PairingNet: A Learning-based Pair-searching and -matching Network for Image Fragments

In this paper, we propose a learning-based image fragment pair-searching and -matching approach to solve the challenging restoration problem. Existing works use rule-based methods to match similar contour shapes or textures, which are always difficult to tune hyperparameters for extensive data and computationally time-consuming. Therefore, we propose a neural network that can effectively utilize neighbor textures with contour shape information to fundamentally improve performance. First, we employ a graph-based network to extract the local contour and texture features of fragments. Then, for the pair-searching task, we adopt a linear transformer-based module to integrate these local features and use contrastive loss to encode the global features of each fragment. For the pair-matching task, we design a weighted fusion module to dynamically fuse extracted local contour and texture features, and formulate a similarity matrix for each pair of fragments to calculate the matching score and infer the adjacent segment of contours. To faithfully evaluate our proposed network, we created a new image fragment dataset through an algorithm we designed that tears complete images into irregular fragments. The experimental results show that our proposed network achieves excellent pair-searching accuracy, reduces matching errors, and significantly reduces computational time. Details, sourcecode, and data are available in our supplementary material.

SpaceEditing: Integrating Human Knowledge into Deep Neural Networks via Interactive Latent Space Editing

We propose an interactive editing method that allows humans to help deep neural networks (DNNs) learn a latent space more consistent with human knowledge, thereby improving classification accuracy on indistinguishable ambiguous data. Firstly, we visualize high-dimensional data features through dimensionality reduction methods and design an interactive system \textit{SpaceEditing} to display the visualized data. \textit{SpaceEditing} provides a 2D workspace based on the idea of spatial layout. In this workspace, the user can move the projection data in it according to the system guidance. Then, \textit{SpaceEditing} will find the corresponding high-dimensional features according to the projection data moved by the user, and feed the high-dimensional features back to the network for retraining, therefore achieving the purpose of interactively modifying the high-dimensional latent space for the user. Secondly, to more rationally incorporate human knowledge into the training process of neural networks, we design a new loss function that enables the network to learn user-modified information. Finally, We demonstrate how \textit{SpaceEditing} meets user needs through three case studies while evaluating our proposed new method, and the results confirm the effectiveness of our method.

Surface-based 3D Deep Learning Framework for Segmentation of Intracranial Aneurysms from TOF-MRA Images

Segmentation of intracranial aneurysms is an important task in medical diagnosis and surgical planning. Volume-based deep learning frameworks have been proposed for this task; however, they are not effective. In this study, we propose a surface-based deep learning framework that achieves higher performance by leveraging human intervention. First, the user semi-automatically generates a surface representation of the principal brain arteries model from time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography images. The system then samples 3D vessel surface fragments from the entire brain artery model and classifies the surface fragments into those with and without aneurysms using the point-based deep learning network (PointNet++). Next, the system applies surface segmentation (SO-Net) to the surface fragments containing aneurysms. We conduct a head-to-head comparison of segmentation performance by counting voxels between the proposed surface-based framework and existing pixel-based framework, and our framework achieved a much higher dice similarity coefficient score (72%) than the existing one (46%).

IntrA: 3D Intracranial Aneurysm Dataset for Deep Learning

Medicine is an important application area for deep learning models. Research in this field is a combination of medical expertise and data science knowledge. In this paper, instead of 2D medical images, we introduce an open-access 3D intracranial aneurysm dataset, IntrA, that makes the application of points-based and mesh-based classification and segmentation models available. Our dataset can be used to diagnose intracranial aneurysms and to extract the neck for a clipping operation in medicine and other areas of deep learning, such as normal estimation and surface reconstruction. We provide a large-scale benchmark of classification and part segmentation by testing state-of-the-art networks. We also discuss the performance of each method and demonstrate the challenges of our dataset. The published dataset can be accessed here: https://github.com/intra3d2019/IntrA.