Envisioning Outlier Exposure by Large Language Models for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is essential when deploying machine learning models in open-world scenarios. Zero-shot OOD detection, requiring no training on in-distribution (ID) data, has been possible with the advent of vision-language models like CLIP. Existing methods build a text-based classifier with only closed-set labels. However, this largely restricts the inherent capability of CLIP to recognize samples from large and open label space. In this paper, we propose to tackle this constraint by leveraging the expert knowledge and reasoning capability of large language models (LLM) to Envision potential Outlier Exposure, termed EOE, without access to any actual OOD data. Owing to better adaptation to open-world scenarios, EOE can be generalized to different tasks, including far, near, and fine-grained OOD detection. Technically, we design (1) LLM prompts based on visual similarity to generate potential outlier class labels specialized for OOD detection, as well as (2) a new score function based on potential outlier penalty to distinguish hard OOD samples effectively. Empirically, EOE achieves state-of-the-art performance across different OOD tasks and can be effectively scaled to the ImageNet-1K dataset. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/EOE.

A Two-Stage Generative Model with CycleGAN and Joint Diffusion for MRI-based Brain Tumor Detection

Accurate detection and segmentation of brain tumors is critical for medical diagnosis. However, current supervised learning methods require extensively annotated images and the state-of-the-art generative models used in unsupervised methods often have limitations in covering the whole data distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel framework Two-Stage Generative Model (TSGM) that combines Cycle Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) and Variance Exploding stochastic differential equation using joint probability (VE-JP) to improve brain tumor detection and segmentation. The CycleGAN is trained on unpaired data to generate abnormal images from healthy images as data prior. Then VE-JP is implemented to reconstruct healthy images using synthetic paired abnormal images as a guide, which alters only pathological regions but not regions of healthy. Notably, our method directly learned the joint probability distribution for conditional generation. The residual between input and reconstructed images suggests the abnormalities and a thresholding method is subsequently applied to obtain segmentation results. Furthermore, the multimodal results are weighted with different weights to improve the segmentation accuracy further. We validated our method on three datasets, and compared with other unsupervised methods for anomaly detection and segmentation. The DSC score of 0.8590 in BraTs2020 dataset, 0.6226 in ITCS dataset and 0.7403 in In-house dataset show that our method achieves better segmentation performance and has better generalization.

Physics-Informed DeepMRI: Bridging the Gap from Heat Diffusion to k-Space Interpolation

In the field of parallel imaging (PI), alongside image-domain regularization methods, substantial research has been dedicated to exploring $k$-space interpolation. However, the interpretability of these methods remains an unresolved issue. Furthermore, these approaches currently face acceleration limitations that are comparable to those experienced by image-domain methods. In order to enhance interpretability and overcome the acceleration limitations, this paper introduces an interpretable framework that unifies both $k$-space interpolation techniques and image-domain methods, grounded in the physical principles of heat diffusion equations. Building upon this foundational framework, a novel $k$-space interpolation method is proposed. Specifically, we model the process of high-frequency information attenuation in $k$-space as a heat diffusion equation, while the effort to reconstruct high-frequency information from low-frequency regions can be conceptualized as a reverse heat equation. However, solving the reverse heat equation poses a challenging inverse problem. To tackle this challenge, we modify the heat equation to align with the principles of magnetic resonance PI physics and employ the score-based generative method to precisely execute the modified reverse heat diffusion. Finally, experimental validation conducted on publicly available datasets demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach over traditional $k$-space interpolation methods, deep learning-based $k$-space interpolation methods, and conventional diffusion models in terms of reconstruction accuracy, particularly in high-frequency regions.

Synthesizing PET images from High-field and Ultra-high-field MR images Using Joint Diffusion Attention Model

MRI and PET are crucial diagnostic tools for brain diseases, as they provide complementary information on brain structure and function. However, PET scanning is costly and involves radioactive exposure, resulting in a lack of PET. Moreover, simultaneous PET and MRI at ultra-high-field are currently hardly infeasible. Ultra-high-field imaging has unquestionably proven valuable in both clinical and academic settings, especially in the field of cognitive neuroimaging. These motivate us to propose a method for synthetic PET from high-filed MRI and ultra-high-field MRI. From a statistical perspective, the joint probability distribution (JPD) is the most direct and fundamental means of portraying the correlation between PET and MRI. This paper proposes a novel joint diffusion attention model which has the joint probability distribution and attention strategy, named JDAM. JDAM has a diffusion process and a sampling process. The diffusion process involves the gradual diffusion of PET to Gaussian noise by adding Gaussian noise, while MRI remains fixed. JPD of MRI and noise-added PET was learned in the diffusion process. The sampling process is a predictor-corrector. PET images were generated from MRI by JPD of MRI and noise-added PET. The predictor is a reverse diffusion process and the corrector is Langevin dynamics. Experimental results on the public Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art CycleGAN for high-field MRI (3T MRI). Finally, synthetic PET images from the ultra-high-field (5T MRI and 7T MRI) be attempted, providing a possibility for ultra-high-field PET-MRI imaging.

Meta-Learning Enabled Score-Based Generative Model for 1.5T-Like Image Reconstruction from 0.5T MRI

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is known to have reduced signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) at lower field strengths, leading to signal degradation when producing a low-field MRI image from a high-field one. Therefore, reconstructing a high-field-like image from a low-field MRI is a complex problem due to the ill-posed nature of the task. Additionally, obtaining paired low-field and high-field MR images is often not practical. We theoretically uncovered that the combination of these challenges renders conventional deep learning methods that directly learn the mapping from a low-field MR image to a high-field MR image unsuitable. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel meta-learning approach that employs a teacher-student mechanism. Firstly, an optimal-transport-driven teacher learns the degradation process from high-field to low-field MR images and generates pseudo-paired high-field and low-field MRI images. Then, a score-based student solves the inverse problem of reconstructing a high-field-like MR image from a low-field MRI within the framework of iterative regularization, by learning the joint distribution of pseudo-paired images to act as a regularizer. Experimental results on real low-field MRI data demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art unpaired learning methods.

SPIRiT-Diffusion: Self-Consistency Driven Diffusion Model for Accelerated MRI

Diffusion models are a leading method for image generation and have been successfully applied in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction. Current diffusion-based reconstruction methods rely on coil sensitivity maps (CSM) to reconstruct multi-coil data. However, it is difficult to accurately estimate CSMs in practice use, resulting in degradation of the reconstruction quality. To address this issue, we propose a self-consistency-driven diffusion model inspired by the iterative self-consistent parallel imaging (SPIRiT), namely SPIRiT-Diffusion. Specifically, the iterative solver of the self-consistent term in SPIRiT is utilized to design a novel stochastic differential equation (SDE) for diffusion process. Then $\textit{k}$-space data can be interpolated directly during the reverse diffusion process, instead of using CSM to separate and combine individual coil images. This method indicates that the optimization model can be used to design SDE in diffusion models, driving the diffusion process strongly conforming with the physics involved in the optimization model, dubbed model-driven diffusion. The proposed SPIRiT-Diffusion method was evaluated on a 3D joint Intracranial and Carotid Vessel Wall imaging dataset. The results demonstrate that it outperforms the CSM-based reconstruction methods, and achieves high reconstruction quality at a high acceleration rate of 10.

SPIRiT-Diffusion: SPIRiT-driven Score-Based Generative Modeling for Vessel Wall imaging

Diffusion model is the most advanced method in image generation and has been successfully applied to MRI reconstruction. However, the existing methods do not consider the characteristics of multi-coil acquisition of MRI data. Therefore, we give a new diffusion model, called SPIRiT-Diffusion, based on the SPIRiT iterative reconstruction algorithm. Specifically, SPIRiT-Diffusion characterizes the prior distribution of coil-by-coil images by score matching and characterizes the k-space redundant prior between coils based on self-consistency. With sufficient prior constraint utilized, we achieve superior reconstruction results on the joint Intracranial and Carotid Vessel Wall imaging dataset.

Self-Score: Self-Supervised Learning on Score-Based Models for MRI Reconstruction

Recently, score-based diffusion models have shown satisfactory performance in MRI reconstruction. Most of these methods require a large amount of fully sampled MRI data as a training set, which, sometimes, is difficult to acquire in practice. This paper proposes a fully-sampled-data-free score-based diffusion model for MRI reconstruction, which learns the fully sampled MR image prior in a self-supervised manner on undersampled data. Specifically, we first infer the fully sampled MR image distribution from the undersampled data by Bayesian deep learning, then perturb the data distribution and approximate their probability density gradient by training a score function. Leveraging the learned score function as a prior, we can reconstruct the MR image by performing conditioned Langevin Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. Experiments on the public dataset show that the proposed method outperforms existing self-supervised MRI reconstruction methods and achieves comparable performances with the conventional (fully sampled data trained) score-based diffusion methods.

High-Frequency Space Diffusion Models for Accelerated MRI

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have been shown to have superior performances in MRI reconstruction. From the perspective of continuous stochastic differential equations (SDEs), the reverse process of DDPM can be seen as maximizing the energy of the reconstructed MR image, leading to SDE sequence divergence. For this reason, a modified high-frequency DDPM model is proposed for MRI reconstruction. From its continuous SDE viewpoint, termed high-frequency space SDE (HFS-SDE), the energy concentrated low-frequency part of the MR image is no longer amplified, and the diffusion process focuses more on acquiring high-frequency prior information. It not only improves the stability of the diffusion model but also provides the possibility of better recovery of high-frequency details. Experiments on the publicly fastMRI dataset show that our proposed HFS-SDE outperforms the DDPM-driven VP-SDE, supervised deep learning methods and traditional parallel imaging methods in terms of stability and reconstruction accuracy.

Accelerating Magnetic Resonance Parametric Mapping Using Simultaneously Spatial Patch-based and Parametric Group-based Low-rank Tensors (SMART)

Quantitative magnetic resonance (MR) parametric mapping is a promising approach for characterizing intrinsic tissue-dependent information. However, long scan time significantly hinders its widespread applications. Recently, low-rank tensor has been employed and demonstrated good performance in accelerating MR parametricmapping. In this study, we propose a novel method that uses spatial patch-based and parametric group-based low rank tensors simultaneously (SMART) to reconstruct images from highly undersampled k-space data. The spatial patch-based low-rank tensor exploits the high local and nonlocal redundancies and similarities between the contrast images in parametric mapping. The parametric group based low-rank tensor, which integrates similar exponential behavior of the image signals, is jointly used to enforce the multidimensional low-rankness in the reconstruction process. In vivo brain datasets were used to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method achieves 11.7-fold and 13.21-fold accelerations in two-dimensional and three-dimensional acquisitions, respectively, with more accurate reconstructed images and maps than several state-of-the-art methods. Prospective reconstruction results further demonstrate the capability of the SMART method in accelerating MR quantitative imaging.