CAS-GAN for Contrast-free Angiography Synthesis

Iodinated contrast agents are widely utilized in numerous interventional procedures, yet posing substantial health risks to patients. This paper presents CAS-GAN, a novel GAN framework that serves as a ``virtual contrast agent" to synthesize X-ray angiographies via disentanglement representation learning and vessel semantic guidance, thereby reducing the reliance on iodinated agents during interventional procedures. Specifically, our approach disentangles X-ray angiographies into background and vessel components, leveraging medical prior knowledge. A specialized predictor then learns to map the interrelationships between these components. Additionally, a vessel semantic-guided generator and a corresponding loss function are introduced to enhance the visual fidelity of generated images. Experimental results on the XCAD dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our CAS-GAN, achieving a FID of 5.94 and a MMD of 0.017. These promising results highlight CAS-GAN's potential for clinical applications.

SPIRONet: Spatial-Frequency Learning and Topological Channel Interaction Network for Vessel Segmentation

Automatic vessel segmentation is paramount for developing next-generation interventional navigation systems. However, current approaches suffer from suboptimal segmentation performances due to significant challenges in intraoperative images (i.e., low signal-to-noise ratio, small or slender vessels, and strong interference). In this paper, a novel spatial-frequency learning and topological channel interaction network (SPIRONet) is proposed to address the above issues. Specifically, dual encoders are utilized to comprehensively capture local spatial and global frequency vessel features. Then, a cross-attention fusion module is introduced to effectively fuse spatial and frequency features, thereby enhancing feature discriminability. Furthermore, a topological channel interaction module is designed to filter out task-irrelevant responses based on graph neural networks. Extensive experimental results on several challenging datasets (CADSA, CAXF, DCA1, and XCAD) demonstrate state-of-the-art performances of our method. Moreover, the inference speed of SPIRONet is 21 FPS with a 512x512 input size, surpassing clinical real-time requirements (6~12FPS). These promising outcomes indicate SPIRONet's potential for integration into vascular interventional navigation systems. Code is available at https://github.com/Dxhuang-CASIA/SPIRONet.

A Weight-aware-based Multi-source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method for Human Motion Intention Recognition

Accurate recognition of human motion intention (HMI) is beneficial for exoskeleton robots to improve the wearing comfort level and achieve natural human-robot interaction. A classifier trained on labeled source subjects (domains) performs poorly on unlabeled target subject since the difference in individual motor characteristics. The unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method has become an effective way to this problem. However, the labeled data are collected from multiple source subjects that might be different not only from the target subject but also from each other. The current UDA methods for HMI recognition ignore the difference between each source subject, which reduces the classification accuracy. Therefore, this paper considers the differences between source subjects and develops a novel theory and algorithm for UDA to recognize HMI, where the margin disparity discrepancy (MDD) is extended to multi-source UDA theory and a novel weight-aware-based multi-source UDA algorithm (WMDD) is proposed. The source domain weight, which can be adjusted adaptively by the MDD between each source subject and target subject, is incorporated into UDA to measure the differences between source subjects. The developed multi-source UDA theory is theoretical and the generalization error on target subject is guaranteed. The theory can be transformed into an optimization problem for UDA, successfully bridging the gap between theory and algorithm. Moreover, a lightweight network is employed to guarantee the real-time of classification and the adversarial learning between feature generator and ensemble classifiers is utilized to further improve the generalization ability. The extensive experiments verify theoretical analysis and show that WMDD outperforms previous UDA methods on HMI recognition tasks.

MOSformer: Momentum encoder-based inter-slice fusion transformer for medical image segmentation

Medical image segmentation takes an important position in various clinical applications. Deep learning has emerged as the predominant solution for automated segmentation of volumetric medical images. 2.5D-based segmentation models bridge computational efficiency of 2D-based models and spatial perception capabilities of 3D-based models. However, prevailing 2.5D-based models often treat each slice equally, failing to effectively learn and exploit inter-slice information, resulting in suboptimal segmentation performances. In this paper, a novel Momentum encoder-based inter-slice fusion transformer (MOSformer) is proposed to overcome this issue by leveraging inter-slice information at multi-scale feature maps extracted by different encoders. Specifically, dual encoders are employed to enhance feature distinguishability among different slices. One of the encoders is moving-averaged to maintain the consistency of slice representations. Moreover, an IF-Swin transformer module is developed to fuse inter-slice multi-scale features. The MOSformer is evaluated on three benchmark datasets (Synapse, ACDC, and AMOS), establishing a new state-of-the-art with 85.63%, 92.19%, and 85.43% of DSC, respectively. These promising results indicate its competitiveness in medical image segmentation. Codes and models of MOSformer will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

MICRO: Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning with a Conservative Bellman Operator

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) faces a significant challenge of distribution shift. Model-free offline RL penalizes the Q value for out-of-distribution (OOD) data or constrains the policy closed to the behavior policy to tackle this problem, but this inhibits the exploration of the OOD region. Model-based offline RL, which uses the trained environment model to generate more OOD data and performs conservative policy optimization within that model, has become an effective method for this problem. However, the current model-based algorithms rarely consider agent robustness when incorporating conservatism into policy. Therefore, the new model-based offline algorithm with a conservative Bellman operator (MICRO) is proposed. This method trades off performance and robustness via introducing the robust Bellman operator into the algorithm. Compared with previous model-based algorithms with robust adversarial models, MICRO can significantly reduce the computation cost by only choosing the minimal Q value in the state uncertainty set. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MICRO outperforms prior RL algorithms in offline RL benchmark and is considerably robust to adversarial perturbations.

CROP: Conservative Reward for Model-based Offline Policy Optimization

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policy using collected data without online interactions. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing for addressing offline RL challenges due to their capability to mitigate the limitations of offline data through data generation using models. Prior research has demonstrated that introducing conservatism into the model or Q-function during policy optimization can effectively alleviate the prevalent distribution drift problem in offline RL. However, the investigation into the impacts of conservatism in reward estimation is still lacking. This paper proposes a novel model-based offline RL algorithm, Conservative Reward for model-based Offline Policy optimization (CROP), which conservatively estimates the reward in model training. To achieve a conservative reward estimation, CROP simultaneously minimizes the estimation error and the reward of random actions. Theoretical analysis shows that this conservative reward mechanism leads to a conservative policy evaluation and helps mitigate distribution drift. Experiments on D4RL benchmarks showcase that the performance of CROP is comparable to the state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, CROP establishes an innovative connection between offline and online RL, highlighting that offline RL problems can be tackled by adopting online RL techniques to the empirical Markov decision process trained with a conservative reward. The source code is available with https://github.com/G0K0URURI/CROP.git.

DOMAIN: MilDly COnservative Model-BAsed OfflINe Reinforcement Learning

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL), which learns environment model from offline dataset and generates more out-of-distribution model data, has become an effective approach to the problem of distribution shift in offline RL. Due to the gap between the learned and actual environment, conservatism should be incorporated into the algorithm to balance accurate offline data and imprecise model data. The conservatism of current algorithms mostly relies on model uncertainty estimation. However, uncertainty estimation is unreliable and leads to poor performance in certain scenarios, and the previous methods ignore differences between the model data, which brings great conservatism. Therefore, this paper proposes a milDly cOnservative Model-bAsed offlINe RL algorithm (DOMAIN) without estimating model uncertainty to address the above issues. DOMAIN introduces adaptive sampling distribution of model samples, which can adaptively adjust the model data penalty. In this paper, we theoretically demonstrate that the Q value learned by the DOMAIN outside the region is a lower bound of the true Q value, the DOMAIN is less conservative than previous model-based offline RL algorithms and has the guarantee of security policy improvement. The results of extensive experiments show that DOMAIN outperforms prior RL algorithms on the D4RL dataset benchmark, and achieves better performance than other RL algorithms on tasks that require generalization.

CASOG: Conservative Actor-critic with SmOoth Gradient for Skill Learning in Robot-Assisted Intervention

Robot-assisted intervention has shown reduced radiation exposure to physicians and improved precision in clinical trials. However, existing vascular robotic systems follow master-slave control mode and entirely rely on manual commands. This paper proposes a novel offline reinforcement learning algorithm, Conservative Actor-critic with SmOoth Gradient (CASOG), to learn manipulation skills from human demonstrations on vascular robotic systems. The proposed algorithm conservatively estimates Q-function and smooths gradients of convolution layers to deal with distribution shift and overfitting issues. Furthermore, to focus on complex manipulations, transitions with larger temporal-difference error are sampled with higher probability. Comparative experiments in a pre-clinical environment demonstrate that CASOG can deliver guidewire to the target at a success rate of 94.00\% and mean backward steps of 14.07, performing closer to humans and better than prior offline reinforcement learning methods. These results indicate that the proposed algorithm is promising to improve the autonomy of vascular robotic systems.

2020 CATARACTS Semantic Segmentation Challenge

Surgical scene segmentation is essential for anatomy and instrument localization which can be further used to assess tissue-instrument interactions during a surgical procedure. In 2017, the Challenge on Automatic Tool Annotation for cataRACT Surgery (CATARACTS) released 50 cataract surgery videos accompanied by instrument usage annotations. These annotations included frame-level instrument presence information. In 2020, we released pixel-wise semantic annotations for anatomy and instruments for 4670 images sampled from 25 videos of the CATARACTS training set. The 2020 CATARACTS Semantic Segmentation Challenge, which was a sub-challenge of the 2020 MICCAI Endoscopic Vision (EndoVis) Challenge, presented three sub-tasks to assess participating solutions on anatomical structure and instrument segmentation. Their performance was assessed on a hidden test set of 531 images from 10 videos of the CATARACTS test set.

Group Feature Learning and Domain Adversarial Neural Network for aMCI Diagnosis System Based on EEG

Medical diagnostic robot systems have been paid more and more attention due to its objectivity and accuracy. The diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is considered an effective means to prevent Alzheimer's disease (AD). Doctors diagnose MCI based on various clinical examinations, which are expensive and the diagnosis results rely on the knowledge of doctors. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a robot diagnostic system to eliminate the influence of human factors and obtain a higher accuracy rate. In this paper, we propose a novel Group Feature Domain Adversarial Neural Network (GF-DANN) for amnestic MCI (aMCI) diagnosis, which involves two important modules. A Group Feature Extraction (GFE) module is proposed to reduce individual differences by learning group-level features through adversarial learning. A Dual Branch Domain Adaptation (DBDA) module is carefully designed to reduce the distribution difference between the source and target domain in a domain adaption way. On three types of data set, GF-DANN achieves the best accuracy compared with classic machine learning and deep learning methods. On the DMS data set, GF-DANN has obtained an accuracy rate of 89.47%, and the sensitivity and specificity are 90% and 89%. In addition, by comparing three EEG data collection paradigms, our results demonstrate that the DMS paradigm has the potential to build an aMCI diagnose robot system.