Building 3D In-Context Learning Universal Model in Neuroimaging

In-context learning (ICL), a type of universal model, demonstrates exceptional generalization across a wide range of tasks without retraining by leveraging task-specific guidance from context, making it particularly effective for the complex demands of neuroimaging. However, existing ICL models, which take 2D images as input, struggle to fully leverage the 3D anatomical structures in neuroimages, leading to a lack of global awareness and suboptimal performance. In this regard, we introduce Neuroverse3D, an ICL model capable of performing multiple neuroimaging tasks (e.g., segmentation, denoising, inpainting) in 3D. Neuroverse3D overcomes the large memory consumption due to 3D inputs through adaptive parallel-sequential context processing and a U-shape fusion strategy, allowing it to handle an unlimited number of context images. Additionally, we propose an optimized loss to balance multi-task training and enhance the focus on anatomical structures. Our study incorporates 43,674 3D scans from 19 neuroimaging datasets and evaluates Neuroverse3D on 14 diverse tasks using held-out test sets. The results demonstrate that Neuroverse3D significantly outperforms existing ICL models and closely matches the performance of task-specific models. The code and model weights are publicly released at: https://github.com/jiesihu/Neu3D.

Multi-Class Segmentation of Aortic Branches and Zones in Computed Tomography Angiography: The AortaSeg24 Challenge

Multi-class segmentation of the aorta in computed tomography angiography (CTA) scans is essential for diagnosing and planning complex endovascular treatments for patients with aortic dissections. However, existing methods reduce aortic segmentation to a binary problem, limiting their ability to measure diameters across different branches and zones. Furthermore, no open-source dataset is currently available to support the development of multi-class aortic segmentation methods. To address this gap, we organized the AortaSeg24 MICCAI Challenge, introducing the first dataset of 100 CTA volumes annotated for 23 clinically relevant aortic branches and zones. This dataset was designed to facilitate both model development and validation. The challenge attracted 121 teams worldwide, with participants leveraging state-of-the-art frameworks such as nnU-Net and exploring novel techniques, including cascaded models, data augmentation strategies, and custom loss functions. We evaluated the submitted algorithms using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Normalized Surface Distance (NSD), highlighting the approaches adopted by the top five performing teams. This paper presents the challenge design, dataset details, evaluation metrics, and an in-depth analysis of the top-performing algorithms. The annotated dataset, evaluation code, and implementations of the leading methods are publicly available to support further research. All resources can be accessed at https://aortaseg24.grand-challenge.org.

Legal Evalutions and Challenges of Large Language Models

In this paper, we review legal testing methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs), using the OPENAI o1 model as a case study to evaluate the performance of large models in applying legal provisions. We compare current state-of-the-art LLMs, including open-source, closed-source, and legal-specific models trained specifically for the legal domain. Systematic tests are conducted on English and Chinese legal cases, and the results are analyzed in depth. Through systematic testing of legal cases from common law systems and China, this paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs in understanding and applying legal texts, reasoning through legal issues, and predicting judgments. The experimental results highlight both the potential and limitations of LLMs in legal applications, particularly in terms of challenges related to the interpretation of legal language and the accuracy of legal reasoning. Finally, the paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of various types of models, offering valuable insights and references for the future application of AI in the legal field.

Touchstone Benchmark: Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating AI Algorithms for Medical Segmentation?

How can we test AI performance? This question seems trivial, but it isn't. Standard benchmarks often have problems such as in-distribution and small-size test sets, oversimplified metrics, unfair comparisons, and short-term outcome pressure. As a consequence, good performance on standard benchmarks does not guarantee success in real-world scenarios. To address these problems, we present Touchstone, a large-scale collaborative segmentation benchmark of 9 types of abdominal organs. This benchmark is based on 5,195 training CT scans from 76 hospitals around the world and 5,903 testing CT scans from 11 additional hospitals. This diverse test set enhances the statistical significance of benchmark results and rigorously evaluates AI algorithms across various out-of-distribution scenarios. We invited 14 inventors of 19 AI algorithms to train their algorithms, while our team, as a third party, independently evaluated these algorithms on three test sets. In addition, we also evaluated pre-existing AI frameworks--which, differing from algorithms, are more flexible and can support different algorithms--including MONAI from NVIDIA, nnU-Net from DKFZ, and numerous other open-source frameworks. We are committed to expanding this benchmark to encourage more innovation of AI algorithms for the medical domain.

RANSAC Back to SOTA: A Two-stage Consensus Filtering for Real-time 3D Registration

Correspondence-based point cloud registration (PCR) plays a key role in robotics and computer vision. However, challenges like sensor noises, object occlusions, and descriptor limitations inevitably result in numerous outliers. RANSAC family is the most popular outlier removal solution. However, the requisite iterations escalate exponentially with the outlier ratio, rendering it far inferior to existing methods (SC2PCR [1], MAC [2], etc.) in terms of accuracy or speed. Thus, we propose a two-stage consensus filtering (TCF) that elevates RANSAC to state-of-the-art (SOTA) speed and accuracy. Firstly, one-point RANSAC obtains a consensus set based on length consistency. Subsequently, two-point RANSAC refines the set via angle consistency. Then, three-point RANSAC computes a coarse pose and removes outliers based on transformed correspondence's distances. Drawing on optimizations from one-point and two-point RANSAC, three-point RANSAC requires only a few iterations. Eventually, an iterative reweighted least squares (IRLS) is applied to yield the optimal pose. Experiments on the large-scale KITTI and ETH datasets demonstrate our method achieves up to three-orders-of-magnitude speedup compared to MAC while maintaining registration accuracy and recall. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShiPC-AI/TCF.

Hyperbolic Image-and-Pointcloud Contrastive Learning for 3D Classification

3D contrastive representation learning has exhibited remarkable efficacy across various downstream tasks. However, existing contrastive learning paradigms based on cosine similarity fail to deeply explore the potential intra-modal hierarchical and cross-modal semantic correlations about multi-modal data in Euclidean space. In response, we seek solutions in hyperbolic space and propose a hyperbolic image-and-pointcloud contrastive learning method (HyperIPC). For the intra-modal branch, we rely on the intrinsic geometric structure to explore the hyperbolic embedding representation of point cloud to capture invariant features. For the cross-modal branch, we leverage images to guide the point cloud in establishing strong semantic hierarchical correlations. Empirical experiments underscore the outstanding classification performance of HyperIPC. Notably, HyperIPC enhances object classification results by 2.8% and few-shot classification outcomes by 5.9% on ScanObjectNN compared to the baseline. Furthermore, ablation studies and confirmatory testing validate the rationality of HyperIPC's parameter settings and the effectiveness of its submodules.

ML-SemReg: Boosting Point Cloud Registration with Multi-level Semantic Consistency

Recent advances in point cloud registration mostly leverage geometric information. Although these methods have yielded promising results, they still struggle with problems of low overlap, thus limiting their practical usage. In this paper, we propose ML-SemReg, a plug-and-play point cloud registration framework that fully exploits semantic information. Our key insight is that mismatches can be categorized into two types, i.e., inter- and intra-class, after rendering semantic clues, and can be well addressed by utilizing multi-level semantic consistency. We first propose a Group Matching module to address inter-class mismatching, outputting multiple matching groups that inherently satisfy Local Semantic Consistency. For each group, a Mask Matching module based on Scene Semantic Consistency is then introduced to suppress intra-class mismatching. Benefit from those two modules, ML-SemReg generates correspondences with a high inlier ratio. Extensive experiments demonstrate excellent performance and robustness of ML-SemReg, e.g., in hard-cases of the KITTI dataset, the Registration Recall of MAC increases by almost 34 percentage points when our ML-SemReg is equipped. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Laka-3DV/ML-SemReg}

Centerline Boundary Dice Loss for Vascular Segmentation

Vascular segmentation in medical imaging plays a crucial role in analysing morphological and functional assessments. Traditional methods, like the centerline Dice (clDice) loss, ensure topology preservation but falter in capturing geometric details, especially under translation and deformation. The combination of clDice with traditional Dice loss can lead to diameter imbalance, favoring larger vessels. Addressing these challenges, we introduce the centerline boundary Dice (cbDice) loss function, which harmonizes topological integrity and geometric nuances, ensuring consistent segmentation across various vessel sizes. cbDice enriches the clDice approach by including boundary-aware aspects, thereby improving geometric detail recognition. It matches the performance of the boundary difference over union (B-DoU) loss through a mask-distance-based approach, enhancing traslation sensitivity. Crucially, cbDice incorporates radius information from vascular skeletons, enabling uniform adaptation to vascular diameter changes and maintaining balance in branch growth and fracture impacts. Furthermore, we conducted a theoretical analysis of clDice variants (cl-X-Dice). We validated cbDice's efficacy on three diverse vascular segmentation datasets, encompassing both 2D and 3D, and binary and multi-class segmentation. Particularly, the method integrated with cbDice demonstrated outstanding performance on the MICCAI 2023 TopCoW Challenge dataset. Our code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/PengchengShi1220/cbDice.

Benchmarking the CoW with the TopCoW Challenge: Topology-Aware Anatomical Segmentation of the Circle of Willis for CTA and MRA

The Circle of Willis (CoW) is an important network of arteries connecting major circulations of the brain. Its vascular architecture is believed to affect the risk, severity, and clinical outcome of serious neuro-vascular diseases. However, characterizing the highly variable CoW anatomy is still a manual and time-consuming expert task. The CoW is usually imaged by two angiographic imaging modalities, magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) and computed tomography angiography (CTA), but there exist limited public datasets with annotations on CoW anatomy, especially for CTA. Therefore we organized the TopCoW Challenge in 2023 with the release of an annotated CoW dataset and invited submissions worldwide for the CoW segmentation task, which attracted over 140 registered participants from four continents. TopCoW dataset was the first public dataset with voxel-level annotations for CoW's 13 vessel components, made possible by virtual-reality (VR) technology. It was also the first dataset with paired MRA and CTA from the same patients. TopCoW challenge aimed to tackle the CoW characterization problem as a multiclass anatomical segmentation task with an emphasis on topological metrics. The top performing teams managed to segment many CoW components to Dice scores around 90%, but with lower scores for communicating arteries and rare variants. There were also topological mistakes for predictions with high Dice scores. Additional topological analysis revealed further areas for improvement in detecting certain CoW components and matching CoW variant's topology accurately. TopCoW represented a first attempt at benchmarking the CoW anatomical segmentation task for MRA and CTA, both morphologically and topologically.

Cross-Modal Information-Guided Network using Contrastive Learning for Point Cloud Registration

The majority of point cloud registration methods currently rely on extracting features from points. However, these methods are limited by their dependence on information obtained from a single modality of points, which can result in deficiencies such as inadequate perception of global features and a lack of texture information. Actually, humans can employ visual information learned from 2D images to comprehend the 3D world. Based on this fact, we present a novel Cross-Modal Information-Guided Network (CMIGNet), which obtains global shape perception through cross-modal information to achieve precise and robust point cloud registration. Specifically, we first incorporate the projected images from the point clouds and fuse the cross-modal features using the attention mechanism. Furthermore, we employ two contrastive learning strategies, namely overlapping contrastive learning and cross-modal contrastive learning. The former focuses on features in overlapping regions, while the latter emphasizes the correspondences between 2D and 3D features. Finally, we propose a mask prediction module to identify keypoints in the point clouds. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our network achieves superior registration performance.