Abstract:In recent years, Transformers have become the de-facto architecture for long-term sequence forecasting (LTSF), but faces challenges such as quadratic complexity and permutation invariant bias. A recent model, Mamba, based on selective state space models (SSMs), has emerged as a competitive alternative to Transformer, offering comparable performance with higher throughput and linear complexity related to sequence length. In this study, we analyze the limitations of current Mamba in LTSF and propose four targeted improvements, leading to MambaTS. We first introduce variable scan along time to arrange the historical information of all the variables together. We suggest that causal convolution in Mamba is not necessary for LTSF and propose the Temporal Mamba Block (TMB). We further incorporate a dropout mechanism for selective parameters of TMB to mitigate model overfitting. Moreover, we tackle the issue of variable scan order sensitivity by introducing variable permutation training. We further propose variable-aware scan along time to dynamically discover variable relationships during training and decode the optimal variable scan order by solving the shortest path visiting all nodes problem during inference. Extensive experiments conducted on eight public datasets demonstrate that MambaTS achieves new state-of-the-art performance.
Abstract:Radiation therapy is crucial in cancer treatment. Experienced experts typically iteratively generate high-quality dose distribution maps, forming the basis for excellent radiation therapy plans. Therefore, automated prediction of dose distribution maps is significant in expediting the treatment process and providing a better starting point for developing radiation therapy plans. With the remarkable results of diffusion models in predicting high-frequency regions of dose distribution maps, dose prediction methods based on diffusion models have been extensively studied. However, existing methods mainly utilize CNNs or Transformers as denoising networks. CNNs lack the capture of global receptive fields, resulting in suboptimal prediction performance. Transformers excel in global modeling but face quadratic complexity with image size, resulting in significant computational overhead. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a novel diffusion model, MD-Dose, based on the Mamba architecture for predicting radiation therapy dose distribution in thoracic cancer patients. In the forward process, MD-Dose adds Gaussian noise to dose distribution maps to obtain pure noise images. In the backward process, MD-Dose utilizes a noise predictor based on the Mamba to predict the noise, ultimately outputting the dose distribution maps. Furthermore, We develop a Mamba encoder to extract structural information and integrate it into the noise predictor for localizing dose regions in the planning target volume (PTV) and organs at risk (OARs). Through extensive experiments on a dataset of 300 thoracic tumor patients, we showcase the superiority of MD-Dose in various metrics and time consumption.
Abstract:Data augmentation is a critical regularization technique for deep neural networks, particularly in medical image classification. Popular data augmentation approaches include image transformation-based methods, generative data augmentation, and automatic data augmentation. However, these approaches encounter notable limitations: image transformation-based and automated data augmentation techniques cannot implement semantic transformations, leading to a constrained variety of augmented samples, and generative data augmentation methods are computationally expensive. In response to these challenges, we proposed Bayesian Random Semantic Data Augmentation (BRSDA), a novel, efficient, and plug-and-play semantic data augmentation method. BRSDA is motivated by a simple translation in the feature space along specific directions that can effectuate semantic transformations. When given a feature, we define its augmentable semantic magnitude as a random variable and estimate its distribution using variational Bayesian, then sample semantic magnitude and add to the randomly selected semantic direction to achieve semantic data augmentation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BRSDA on five 2D and six 3D medical image datasets covering nine modalities. We also test BRSDA with mainstream neural network architectures, showcasing its robustness. Furthermore, combining BRSDA with other leading data augmentation methods achieves superior performance. Code is available online at \url{https://github.com/YaoyaoZhu19/BRSDA}.
Abstract:Radiation therapy serves as an effective and standard method for cancer treatment. Excellent radiation therapy plans always rely on high-quality dose distribution maps obtained through repeated trial and error by experienced experts. However, due to individual differences and complex clinical situations, even seasoned expert teams may need help to achieve the best treatment plan every time quickly. Many automatic dose distribution prediction methods have been proposed recently to accelerate the radiation therapy planning process and have achieved good results. However, these results suffer from over-smoothing issues, with the obtained dose distribution maps needing more high-frequency details, limiting their clinical application. To address these limitations, we propose a dose prediction diffusion model based on SwinTransformer and a projector, SP-DiffDose. To capture the direct correlation between anatomical structure and dose distribution maps, SP-DiffDose uses a structural encoder to extract features from anatomical images, then employs a conditional diffusion process to blend noise and anatomical images at multiple scales and gradually map them to dose distribution maps. To enhance the dose prediction distribution for organs at risk, SP-DiffDose utilizes SwinTransformer in the deeper layers of the network to capture features at different scales in the image. To learn good representations from the fused features, SP-DiffDose passes the fused features through a designed projector, improving dose prediction accuracy. Finally, we evaluate SP-DiffDose on an internal dataset. The results show that SP-DiffDose outperforms existing methods on multiple evaluation metrics, demonstrating the superiority and generalizability of our method.
Abstract:Intellectual properties is increasingly important in the economic development. To solve the pain points by traditional methods in IP evaluation, we are developing a new technology with machine learning as the core. We have built an online platform and will expand our business in the Greater Bay Area with plans.