A Survey of Embodied AI in Healthcare: Techniques, Applications, and Opportunities

Healthcare systems worldwide face persistent challenges in efficiency, accessibility, and personalization. Powered by modern AI technologies such as multimodal large language models and world models, Embodied AI (EmAI) represents a transformative frontier, offering enhanced autonomy and the ability to interact with the physical world to address these challenges. As an interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving research domain, "EmAI in healthcare" spans diverse fields such as algorithms, robotics, and biomedicine. This complexity underscores the importance of timely reviews and analyses to track advancements, address challenges, and foster cross-disciplinary collaboration. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the "brain" of EmAI for healthcare, wherein we introduce foundational AI algorithms for perception, actuation, planning, and memory, and focus on presenting the healthcare applications spanning clinical interventions, daily care & companionship, infrastructure support, and biomedical research. Despite its promise, the development of EmAI for healthcare is hindered by critical challenges such as safety concerns, gaps between simulation platforms and real-world applications, the absence of standardized benchmarks, and uneven progress across interdisciplinary domains. We discuss the technical barriers and explore ethical considerations, offering a forward-looking perspective on the future of EmAI in healthcare. A hierarchical framework of intelligent levels for EmAI systems is also introduced to guide further development. By providing systematic insights, this work aims to inspire innovation and practical applications, paving the way for a new era of intelligent, patient-centered healthcare.

Unsupervised learning of spatially varying regularization for diffeomorphic image registration

Spatially varying regularization accommodates the deformation variations that may be necessary for different anatomical regions during deformable image registration. Historically, optimization-based registration models have harnessed spatially varying regularization to address anatomical subtleties. However, most modern deep learning-based models tend to gravitate towards spatially invariant regularization, wherein a homogenous regularization strength is applied across the entire image, potentially disregarding localized variations. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical probabilistic model that integrates a prior distribution on the deformation regularization strength, enabling the end-to-end learning of a spatially varying deformation regularizer directly from the data. The proposed method is straightforward to implement and easily integrates with various registration network architectures. Additionally, automatic tuning of hyperparameters is achieved through Bayesian optimization, allowing efficient identification of optimal hyperparameters for any given registration task. Comprehensive evaluations on publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves registration performance and enhances the interpretability of deep learning-based registration, all while maintaining smooth deformations.

Learning Differential Pyramid Representation for Tone Mapping

Previous tone mapping methods mainly focus on how to enhance tones in low-resolution images and recover details using the high-frequent components extracted from the input image. These methods typically rely on traditional feature pyramids to artificially extract high-frequency components, such as Laplacian and Gaussian pyramids with handcrafted kernels. However, traditional handcrafted features struggle to effectively capture the high-frequency components in HDR images, resulting in excessive smoothing and loss of detail in the output image. To mitigate the above issue, we introduce a learnable Differential Pyramid Representation Network (DPRNet). Based on the learnable differential pyramid, our DPRNet can capture detailed textures and structures, which is crucial for high-quality tone mapping recovery. In addition, to achieve global consistency and local contrast harmonization, we design a global tone perception module and a local tone tuning module that ensure the consistency of global tuning and the accuracy of local tuning, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving PSNR by 2.58 dB in the HDR+ dataset and 3.31 dB in the HDRI Haven dataset respectively compared with the second-best method. Notably, our method exhibits the best generalization ability in the non-homologous image and video tone mapping operation. We provide an anonymous online demo at https://xxxxxx2024.github.io/DPRNet/.

WeatherGFM: Learning A Weather Generalist Foundation Model via In-context Learning

The Earth's weather system encompasses intricate weather data modalities and diverse weather understanding tasks, which hold significant value to human life. Existing data-driven models focus on single weather understanding tasks (e.g., weather forecasting). Although these models have achieved promising results, they fail to tackle various complex tasks within a single and unified model. Moreover, the paradigm that relies on limited real observations for a single scenario hinders the model's performance upper bound. In response to these limitations, we draw inspiration from the in-context learning paradigm employed in state-of-the-art visual foundation models and large language models. In this paper, we introduce the first generalist weather foundation model (WeatherGFM), designed to address a wide spectrum of weather understanding tasks in a unified manner. More specifically, we initially unify the representation and definition of the diverse weather understanding tasks. Subsequently, we devised weather prompt formats to manage different weather data modalities, namely single, multiple, and temporal modalities. Finally, we adopt a visual prompting question-answering paradigm for the training of unified weather understanding tasks. Extensive experiments indicate that our WeatherGFM can effectively handle up to ten weather understanding tasks, including weather forecasting, super-resolution, weather image translation, and post-processing. Our method also showcases generalization ability on unseen tasks.

An Image-Guided Robotic System for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: System Development and Experimental Evaluation

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a noninvasive medical procedure that can modulate brain activity, and it is widely used in neuroscience and neurology research. Compared to manual operators, robots may improve the outcome of TMS due to their superior accuracy and repeatability. However, there has not been a widely accepted standard protocol for performing robotic TMS using fine-segmented brain images, resulting in arbitrary planned angles with respect to the true boundaries of the modulated cortex. Given that the recent study in TMS simulation suggests a noticeable difference in outcomes when using different anatomical details, cortical shape should play a more significant role in deciding the optimal TMS coil pose. In this work, we introduce an image-guided robotic system for TMS that focuses on (1) establishing standardized planning methods and heuristics to define a reference (true zero) for the coil poses and (2) solving the issue that the manual coil placement requires expert hand-eye coordination which often leading to low repeatability of the experiments. To validate the design of our robotic system, a phantom study and a preliminary human subject study were performed. Our results show that the robotic method can half the positional error and improve the rotational accuracy by up to two orders of magnitude. The accuracy is proven to be repeatable because the standard deviation of multiple trials is lowered by an order of magnitude. The improved actuation accuracy successfully translates to the TMS application, with a higher and more stable induced voltage in magnetic field sensors.

Bi-Directional MS Lesion Filling and Synthesis Using Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model-based Lesion Repainting

Automatic magnetic resonance (MR) image processing pipelines are widely used to study people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS), encompassing tasks such as lesion segmentation and brain parcellation. However, the presence of lesion often complicates these analysis, particularly in brain parcellation. Lesion filling is commonly used to mitigate this issue, but existing lesion filling algorithms often fall short in accurately reconstructing realistic lesion-free images, which are vital for consistent downstream analysis. Additionally, the performance of lesion segmentation algorithms is often limited by insufficient data with lesion delineation as training labels. In this paper, we propose a novel approach leveraging Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIMs) for both MS lesion filling and synthesis based on image inpainting. Our modified DDIM architecture, once trained, enables both MS lesion filing and synthesis. Specifically, it can generate lesion-free T1-weighted or FLAIR images from those containing lesions; Or it can add lesions to T1-weighted or FLAIR images of healthy subjects. The former is essential for downstream analyses that require lesion-free images, while the latter is valuable for augmenting training datasets for lesion segmentation tasks. We validate our approach through initial experiments in this paper and demonstrate promising results in both lesion filling and synthesis, paving the way for future work.

Unsupervised Learning of Multi-modal Affine Registration for PET/CT

Affine registration plays a crucial role in PET/CT imaging, where aligning PET with CT images is challenging due to their respective functional and anatomical representations. Despite the significant promise shown by recent deep learning (DL)-based methods in various medical imaging applications, their application to multi-modal PET/CT affine registration remains relatively unexplored. This study investigates a DL-based approach for PET/CT affine registration. We introduce a novel method using Parzen windowing to approximate the correlation ratio, which acts as the image similarity measure for training DNNs in multi-modal registration. Additionally, we propose a multi-scale, instance-specific optimization scheme that iteratively refines the DNN-generated affine parameters across multiple image resolutions. Our method was evaluated against the widely used mutual information metric and a popular optimization-based technique from the ANTs package, using a large public FDG-PET/CT dataset with synthetic affine transformations. Our approach achieved a mean Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.870, outperforming the compared methods and demonstrating its effectiveness in multi-modal PET/CT image registration.

A Preliminary Exploration Towards General Image Restoration

Despite the tremendous success of deep models in various individual image restoration tasks, there are at least two major technical challenges preventing these works from being applied to real-world usages: (1) the lack of generalization ability and (2) the complex and unknown degradations in real-world scenarios. Existing deep models, tailored for specific individual image restoration tasks, often fall short in effectively addressing these challenges. In this paper, we present a new problem called general image restoration (GIR) which aims to address these challenges within a unified model. GIR covers most individual image restoration tasks (\eg, image denoising, deblurring, deraining and super-resolution) and their combinations for general purposes. This paper proceeds to delineate the essential aspects of GIR, including problem definition and the overarching significance of generalization performance. Moreover, the establishment of new datasets and a thorough evaluation framework for GIR models is discussed. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of existing approaches for tackling the GIR challenge, illuminating their strengths and pragmatic challenges. By analyzing these approaches, we not only underscore the effectiveness of GIR but also highlight the difficulties in its practical implementation. At last, we also try to understand and interpret these models' behaviors to inspire the future direction. Our work can open up new valuable research directions and contribute to the research of general vision.

Learning A Low-Level Vision Generalist via Visual Task Prompt

Building a unified model for general low-level vision tasks holds significant research and practical value. Current methods encounter several critical issues. Multi-task restoration approaches can address multiple degradation-to-clean restoration tasks, while their applicability to tasks with different target domains (e.g., image stylization) is limited. Methods like PromptGIP can handle multiple input-target domains but rely on the Masked Autoencoder (MAE) paradigm. Consequently, they are tied to the ViT architecture, resulting in suboptimal image reconstruction quality. In addition, these methods are sensitive to prompt image content and often struggle with low-frequency information processing. In this paper, we propose a Visual task Prompt-based Image Processing (VPIP) framework to overcome these challenges. VPIP employs visual task prompts to manage tasks with different input-target domains and allows flexible selection of backbone network suitable for general tasks. Besides, a new prompt cross-attention is introduced to facilitate interaction between the input and prompt information. Based on the VPIP framework, we train a low-level vision generalist model, namely GenLV, on 30 diverse tasks. Experimental results show that GenLV can successfully address a variety of low-level tasks, significantly outperforming existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Codes are available at https://github.com/chxy95/GenLV.

GRIDS: Grouped Multiple-Degradation Restoration with Image Degradation Similarity

Traditional single-task image restoration methods excel in handling specific degradation types but struggle with multiple degradations. To address this limitation, we propose Grouped Restoration with Image Degradation Similarity (GRIDS), a novel approach that harmonizes the competing objectives inherent in multiple-degradation restoration. We first introduce a quantitative method for assessing relationships between image degradations using statistical modeling of deep degradation representations. This analysis facilitates the strategic grouping of similar tasks, enhancing both the efficiency and effectiveness of the restoration process. Based on the degradation similarity, GRIDS divides restoration tasks into one of the optimal groups, where tasks within the same group are highly correlated. For instance, GRIDS effectively groups 11 degradation types into 4 cohesive groups. Trained models within each group show significant improvements, with an average improvement of 0.09dB over single-task upper bound models and 2.24dB over the mix-training baseline model. GRIDS incorporates an adaptive model selection mechanism for inference, automatically selecting the appropriate grouped-training model based on the input degradation. This mechanism is particularly useful for real-world scenarios with unknown degradations as it does not rely on explicit degradation classification modules. Furthermore, our method can predict model generalization ability without the need for network inference, providing valuable insights for practitioners.