scanning time for a fully sampled MRI can be undesirably lengthy. Compressed sensing has been developed to minimize image artifacts in accelerated scans, but the required iterative reconstruction is computationally complex and difficult to generalize on new cases. Image-domain-based deep learning methods (e.g., convolutional neural networks) emerged as a faster alternative but face challenges in modeling continuous k-space, a problem amplified with non-Cartesian sampling commonly used in accelerated acquisition. In comparison, implicit neural representations can model continuous signals in the frequency domain and thus are compatible with arbitrary k-space sampling patterns. The current study develops a novel generative-adversarially trained implicit neural representations (k-GINR) for de novo undersampled non-Cartesian k-space reconstruction. k-GINR consists of two stages: 1) supervised training on an existing patient cohort; 2) self-supervised patient-specific optimization. In stage 1, the network is trained with the generative-adversarial network on diverse patients of the same anatomical region supervised by fully sampled acquisition. In stage 2, undersampled k-space data of individual patients is used to tailor the prior-embedded network for patient-specific optimization. The UCSF StarVIBE T1-weighted liver dataset was evaluated on the proposed framework. k-GINR is compared with an image-domain deep learning method, Deep Cascade CNN, and a compressed sensing method. k-GINR consistently outperformed the baselines with a larger performance advantage observed at very high accelerations (e.g., 20 times). k-GINR offers great value for direct non-Cartesian k-space reconstruction for new incoming patients across a wide range of accelerations liver anatomy.
Enhancing Alzheimer's Diagnosis: Leveraging Anatomical Landmarks in Graph Convolutional Neural Networks on Tetrahedral Meshes
Authors: Yanxi Chen, Mohammad Farazi, Zhangsihao Yang, Yonghui Fan, Nicholas Ashton, Eric M Reiman, Yi Su, Yalin Wang
Date: 2025-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a major neurodegenerative condition that affects millions around the world. As one of the main biomarkers in the AD diagnosis procedure, brain amyloid positivity is typically identified by positron emission tomography (PET), which is costly and invasive. Brain structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) may provide a safer and more convenient solution for the AD diagnosis. Recent advances in geometric deep learning have facilitated sMRI analysis and early diagnosis of AD. However, determining AD pathology, such as brain amyloid deposition, in preclinical stage remains challenging, as less significant morphological changes can be observed. As a result, few AD classification models are generalizable to the brain amyloid positivity classification task. Blood-based biomarkers (BBBMs), on the other hand, have recently achieved remarkable success in predicting brain amyloid positivity and identifying individuals with high risk of being brain amyloid positive. However, individuals in medium risk group still require gold standard tests such as Amyloid PET for further evaluation. Inspired by the recent success of transformer architectures, we propose a geometric deep learning model based on transformer that is both scalable and robust to variations in input volumetric mesh size. Our work introduced a novel tokenization scheme for tetrahedral meshes, incorporating anatomical landmarks generated by a pre-trained Gaussian process model. Our model achieved superior classification performance in AD classification task. In addition, we showed that the model was also generalizable to the brain amyloid positivity prediction with individuals in the medium risk class, where BM alone cannot achieve a clear classification. Our work may enrich geometric deep learning research and improve AD diagnosis accuracy without using expensive and invasive PET scans.
Prediction of Frozen Region Growth in Kidney Cryoablation Intervention Using a 3D Flow-Matching Model
Authors: Siyeop Yoon, Yujin Oh, Matthew Tivnan, Sifan Song, Pengfei Jin, Sekeun Kim, Hyun Jin Cho, Dufan Wu, Raul Uppot, Quanzheng Li
Date: 2025-03-06 00:00:00

This study presents a 3D flow-matching model designed to predict the progression of the frozen region (iceball) during kidney cryoablation. Precise intraoperative guidance is critical in cryoablation to ensure complete tumor eradication while preserving adjacent healthy tissue. However, conventional methods, typically based on physics driven or diffusion based simulations, are computationally demanding and often struggle to represent complex anatomical structures accurately. To address these limitations, our approach leverages intraoperative CT imaging to inform the model. The proposed 3D flow matching model is trained to learn a continuous deformation field that maps early-stage CT scans to future predictions. This transformation not only estimates the volumetric expansion of the iceball but also generates corresponding segmentation masks, effectively capturing spatial and morphological changes over time. Quantitative analysis highlights the model robustness, demonstrating strong agreement between predictions and ground-truth segmentations. The model achieves an Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.61 and a Dice coefficient of 0.75. By integrating real time CT imaging with advanced deep learning techniques, this approach has the potential to enhance intraoperative guidance in kidney cryoablation, improving procedural outcomes and advancing the field of minimally invasive surgery.
RadIR: A Scalable Framework for Multi-Grained Medical Image Retrieval via Radiology Report Mining
Authors: Tengfei Zhang, Ziheng Zhao, Chaoyi Wu, Xiao Zhou, Ya zhang, Yangfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
Date: 2025-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Medical Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Developing advanced medical imaging retrieval systems is challenging due to the varying definitions of `similar images' across different medical contexts. This challenge is compounded by the lack of large-scale, high-quality medical imaging retrieval datasets and benchmarks. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology that leverages dense radiology reports to define image-wise similarity ordering at multiple granularities in a scalable and fully automatic manner. Using this approach, we construct two comprehensive medical imaging retrieval datasets: MIMIC-IR for Chest X-rays and CTRATE-IR for CT scans, providing detailed image-image ranking annotations conditioned on diverse anatomical structures. Furthermore, we develop two retrieval systems, RadIR-CXR and model-ChestCT, which demonstrate superior performance in traditional image-image and image-report retrieval tasks. These systems also enable flexible, effective image retrieval conditioned on specific anatomical structures described in text, achieving state-of-the-art results on 77 out of 78 metrics.
Adaptive Prototype Learning for Multimodal Cancer Survival Analysis
Authors: Hong Liu, Haosen Yang, Federica Eduati, Josien P. W. Pluim, Mitko Veta
Date: 2025-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Analysis, Survival Prediction

Leveraging multimodal data, particularly the integration of whole-slide histology images (WSIs) and transcriptomic profiles, holds great promise for improving cancer survival prediction. However, excessive redundancy in multimodal data can degrade model performance. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Prototype Learning (APL), a novel and effective approach for multimodal cancer survival analysis. APL adaptively learns representative prototypes in a data-driven manner, reducing redundancy while preserving critical information. Our method employs two sets of learnable query vectors that serve as a bridge between high-dimensional representations and survival prediction, capturing task-relevant features. Additionally, we introduce a multimodal mixed self-attention mechanism to enable cross-modal interactions, further enhancing information fusion. Extensive experiments on five benchmark cancer datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/HongLiuuuuu/APL.
Toward Lightweight and Fast Decoders for Diffusion Models in Image and Video Generation
Authors: Alexey Buzovkin, Evgeny Shilov
Date: 2025-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, GPU, Image Generation, Video Generation

We investigate methods to reduce inference time and memory footprint in stable diffusion models by introducing lightweight decoders for both image and video synthesis. Traditional latent diffusion pipelines rely on large Variational Autoencoder decoders that can slow down generation and consume considerable GPU memory. We propose custom-trained decoders using lightweight Vision Transformer and Taming Transformer architectures. Experiments show up to 15% overall speed-ups for image generation on COCO2017 and up to 20 times faster decoding in the sub-module, with additional gains on UCF-101 for video tasks. Memory requirements are moderately reduced, and while there is a small drop in perceptual quality compared to the default decoder, the improvements in speed and scalability are crucial for large-scale inference scenarios such as generating 100K images. Our work is further contextualized by advances in efficient video generation, including dual masking strategies, illustrating a broader effort to improve the scalability and efficiency of generative models.
Towards Universal Learning-based Model for Cardiac Image Reconstruction: Summary of the CMRxRecon2024 Challenge
Authors: Fanwen Wang, Zi Wang, Yan Li, Jun Lyu, Chen Qin, Shuo Wang, Kunyuan Guo, Mengting Sun, Mingkai Huang, Haoyu Zhang, Michael Tänzer, Qirong Li, Xinran Chen, Jiahao Huang, Yinzhe Wu, Kian Anvari Hamedani, Yuntong Lyu, Longyu Sun, Qing Li, Ziqiang Xu, Bingyu Xin, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Narges Razizadeh, Shahabedin Nabavi, George Yiasemis, Jonas Teuwen, Zhenxi Zhang, Sha Wang, Chi Zhang, Daniel B. Ennis, Zhihao Xue, Chenxi Hu, Ruru Xu, Ilkay Oksuz, Donghang Lyu, Yanxin Huang, Xinrui Guo, Ruqian Hao, Jaykumar H. Patel, Guanke Cai, Binghua Chen, Yajing Zhang, Sha Hua, Zhensen Chen, Qi Dou, Xiahai Zhuang, Qian Tao, Wenjia Bai, Jing Qin, He Wang, Claudia Prieto, Michael Markl, Alistair Young, Hao Li, Xihong Hu, Lianmin Wu, Xiaobo Qu, Guang Yang, Chengyan Wang
Date: 2025-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Image Reconstruction, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Prompt Learning, Task 2

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging offers diverse contrasts for non-invasive assessment of cardiac function and myocardial characterization. However, CMR often requires the acquisition of many contrasts, and each contrast takes a considerable amount of time. The extended acquisition time will further increase the susceptibility to motion artifacts. Existing deep learning-based reconstruction methods have been proven to perform well in image reconstruction tasks, but most of them are designed for specific acquisition modality or dedicated imaging parameter, which limits their ability to generalize across a variety of scan scenarios. To address this issue, the CMRxRecon2024 challenge consists of two specific tasks: Task 1 focuses on a modality-universal setting, evaluating the out-of-distribution generalization of existing learning-based models, while Task 2 follows a k-space sampling-universal setting, assessing the all-in-one adaptability of universal models. Main contributions of this challenge include providing the largest publicly available multi-modality, multi-view cardiac k-space dataset; and developing an open benchmarking platform for algorithm evaluation and shared code library for data processing. In addition, through a detailed analysis of the results submitted to the challenge, we have also made several findings, including: 1) adaptive prompt-learning embedding is an effective means for achieving strong generalization in reconstruction models; 2) enhanced data consistency based on physics-informed networks is also an effective pathway toward a universal model; 3) traditional evaluation metrics have limitations when assessing ground-truth references with moderate or lower image quality, highlighting the need for subjective evaluation methods. This challenge attracted 200 participants from 18 countries, aimed at promoting their translation into clinical practice.
Passive Sonar Sensor Placement for Undersea Surveillance
Authors: Graham V. Weinberg, Martijn van der Merwe
Date: 2025-03-05 00:00:00

Detection of undersea threats is a complex problem of considerable importance for maritime regional surveillance and security. Multistatic sonar systems can provide a means to monitor for underwater threats, where fixed sensors, towed arrays and dipping sonars may be utilised for this purpose. However, it is advantageous to deploy passive sensors to provide a stealthy early warning system. Hence this paper is concerned with determining where a series of passive sonar sensors should be situated in order to provide an initial threat detection capability. In order to facilitate this it is necessary to derive a suitable expression for the probability of threat detection from a passive sensor. This is based upon considerations of the passive sonar equation. It will be demonstrated how the stochastic aspects of this equation may be modelled through appropriate random variables capturing the uncertainty in noise levels. Subsequently this is utilised to produce the system-level probability of threat detection. Since the threat location is also unknown an appropriate statistical model is introduced to account for this uncertainty. This then permits the specification of the probability of detection as a function of sensor locations. Consequently it is then possible to determine optimal sensor placement to maximise the threat detection probability. This provides a new way in which to determine whether a surveillance region is covered adequately by sensors. The methodology will be illustrated through a series of examples utilising passive sonar characteristics sourced from the open literature.
Self-Supervised Z-Slice Augmentation for 3D Bio-Imaging via Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Alessandro Pasqui, Sajjad Mahdavi, Benoit Vianay, Alexandra Colin, Alex McDougall, Rémi Dumollard, Yekaterina A. Miroshnikova, Elsa Labrune, Hervé Turlier
Date: 2025-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Knowledge Distillation

Three-dimensional biological microscopy has significantly advanced our understanding of complex biological structures. However, limitations due to microscopy techniques, sample properties or phototoxicity often result in poor z-resolution, hindering accurate cellular measurements. Here, we introduce ZAugNet, a fast, accurate, and self-supervised deep learning method for enhancing z-resolution in biological images. By performing nonlinear interpolation between consecutive slices, ZAugNet effectively doubles resolution with each iteration. Compared on several microscopy modalities and biological objects, it outperforms competing methods on most metrics. Our method leverages a generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture combined with knowledge distillation to maximize prediction speed without compromising accuracy. We also developed ZAugNet+, an extended version enabling continuous interpolation at arbitrary distances, making it particularly useful for datasets with nonuniform slice spacing. Both ZAugNet and ZAugNet+ provide high-performance, scalable z-slice augmentation solutions for large-scale 3D imaging. They are available as open-source frameworks in PyTorch, with an intuitive Colab notebook interface for easy access by the scientific community.
PGAD: Prototype-Guided Adaptive Distillation for Multi-Modal Learning in AD Diagnosis
Authors: Yanfei Li, Teng Yin, Wenyi Shang, Jingyu Liu, Xi Wang, Kaiyang Zhao
Date: 2025-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Missing modalities pose a major issue in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) diagnosis, as many subjects lack full imaging data due to cost and clinical constraints. While multi-modal learning leverages complementary information, most existing methods train only on complete data, ignoring the large proportion of incomplete samples in real-world datasets like ADNI. This reduces the effective training set and limits the full use of valuable medical data. While some methods incorporate incomplete samples, they fail to effectively address inter-modal feature alignment and knowledge transfer challenges under high missing rates. To address this, we propose a Prototype-Guided Adaptive Distillation (PGAD) framework that directly incorporates incomplete multi-modal data into training. PGAD enhances missing modality representations through prototype matching and balances learning with a dynamic sampling strategy. We validate PGAD on the ADNI dataset with varying missing rates (20%, 50%, and 70%) and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of prototype matching and adaptive sampling, highlighting the potential of our framework for robust and scalable AD diagnosis in real-world clinical settings.
Rethinking Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation by SAM2: A Training-Free Framework with Augmentative Prompting and Dynamic Matching
Authors: Haiyue Zu, Jun Ge, Heting Xiao, Jile Xie, Zhangzhe Zhou, Yifan Meng, Jiayi Ni, Junjie Niu, Linlin Zhang, Li Ni, Huilin Yang
Date: 2025-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Few-Shot Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

The reliance on large labeled datasets presents a significant challenge in medical image segmentation. Few-shot learning offers a potential solution, but existing methods often still require substantial training data. This paper proposes a novel approach that leverages the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), a vision foundation model with strong video segmentation capabilities. We conceptualize 3D medical image volumes as video sequences, departing from the traditional slice-by-slice paradigm. Our core innovation is a support-query matching strategy: we perform extensive data augmentation on a single labeled support image and, for each frame in the query volume, algorithmically select the most analogous augmented support image. This selected image, along with its corresponding mask, is used as a mask prompt, driving SAM2's video segmentation. This approach entirely avoids model retraining or parameter updates. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on benchmark few-shot medical image segmentation datasets, achieving significant improvements in accuracy and annotation efficiency. This plug-and-play method offers a powerful and generalizable solution for 3D medical image segmentation.