Assessment of cardiovascular disease (CVD) with cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used to non-invasively evaluate detailed cardiac structure and function. Accurate segmentation of cardiac structures from cine MRI is a crucial step for ea
rly diagnosis and prognosis of CVD, and has been greatly improved with convolutional neural networks (CNN). There, however, are a number of limitations identified in CNN models, such as limited interpretability and high complexity, thus limiting their use in clinical practice. In this work, to address the limitations, we propose a lightweight and interpretable machine learning model, successive subspace learning with the subspace approximation with adjusted bias (Saab) transform, for accurate and efficient segmentation from cine MRI. Specifically, our segmentation framework is comprised of the following steps: (1) sequential expansion of near-to-far neighborhood at different resolutions; (2) channel-wise subspace approximation using the Saab transform for unsupervised dimension reduction; (3) class-wise entropy guided feature selection for supervised dimension reduction; (4) concatenation of features and pixel-wise classification with gradient boost; and (5) conditional random field for post-processing. Experimental results on the ACDC 2017 segmentation database, showed that our framework performed better than state-of-the-art U-Net models with 200$times$ fewer parameters in delineating the left ventricle, right ventricle, and myocardium, thus showing its potential to be used in clinical practice.
Self-training based unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has shown great potential to address the problem of domain shift, when applying a trained deep learning model in a source domain to unlabeled target domains. However, while the self-training UD
A has demonstrated its effectiveness on discriminative tasks, such as classification and segmentation, via the reliable pseudo-label selection based on the softmax discrete histogram, the self-training UDA for generative tasks, such as image synthesis, is not fully investigated. In this work, we propose a novel generative self-training (GST) UDA framework with continuous value prediction and regression objective for cross-domain image synthesis. Specifically, we propose to filter the pseudo-label with an uncertainty mask, and quantify the predictive confidence of generated images with practical variational Bayes learning. The fast test-time adaptation is achieved by a round-based alternative optimization scheme. We validated our framework on the tagged-to-cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) synthesis problem, where datasets in the source and target domains were acquired from different scanners or centers. Extensive validations were carried out to verify our framework against popular adversarial training UDA methods. Results show that our GST, with tagged MRI of test subjects in new target domains, improved the synthesis quality by a large margin, compared with the adversarial training UDA methods.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled and unseen target domain, which is usually trained on data from both domains. Access to the source domain data at the adaptation stag
e, however, is often limited, due to data storage or privacy issues. To alleviate this, in this work, we target source free UDA for segmentation, and propose to adapt an ``off-the-shelf segmentation model pre-trained in the source domain to the target domain, with an adaptive batch-wise normalization statistics adaptation framework. Specifically, the domain-specific low-order batch statistics, i.e., mean and variance, are gradually adapted with an exponential momentum decay scheme, while the consistency of domain shareable high-order batch statistics, i.e., scaling and shifting parameters, is explicitly enforced by our optimization objective. The transferability of each channel is adaptively measured first from which to balance the contribution of each channel. Moreover, the proposed source free UDA framework is orthogonal to unsupervised learning methods, e.g., self-entropy minimization, which can thus be simply added on top of our framework. Extensive experiments on the BraTS 2018 database show that our source free UDA framework outperformed existing source-relaxed UDA methods for the cross-subtype UDA segmentation task and yielded comparable results for the cross-modality UDA segmentation task, compared with a supervised UDA methods with the source data.
Intelligible speech is produced by creating varying internal local muscle groupings -- i.e., functional units -- that are generated in a systematic and coordinated manner. There are two major challenges in characterizing and analyzing functional unit
s.~First, due to the complex and convoluted nature of tongue structure and function, it is of great importance to develop a method that can accurately decode complex muscle coordination patterns during speech. Second, it is challenging to keep identified functional units across subjects comparable due to their substantial variability. In this work, to address these challenges, we develop a new deep learning framework to identify common and subject-specific functional units of tongue motion during speech.~Our framework hinges on joint deep graph-regularized sparse non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) using motion quantities derived from displacements by tagged Magnetic Resonance Imaging. More specifically, we transform NMF with sparse and graph regularizations into modular architectures akin to deep neural networks by means of unfolding the Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm to learn interpretable building blocks and associated weighting map. We then apply spectral clustering to common and subject-specific weighting maps from which we jointly determine the common and subject-specific functional units. Experiments carried out with simulated datasets show that the proposed method achieved on par or better clustering performance over the comparison methods. Experiments carried out with in vivo tongue motion data show that the proposed method can determine the common and subject-specific functional units with increased interpretability and decreased size variability.
