Deep Learning Techniques for Automatic Lateral X-ray Cephalometric Landmark Detection: Is the Problem Solved?

Localization of the craniofacial landmarks from lateral cephalograms is a fundamental task in cephalometric analysis. The automation of the corresponding tasks has thus been the subject of intense research over the past decades. In this paper, we introduce the "Cephalometric Landmark Detection (CL-Detection)" dataset, which is the largest publicly available and comprehensive dataset for cephalometric landmark detection. This multi-center and multi-vendor dataset includes 600 lateral X-ray images with 38 landmarks acquired with different equipment from three medical centers. The overarching objective of this paper is to measure how far state-of-the-art deep learning methods can go for cephalometric landmark detection. Following the 2023 MICCAI CL-Detection Challenge, we report the results of the top ten research groups using deep learning methods. Results show that the best methods closely approximate the expert analysis, achieving a mean detection rate of 75.719% and a mean radial error of 1.518 mm. While there is room for improvement, these findings undeniably open the door to highly accurate and fully automatic location of craniofacial landmarks. We also identify scenarios for which deep learning methods are still failing. Both the dataset and detailed results are publicly available online, while the platform will remain open for the community to benchmark future algorithm developments at https://cl-detection2023.grand-challenge.org/.

Universal Incomplete-View CT Reconstruction with Prompted Contextual Transformer

Despite the reduced radiation dose, suitability for objects with physical constraints, and accelerated scanning procedure, incomplete-view computed tomography (CT) images suffer from severe artifacts, hampering their value for clinical diagnosis. The incomplete-view CT can be divided into two scenarios depending on the sampling of projection, sparse-view CT and limited-angle CT, each encompassing various settings for different clinical requirements. Existing methods tackle with these settings separately and individually due to their significantly different artifact patterns; this, however, gives rise to high computational and storage costs, hindering its flexible adaptation to new settings. To address this challenge, we present the first-of-its-kind all-in-one incomplete-view CT reconstruction model with PROmpted Contextual Transformer, termed ProCT. More specifically, we first devise the projection view-aware prompting to provide setting-discriminative information, enabling a single model to handle diverse incomplete-view CT settings. Then, we propose artifact-aware contextual learning to provide the contextual guidance of image pairs from either CT phantom or publicly available datasets, making ProCT capable of accurately removing the complex artifacts from the incomplete-view CT images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ProCT can achieve superior performance on a wide range of incomplete-view CT settings using a single model. Remarkably, our model with only image-domain information surpasses the state-of-the-art dual-domain methods that require the access to raw data. The code is available at: https://github.com/Masaaki-75/proct

Prompt-In-Prompt Learning for Universal Image Restoration

Image restoration, which aims to retrieve and enhance degraded images, is fundamental across a wide range of applications. While conventional deep learning approaches have notably improved the image quality across various tasks, they still suffer from (i) the high storage cost needed for various task-specific models and (ii) the lack of interactivity and flexibility, hindering their wider application. Drawing inspiration from the pronounced success of prompts in both linguistic and visual domains, we propose novel Prompt-In-Prompt learning for universal image restoration, named PIP. First, we present two novel prompts, a degradation-aware prompt to encode high-level degradation knowledge and a basic restoration prompt to provide essential low-level information. Second, we devise a novel prompt-to-prompt interaction module to fuse these two prompts into a universal restoration prompt. Third, we introduce a selective prompt-to-feature interaction module to modulate the degradation-related feature. By doing so, the resultant PIP works as a plug-and-play module to enhance existing restoration models for universal image restoration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of PIP on multiple restoration tasks, including image denoising, deraining, dehazing, deblurring, and low-light enhancement. Remarkably, PIP is interpretable, flexible, efficient, and easy-to-use, showing promising potential for real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/longzilicart/pip_universal.

Learning to Distill Global Representation for Sparse-View CT

Sparse-view computed tomography (CT) -- using a small number of projections for tomographic reconstruction -- enables much lower radiation dose to patients and accelerated data acquisition. The reconstructed images, however, suffer from strong artifacts, greatly limiting their diagnostic value. Current trends for sparse-view CT turn to the raw data for better information recovery. The resultant dual-domain methods, nonetheless, suffer from secondary artifacts, especially in ultra-sparse view scenarios, and their generalization to other scanners/protocols is greatly limited. A crucial question arises: have the image post-processing methods reached the limit? Our answer is not yet. In this paper, we stick to image post-processing methods due to great flexibility and propose global representation (GloRe) distillation framework for sparse-view CT, termed GloReDi. First, we propose to learn GloRe with Fourier convolution, so each element in GloRe has an image-wide receptive field. Second, unlike methods that only use the full-view images for supervision, we propose to distill GloRe from intermediate-view reconstructed images that are readily available but not explored in previous literature. The success of GloRe distillation is attributed to two key components: representation directional distillation to align the GloRe directions, and band-pass-specific contrastive distillation to gain clinically important details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed GloReDi over the state-of-the-art methods, including dual-domain ones. The source code is available at https://github.com/longzilicart/GloReDi.

YOLOrtho -- A Unified Framework for Teeth Enumeration and Dental Disease Detection

Detecting dental diseases through panoramic X-rays images is a standard procedure for dentists. Normally, a dentist need to identify diseases and find the infected teeth. While numerous machine learning models adopting this two-step procedure have been developed, there has not been an end-to-end model that can identify teeth and their associated diseases at the same time. To fill the gap, we develop YOLOrtho, a unified framework for teeth enumeration and dental disease detection. We develop our model on Dentex Challenge 2023 data, which consists of three distinct types of annotated data. The first part is labeled with quadrant, and the second part is labeled with quadrant and enumeration and the third part is labeled with quadrant, enumeration and disease. To further improve detection, we make use of Tufts Dental public dataset. To fully utilize the data and learn both teeth detection and disease identification simultaneously, we formulate diseases as attributes attached to their corresponding teeth. Due to the nature of position relation in teeth enumeration, We replace convolution layer with CoordConv in our model to provide more position information for the model. We also adjust the model architecture and insert one more upsampling layer in FPN in favor of large object detection. Finally, we propose a post-process strategy for teeth layout that corrects teeth enumeration based on linear sum assignment. Results from experiments show that our model exceeds large Diffusion-based model.

Emo-DNA: Emotion Decoupling and Alignment Learning for Cross-Corpus Speech Emotion Recognition

Cross-corpus speech emotion recognition (SER) seeks to generalize the ability of inferring speech emotion from a well-labeled corpus to an unlabeled one, which is a rather challenging task due to the significant discrepancy between two corpora. Existing methods, typically based on unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), struggle to learn corpus-invariant features by global distribution alignment, but unfortunately, the resulting features are mixed with corpus-specific features or not class-discriminative. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel Emotion Decoupling aNd Alignment learning framework (EMO-DNA) for cross-corpus SER, a novel UDA method to learn emotion-relevant corpus-invariant features. The novelties of EMO-DNA are two-fold: contrastive emotion decoupling and dual-level emotion alignment. On one hand, our contrastive emotion decoupling achieves decoupling learning via a contrastive decoupling loss to strengthen the separability of emotion-relevant features from corpus-specific ones. On the other hand, our dual-level emotion alignment introduces an adaptive threshold pseudo-labeling to select confident target samples for class-level alignment, and performs corpus-level alignment to jointly guide model for learning class-discriminative corpus-invariant features across corpora. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of EMO-DNA over the state-of-the-art methods in several cross-corpus scenarios. Source code is available at https://github.com/Jiaxin-Ye/Emo-DNA.

FreeSeed: Frequency-band-aware and Self-guided Network for Sparse-view CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view computed tomography (CT) is a promising solution for expediting the scanning process and mitigating radiation exposure to patients, the reconstructed images, however, contain severe streak artifacts, compromising subsequent screening and diagnosis. Recently, deep learning-based image post-processing methods along with their dual-domain counterparts have shown promising results. However, existing methods usually produce over-smoothed images with loss of details due to (1) the difficulty in accurately modeling the artifact patterns in the image domain, and (2) the equal treatment of each pixel in the loss function. To address these issues, we concentrate on the image post-processing and propose a simple yet effective FREquency-band-awarE and SElf-guidED network, termed FreeSeed, which can effectively remove artifact and recover missing detail from the contaminated sparse-view CT images. Specifically, we first propose a frequency-band-aware artifact modeling network (FreeNet), which learns artifact-related frequency-band attention in Fourier domain for better modeling the globally distributed streak artifact on the sparse-view CT images. We then introduce a self-guided artifact refinement network (SeedNet), which leverages the predicted artifact to assist FreeNet in continuing to refine the severely corrupted details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of FreeSeed and its dual-domain counterpart over the state-of-the-art sparse-view CT reconstruction methods. Source code is made available at https://github.com/Masaaki-75/freeseed.

OrthoGAN:High-Precision Image Generation for Teeth Orthodontic Visualization

Patients take care of what their teeth will be like after the orthodontics. Orthodontists usually describe the expectation movement based on the original smile images, which is unconvincing. The growth of deep-learning generative models change this situation. It can visualize the outcome of orthodontic treatment and help patients foresee their future teeth and facial appearance. While previous studies mainly focus on 2D or 3D virtual treatment outcome (VTO) at a profile level, the problem of simulating treatment outcome at a frontal facial image is poorly explored. In this paper, we build an efficient and accurate system for simulating virtual teeth alignment effects in a frontal facial image. Our system takes a frontal face image of a patient with visible malpositioned teeth and the patient's 3D scanned teeth model as input, and progressively generates the visual results of the patient's teeth given the specific orthodontics planning steps from the doctor (i.e., the specification of translations and rotations of individual tooth). We design a multi-modal encoder-decoder based generative model to synthesize identity-preserving frontal facial images with aligned teeth. In addition, the original image color information is used to optimize the orthodontic outcomes, making the results more natural. We conduct extensive qualitative and clinical experiments and also a pilot study to validate our method.

An evaluation of U-Net in Renal Structure Segmentation

Renal structure segmentation from computed tomography angiography~(CTA) is essential for many computer-assisted renal cancer treatment applications. Kidney PArsing~(KiPA 2022) Challenge aims to build a fine-grained multi-structure dataset and improve the segmentation of multiple renal structures. Recently, U-Net has dominated the medical image segmentation. In the KiPA challenge, we evaluated several U-Net variants and selected the best models for the final submission.