An increasing number of public datasets have shown a marked clinical impact on assessing anatomical structures. However, each of the datasets is small, partially labeled, and rarely investigates severe tumor subjects. Moreover, current models are limited to segmenting specific organs/tumors, which can not be extended to novel domains and classes. To tackle these limitations, we introduce embedding learned from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to segmentation models, dubbed the CLIP-Driven Universal Model. The Universal Model can better segment 25 organs and 6 types of tumors by exploiting the semantic relationship between abdominal structures. The model is developed from an assembly of 14 datasets with 3,410 CT scans and evaluated on 6,162 external CT scans from 3 datasets. We rank first on the public leaderboard of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) and achieve the state-of-the-art results on Beyond The Cranial Vault (BTCV). Compared with dataset-specific models, the Universal Model is computationally more efficient (6x faster), generalizes better to CT scans from varying sites, and shows stronger transfer learning performance on novel tasks. The design of CLIP embedding enables the Universal Model to be easily extended to new classes without catastrophically forgetting the previously learned classes.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Objective: Thigh muscle group segmentation is important for assessment of muscle anatomy, metabolic disease and aging. Many efforts have been put into quantifying muscle tissues with magnetic resonance (MR) imaging including manual annotation of individual muscles. However, leveraging publicly available annotations in MR images to achieve muscle group segmentation on single slice computed tomography (CT) thigh images is challenging. Method: We propose an unsupervised domain adaptation pipeline with self-training to transfer labels from 3D MR to single CT slice. First, we transform the image appearance from MR to CT with CycleGAN and feed the synthesized CT images to a segmenter simultaneously. Single CT slices are divided into hard and easy cohorts based on the entropy of pseudo labels inferenced by the segmenter. After refining easy cohort pseudo labels based on anatomical assumption, self-training with easy and hard splits is applied to fine tune the segmenter. Results: On 152 withheld single CT thigh images, the proposed pipeline achieved a mean Dice of 0.888(0.041) across all muscle groups including sartorius, hamstrings, quadriceps femoris and gracilis. muscles Conclusion: To our best knowledge, this is the first pipeline to achieve thigh imaging domain adaptation from MR to CT. The proposed pipeline is effective and robust in extracting muscle groups on 2D single slice CT thigh images.The container is available for public use at https://github.com/MASILab/DA_CT_muscle_seg

2D低剂量单板腹部计算机断层扫描（CT）切片可直接测量身体成分，这对于对衰老的健康关系进行定量表征至关重要。然而，由于不同年内获得的纵向切片之间的位置方差，使用2D腹部切片对人体成分变化的纵向分析具有挑战性。为了减少位置差异，我们将条件生成模型扩展到我们的C-斜肌，该模型在腹部区域进行任意轴向切片作为条件，并通过估计潜在空间的结构变化来生成定义的椎骨水平切片。对来自内部数据集的1170名受试者的实验和BTCV Miccai挑战赛的50名受试者的实验表明，我们的模型可以从现实主义和相似性方面产生高质量的图像。来自巴尔的摩纵向研究（BLSA）数据集的20名受试者的外部实验，其中包含纵向单腹部切片验证了我们的方法可以在肌肉和内脏脂肪面积方面与切片的位置方差进行协调。我们的方法提供了一个有希望的方向，将切片从不同的椎骨水平映射到目标切片，以减少单个切片纵向分析的位置差异。源代码可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/masilab/c-slicegen。

Transformer-based models, capable of learning better global dependencies, have recently demonstrated exceptional representation learning capabilities in computer vision and medical image analysis. Transformer reformats the image into separate patches and realize global communication via the self-attention mechanism. However, positional information between patches is hard to preserve in such 1D sequences, and loss of it can lead to sub-optimal performance when dealing with large amounts of heterogeneous tissues of various sizes in 3D medical image segmentation. Additionally, current methods are not robust and efficient for heavy-duty medical segmentation tasks such as predicting a large number of tissue classes or modeling globally inter-connected tissues structures. Inspired by the nested hierarchical structures in vision transformer, we proposed a novel 3D medical image segmentation method (UNesT), employing a simplified and faster-converging transformer encoder design that achieves local communication among spatially adjacent patch sequences by aggregating them hierarchically. We extensively validate our method on multiple challenging datasets, consisting anatomies of 133 structures in brain, 14 organs in abdomen, 4 hierarchical components in kidney, and inter-connected kidney tumors). We show that UNesT consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance and evaluate its generalizability and data efficiency. Particularly, the model achieves whole brain segmentation task complete ROI with 133 tissue classes in single network, outperforms prior state-of-the-art method SLANT27 ensembled with 27 network tiles, our model performance increases the mean DSC score of the publicly available Colin and CANDI dataset from 0.7264 to 0.7444 and from 0.6968 to 0.7025, respectively.

从心脏病学到神经病学的疾病中，代谢健康越来越多地成为危险因素，身体成分的效率评估对于定量表征这些关系至关重要。 2D低剂量单切层扫描术（CT）提供了高分辨率，定量组织图，尽管视野有限。尽管在量化图像上下文时已经提出了许多潜在的分析，但尚无对低剂量单切片CT纵向变异性进行自动分割的全面研究。我们使用受监督的基于深度学习的细分和无监督的聚类方法研究了1469个巴尔的摩纵向研究（BLSA）腹部数据集的1469名纵向研究（BLSA）腹部数据集的1816片。在前两次扫描中有两年差距的1469名受试者中有300名被选出，以评估纵向变异性，其中包括类内相关系数（ICC）和变异系数（CV），以组织/器官的大小和平均强度为单位。我们表明，我们的分割方法在纵向环境中是稳定的，骰子范围为13个目标腹部组织结构的0.821至0.962。我们观察到ICC <0.5的大多数器官的较高变异性，肌肉，腹壁，脂肪和体膜的变化较低，平均ICC> 0.8。我们发现器官的变异性与2D切片的横截面位置高度相关。我们的努力铺平了定量探索和质量控制，以减少纵向分析中的不确定性。

从单个放射学图像中学到的功能无法提供有关随着时间的流逝可能发生的病变以及多少变化的信息。从重复图像计算出的时间相关特征可以捕获这些变化，并通过其时间行为来识别恶性病变。但是，纵向医学成像提出了数据获取的稀疏，不规则时间间隔的独特挑战。虽然自我注意事项已被证明是时间序列和自然图像的一种多功能，有效的学习机制，但尚未探索其在稀疏，不规则采样的空​​间特征之间解释时间距离的潜力。在这项工作中，我们通过使用（1）连续时间的矢量嵌入和（2）时间强调自我注意力的权重来提出两种解释时间距离视觉变压器（VIT）。这两种算法是根据合成肺结节的良性与恶性肺癌区分和肺筛查计算机断层扫描研究（NLST）评估的。与标准VIT相比，评估合成结节的时间段VIT的实验表明，在对不规则采样的纵向图像进行分类方面有了基本改进。在从NLST筛选胸部CTS的交叉验证中，我们的方法（分别为0.785和0.786 AUC）显着超过了横截面方法（0.734 AUC）（0.734 AUC），并匹配领先的纵向医学成像算法（0.779 AUC）在良好的良性上的判别性能与恶性分类。这项工作代表了第一个基于自我注意的框架，用于对纵向医学图像进行分类。我们的代码可从https://github.com/tom1193/time-distance-transformer获得。

随着自我监督学习的快速发展（例如，对比度学习），在医学图像分析中广泛认识到具有大规模图像（即使没有注释）来训练更具概括的AI模型的重要性。但是，大规模收集大规模任务的未注释数据对于单个实验室来说可能具有挑战性。现有的在线资源（例如数字书籍，出版物和搜索引擎）为获取大型图像提供了新的资源。然而，在医疗保健中发布的图像（例如放射学和病理学）由大量的带有子图的复合图组成。为了提取和分离化合物形象为下游学习的可用单个图像，我们提出了一个简单的复合图分离（SIMCFS）框架，而无需使用传统所需的检测边界框注释，并具有新的损失函数和硬案例模拟。我们的技术贡献是四倍：（1）我们引入了一个基于模拟的培训框架，该框架最小化了对资源广泛的边界框注释的需求； （2）我们提出了一种新的侧损失，可针对复合人物分离进行优化； （3）我们提出了一种阶层内图像增强方法来模拟硬病例； （4）据我们所知，这是第一项评估利用复合图像分离的自我监督学习功效的研究。从结果来看，提出的SIMCF在ImageClef 2016复合人物分离数据库上实现了最先进的性能。使用大规模开采数字的预审预革的学习模型通过对比度学习算法提高了下游图像分类任务的准确性。 SIMCF的源代码可在https://github.com/hrlblab/imageseperation上公开获得。

多实施学习（MIL）被广泛用于对病理整体幻灯片图像（WSIS）的计算机辅助解释，以解决缺乏像素或贴片的注释。通常，这种方法直接应用“自然图像驱动”的MIL算法，该算法忽略了WSIS的多尺度（即金字塔）性质。现成的MIL算法通常部署在单个WSIS（例如20x放大倍率）上，而人类病理学家通常以多尺度的方式汇总全球和局部模式（例如，通过放大不同大型）。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种新型的跨尺度注意机制，以明确地将尺度间相互作用汇总到单个MIL网络的克罗恩病（CD）（CD），这是炎症性肠病的一种形式。本文的贡献是两个方面：（1）提出了一种跨尺度注意机制，以从不同分辨率的多尺度相互作用汇总特征； （2）生成差异多尺度注意的可视化，以定位可解释的病变模式。通过训练来自20名CD患者的约250,000 H＆E染色的上升结肠（AC）斑块，在不同尺度上训练30个健康对照样品，我们的方法在曲线下（AUC）得分为0.8924，与基线模型相比达到0.8924。官方实施可在https://github.com/hrlblab/cs-mil上公开获得。

肺部以外的视野（FOV）组织截断在常规的肺筛查计算机断层扫描（CT）中很常见。这对机会性CT的身体组成（BC）评估构成了局限性，因为缺少关键的解剖结构。传统上，扩展CT的FOV被认为是使用有限数据的CT重建问题。但是，这种方法依赖于应用程序中可能无法使用的投影域数据。在这项工作中，我们从语义图像扩展角度提出问题，该角度仅需要图像数据作为输入。提出的两阶段方法根据完整体的估计范围识别新的FOV边框，并在截短区域中渗出了缺失的组织。使用在FOV中具有完整主体的CT切片对训练样品进行模拟，从而使模型开发自制。我们使用有限FOV的肺筛选CT评估了所提出的方法在自动BC评估中的有效性。提出的方法有效地恢复了缺失的组织并减少了FOV组织截断引入的BC评估误差。在大规模肺部筛查CT数据集的BC评估中，这种校正既可以提高受试者内的一致性和与人体测量近似值的相关性。已开发的方法可在https://github.com/masilab/s-efov上获得。