BATseg: Boundary-aware Multiclass Spinal Cord Tumor Segmentation on 3D MRI Scans

Spinal cord tumors significantly contribute to neurological morbidity and mortality. Precise morphometric quantification, encompassing the size, location, and type of such tumors, holds promise for optimizing treatment planning strategies. Although recent methods have demonstrated excellent performance in medical image segmentation, they primarily focus on discerning shapes with relatively large morphology such as brain tumors, ignoring the challenging problem of identifying spinal cord tumors which tend to have tiny sizes, diverse locations, and shapes. To tackle this hard problem of multiclass spinal cord tumor segmentation, we propose a new method, called BATseg, to learn a tumor surface distance field by applying our new multiclass boundary-aware loss function. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we also introduce the first and large-scale spinal cord tumor dataset. It comprises gadolinium-enhanced T1-weighted 3D MRI scans from 653 patients and contains the four most common spinal cord tumor types: astrocytomas, ependymomas, hemangioblastomas, and spinal meningiomas. Extensive experiments on our dataset and another public kidney tumor segmentation dataset show that our proposed method achieves superior performance for multiclass tumor segmentation.

UNIT: Unifying Image and Text Recognition in One Vision Encoder

Currently, vision encoder models like Vision Transformers (ViTs) typically excel at image recognition tasks but cannot simultaneously support text recognition like human visual recognition. To address this limitation, we propose UNIT, a novel training framework aimed at UNifying Image and Text recognition within a single model. Starting with a vision encoder pre-trained with image recognition tasks, UNIT introduces a lightweight language decoder for predicting text outputs and a lightweight vision decoder to prevent catastrophic forgetting of the original image encoding capabilities. The training process comprises two stages: intra-scale pretraining and inter-scale finetuning. During intra-scale pretraining, UNIT learns unified representations from multi-scale inputs, where images and documents are at their commonly used resolution, to enable fundamental recognition capability. In the inter-scale finetuning stage, the model introduces scale-exchanged data, featuring images and documents at resolutions different from the most commonly used ones, to enhance its scale robustness. Notably, UNIT retains the original vision encoder architecture, making it cost-free in terms of inference and deployment. Experiments across multiple benchmarks confirm that our method significantly outperforms existing methods on document-related tasks (e.g., OCR and DocQA) while maintaining the performances on natural images, demonstrating its ability to substantially enhance text recognition without compromising its core image recognition capabilities.

GS-CLIP: Gaussian Splatting for Contrastive Language-Image-3D Pretraining from Real-World Data

3D Shape represented as point cloud has achieve advancements in multimodal pre-training to align image and language descriptions, which is curial to object identification, classification, and retrieval. However, the discrete representations of point cloud lost the object's surface shape information and creates a gap between rendering results and 2D correspondences. To address this problem, we propose GS-CLIP for the first attempt to introduce 3DGS (3D Gaussian Splatting) into multimodal pre-training to enhance 3D representation. GS-CLIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model for a learned common visual and textual space on massive real world image-text pairs and then learns a 3D Encoder for aligning 3DGS optimized per object. Additionally, a novel Gaussian-Aware Fusion is proposed to extract and fuse global explicit feature. As a general framework for language-image-3D pre-training, GS-CLIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks. Experiments on challenging shows that GS-CLIP significantly improves the state-of-the-art, outperforming the previously best results.