Interpretable Auto Window Setting for Deep-Learning-Based CT Analysis

Whether during the early days of popularization or in the present, the window setting in Computed Tomography (CT) has always been an indispensable part of the CT analysis process. Although research has investigated the capabilities of CT multi-window fusion in enhancing neural networks, there remains a paucity of domain-invariant, intuitively interpretable methodologies for Auto Window Setting. In this work, we propose an plug-and-play module originate from Tanh activation function, which is compatible with mainstream deep learning architectures. Starting from the physical principles of CT, we adhere to the principle of interpretability to ensure the module's reliability for medical implementations. The domain-invariant design facilitates observation of the preference decisions rendered by the adaptive mechanism from a clinically intuitive perspective. This enables the proposed method to be understood not only by experts in neural networks but also garners higher trust from clinicians. We confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in multiple open-source datasets, yielding 10%~200% Dice improvements on hard segment targets.

Intuitive Axial Augmentation Using Polar-Sine-Based Piecewise Distortion for Medical Slice-Wise Segmentation

Most data-driven models for medical image analysis rely on universal augmentations to improve performance. Experimental evidence has confirmed their effectiveness, but the unclear mechanism underlying them poses a barrier to the widespread acceptance and trust in such methods within the medical community. We revisit and acknowledge the unique characteristics of medical images apart from traditional digital images, and consequently, proposed a medical-specific augmentation algorithm that is more elastic and aligns well with radiology scan procedure. The method performs piecewise affine with sinusoidal distorted ray according to radius on polar coordinates, thus simulating uncertain postures of human lying flat on the scanning table. Our method could generate human visceral distribution without affecting the fundamental relative position on axial plane. Two non-adaptive algorithms, namely Meta-based Scan Table Removal and Similarity-Guided Parameter Search, are introduced to bolster robustness of our augmentation method. Experiments show our method improves accuracy across multiple famous segmentation frameworks without requiring more data samples. Our preview code is available in: https://github.com/MGAMZ/PSBPD.

SPRMamba: Surgical Phase Recognition for Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection with Mamba

Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) is a minimally invasive procedure initially designed for the treatment of early gastric cancer but is now widely used for various gastrointestinal lesions. Computer-assisted Surgery systems have played a crucial role in improving the precision and safety of ESD procedures, however, their effectiveness is limited by the accurate recognition of surgical phases. The intricate nature of ESD, with different lesion characteristics and tissue structures, presents challenges for real-time surgical phase recognition algorithms. Existing surgical phase recognition algorithms struggle to efficiently capture temporal contexts in video-based scenarios, leading to insufficient performance. To address these issues, we propose SPRMamba, a novel Mamba-based framework for ESD surgical phase recognition. SPRMamba leverages the strengths of Mamba for long-term temporal modeling while introducing the Scaled Residual TranMamba block to enhance the capture of fine-grained details, overcoming the limitations of traditional temporal models like Temporal Convolutional Networks and Transformers. Moreover, a Temporal Sample Strategy is introduced to accelerate the processing, which is essential for real-time phase recognition in clinical settings. Extensive testing on the ESD385 dataset and the cholecystectomy Cholec80 dataset demonstrates that SPRMamba surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods and exhibits greater robustness across various surgical phase recognition tasks.

Deep Multimodal Collaborative Learning for Polyp Re-Identification

Colonoscopic Polyp Re-Identification aims to match the same polyp from a large gallery with images from different views taken using different cameras and plays an important role in the prevention and treatment of colorectal cancer in computer-aided diagnosis. However, traditional methods for object ReID directly adopting CNN models trained on the ImageNet dataset usually produce unsatisfactory retrieval performance on colonoscopic datasets due to the large domain gap. Worsely, these solutions typically learn unimodal modal representations on the basis of visual samples, which fails to explore complementary information from different modalities. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Deep Multimodal Collaborative Learning framework named DMCL for polyp re-identification, which can effectively encourage modality collaboration and reinforce generalization capability in medical scenarios. On the basis of it, a dynamic multimodal feature fusion strategy is introduced to leverage the optimized multimodal representations for multimodal fusion via end-to-end training. Experiments on the standard benchmarks show the benefits of the multimodal setting over state-of-the-art unimodal ReID models, especially when combined with the specialized multimodal fusion strategy.