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.

实际数据集中不可避免地有许多错误标记的数据。由于深度神经网络（DNNS）具有记忆标签的巨大能力，因此需要强大的训练方案来防止标签错误降低DNN的概括性能。当前的最新方法提出了一种共同训练方案，该方案使用与小损失相关的样本训练双网络。但是，实际上，培训两个网络可以同时负担计算资源。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种简单而有效的健壮培训计划，该计划仅通过培训一个网络来运行。在训练过程中，提出的方法通过从随机梯度下降优化形成的重量轨迹中抽样中间网络参数来生成时间自我启动。使用这些自我归档评估的损失总和用于识别错误标记的样品。同时，我们的方法通过将输入数据转换为各种形式，并考虑其协议以识别错误标记的样本来生成多视图预测。通过结合上述指标，我们介绍了提出的{\ it基于自动化的鲁棒训练}（SRT）方法，该方法可以用嘈杂的标签过滤样品，以减少其对训练的影响。广泛使用的公共数据集的实验表明，所提出的方法在某些类别中实现了最新的性能，而无需训练双网络。

手语制作（SLP）旨在将语言的表达方式转化为手语的相应语言，例如基于骨架的标志姿势或视频。现有的SLP型号是自动回旋（AR）或非自动入口（NAR）。但是，AR-SLP模型在解码过程中遭受了回归对均值和误差传播的影响。 NSLP-G是一种基于NAR的模型，在某种程度上解决了这些问题，但会带来其他问题。例如，它不考虑目标符号长度，并且会遭受虚假解码启动的影响。我们通过知识蒸馏（KD）提出了一种新型的NAR-SLP模型，以解决这些问题。首先，我们设计一个长度调节器来预测生成的符号姿势序列的末端。然后，我们采用KD，该KD从预训练的姿势编码器中提取空间语言特征以减轻虚假解码的启动。广泛的实验表明，所提出的方法在特里切特的手势距离和背面翻译评估中都显着优于现有的SLP模型。

Purpose: The aim of this study was to demonstrate the utility of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) in automated knee osteoarthritis (OA) phenotype classification using a small dataset (n=50). Materials and Methods: For this retrospective study, we collected 3,166 three-dimensional (3D) double-echo steady-state magnetic resonance (MR) images from the Osteoarthritis Initiative dataset and 50 3D turbo/fast spin-echo MR images from our institute (in 2020 and 2021) as the source and target datasets, respectively. For each patient, the degree of knee OA was initially graded according to the MRI Osteoarthritis Knee Score (MOAKS) before being converted to binary OA phenotype labels. The proposed UDA pipeline included (a) pre-processing, which involved automatic segmentation and region-of-interest cropping; (b) source classifier training, which involved pre-training phenotype classifiers on the source dataset; (c) target encoder adaptation, which involved unsupervised adaption of the source encoder to the target encoder and (d) target classifier validation, which involved statistical analysis of the target classification performance evaluated by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), sensitivity, specificity and accuracy. Additionally, a classifier was trained without UDA for comparison. Results: The target classifier trained with UDA achieved improved AUROC, sensitivity, specificity and accuracy for both knee OA phenotypes compared with the classifier trained without UDA. Conclusion: The proposed UDA approach improves the performance of automated knee OA phenotype classification for small target datasets by utilising a large, high-quality source dataset for training. The results successfully demonstrated the advantages of the UDA approach in classification on small datasets.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs during the inference stage is crucial for deploying neural networks in the real world. Previous methods commonly relied on the output of a network derived from the highly activated feature map. In this study, we first revealed that a norm of the feature map obtained from the other block than the last block can be a better indicator of OOD detection. Motivated by this, we propose a simple framework consisting of FeatureNorm: a norm of the feature map and NormRatio: a ratio of FeatureNorm for ID and OOD to measure the OOD detection performance of each block. In particular, to select the block that provides the largest difference between FeatureNorm of ID and FeatureNorm of OOD, we create Jigsaw puzzle images as pseudo OOD from ID training samples and calculate NormRatio, and the block with the largest value is selected. After the suitable block is selected, OOD detection with the FeatureNorm outperforms other OOD detection methods by reducing FPR95 by up to 52.77% on CIFAR10 benchmark and by up to 48.53% on ImageNet benchmark. We demonstrate that our framework can generalize to various architectures and the importance of block selection, which can improve previous OOD detection methods as well.

Most scanning LiDAR sensors generate a sequence of point clouds in real-time. While conventional 3D object detectors use a set of unordered LiDAR points acquired over a fixed time interval, recent studies have revealed that substantial performance improvement can be achieved by exploiting the spatio-temporal context present in a sequence of LiDAR point sets. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D object detection architecture, which can encode LiDAR point cloud sequences acquired by multiple successive scans. The encoding process of the point cloud sequence is performed on two different time scales. We first design a short-term motion-aware voxel encoding that captures the short-term temporal changes of point clouds driven by the motion of objects in each voxel. We also propose long-term motion-guided bird's eye view (BEV) feature enhancement that adaptively aligns and aggregates the BEV feature maps obtained by the short-term voxel encoding by utilizing the dynamic motion context inferred from the sequence of the feature maps. The experiments conducted on the public nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that the proposed 3D object detector offers significant improvements in performance compared to the baseline methods and that it sets a state-of-the-art performance for certain 3D object detection categories. Code is available at https://github.com/HYjhkoh/MGTANet.git

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

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

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.