了解伴随衰老过程的内部生理变化是医学图像解释的重要方面，预期的变化在报告异常发现时起着基线的作用。最近已经证明了深度学习可以准确地从胸部X射线检查患者年龄，并显示出作为健康指标和死亡率预测因素的潜力。在本文中，我们介绍了一项关于放射科医生与最先进的深度学习模型的相对性能的新型比较研究：（a）单个胸部X射线的患者年龄估计，以及（b）排名同一患者的两个时间分离图像。我们使用一个具有1.8m胸部X射线的异质数据库培训模型，其地面真相患者年龄，并研究了有限的培训数据和图像分辨率对模型准确性的限制，并在公共数据上证明了概括性的性能。为了探索模型与人类之间在这些年龄预测任务上的较大性能差距，与文献中看到的其他放射学报告任务相比，我们将我们的年龄预测模型纳入有条件的生成对抗网络（CGAN），允许可视化确定的语义特征通过预测模型对年龄预测很重要，将确定的特征与临床医生依赖的特征进行比较。

工程设计传统上是手工执行的：专家根据过去的经验做出设计建议，然后对这些建议进行测试以符合某些目标规格。使用所谓的纪律模型首先通过计算机模拟进行合规性测试。这样的模型可以通过有限元分析，多机系统方法等实现。然后，考虑通过该模拟的设计进行物理原型。总体过程可能需要几个月的时间，并且在实践中是一笔巨大的成本。我们已经开发了一个贝叶斯优化系统，用于通过直接优化针对设计参数的目标规范来部分自动化此过程。所提出的方法是计算不需要的高维非线性函数的广义倒数的一般框架，例如梯度信息，这通常是从纪律模型中获得的。我们此外，基于（i）收敛到最佳满足所有指定设计标准的解决方案，或（ii）收敛到最小值解决方案，我们开发了两层收敛标准。我们证明了使用最先进的商业纪律模型的行业设置动机的车辆底盘设计问题所提出的方法。我们表明，所提出的方法是一般，可扩展和高效的，并且可以根据流行的贝叶斯优化软件包中的现有概念和子例程直接实现新颖的收敛标准。

Extracting complex structures from grid-based data is a common key step in automated medical image analysis. The conventional solution to recovering tree-structured geometries typically involves computing the minimal cost path through intermediate representations derived from segmentation masks. However, this methodology has significant limitations in the context of projective imaging of tree-structured 3D anatomical data such as coronary arteries, since there are often overlapping branches in the 2D projection. In this work, we propose a novel approach to predicting tree connectivity structure which reformulates the task as an optimization problem over individual steps of a recursive process. We design and train a two-stage model which leverages the UNet and Transformer architectures and introduces an image-based prompting technique. Our proposed method achieves compelling results on a pair of synthetic datasets, and outperforms a shortest-path baseline.

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .

Cohn and Umans proposed a framework for developing fast matrix multiplication algorithms based on the embedding computation in certain groups algebras. In subsequent work with Kleinberg and Szegedy, they connected this to the search for combinatorial objects called strong uniquely solvable puzzles (strong USPs). We begin a systematic computer-aided search for these objects. We develop and implement constraint-based algorithms build on reductions to $\mathrm{SAT}$ and $\mathrm{IP}$ to verify that puzzles are strong USPs, and to search for large strong USPs. We produce tight bounds on the maximum size of a strong USP for width $k \le 5$, construct puzzles of small width that are larger than previous work, and improve the upper bounds on strong USP size for $k \le 12$. Although our work only deals with puzzles of small-constant width, the strong USPs we find imply matrix multiplication algorithms that run in $O(n^\omega)$ time with exponent $\omega \le 2.66$. While our algorithms do not beat the fastest algorithms, our work provides evidence and, perhaps, a path to finding families of strong USPs that imply matrix multiplication algorithms that are more efficient than those currently known.

Agile robotics presents a difficult challenge with robots moving at high speeds requiring precise and low-latency sensing and control. Creating agile motion that accomplishes the task at hand while being safe to execute is a key requirement for agile robots to gain human trust. This requires designing new approaches that are flexible and maintain knowledge over world constraints. In this paper, we consider the problem of building a flexible and adaptive controller for a challenging agile mobile manipulation task of hitting ground strokes on a wheelchair tennis robot. We propose and evaluate an extension to work done on learning striking behaviors using a probabilistic movement primitive (ProMP) framework by (1) demonstrating the safe execution of learned primitives on an agile mobile manipulator setup, and (2) proposing an online primitive refinement procedure that utilizes evaluative feedback from humans on the executed trajectories.

Curating datasets for object segmentation is a difficult task. With the advent of large-scale pre-trained generative models, conditional image generation has been given a significant boost in result quality and ease of use. In this paper, we present a novel method that enables the generation of general foreground-background segmentation models from simple textual descriptions, without requiring segmentation labels. We leverage and explore pre-trained latent diffusion models, to automatically generate weak segmentation masks for concepts and objects. The masks are then used to fine-tune the diffusion model on an inpainting task, which enables fine-grained removal of the object, while at the same time providing a synthetic foreground and background dataset. We demonstrate that using this method beats previous methods in both discriminative and generative performance and closes the gap with fully supervised training while requiring no pixel-wise object labels. We show results on the task of segmenting four different objects (humans, dogs, cars, birds).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become commonplace to solve routine everyday tasks. Because of the exponential growth in medical imaging data volume and complexity, the workload on radiologists is steadily increasing. We project that the gap between the number of imaging exams and the number of expert radiologist readers required to cover this increase will continue to expand, consequently introducing a demand for AI-based tools that improve the efficiency with which radiologists can comfortably interpret these exams. AI has been shown to improve efficiency in medical-image generation, processing, and interpretation, and a variety of such AI models have been developed across research labs worldwide. However, very few of these, if any, find their way into routine clinical use, a discrepancy that reflects the divide between AI research and successful AI translation. To address the barrier to clinical deployment, we have formed MONAI Consortium, an open-source community which is building standards for AI deployment in healthcare institutions, and developing tools and infrastructure to facilitate their implementation. This report represents several years of weekly discussions and hands-on problem solving experience by groups of industry experts and clinicians in the MONAI Consortium. We identify barriers between AI-model development in research labs and subsequent clinical deployment and propose solutions. Our report provides guidance on processes which take an imaging AI model from development to clinical implementation in a healthcare institution. We discuss various AI integration points in a clinical Radiology workflow. We also present a taxonomy of Radiology AI use-cases. Through this report, we intend to educate the stakeholders in healthcare and AI (AI researchers, radiologists, imaging informaticists, and regulators) about cross-disciplinary challenges and possible solutions.

Automated cellular instance segmentation is a process utilized for accelerating biological research for the past two decades, and recent advancements have produced higher quality results with less effort from the biologist. Most current endeavors focus on completely cutting the researcher out of the picture by generating highly generalized models. However, these models invariably fail when faced with novel data, distributed differently than the ones used for training. Rather than approaching the problem with methods that presume the availability of large amounts of target data and computing power for retraining, in this work we address the even greater challenge of designing an approach that requires minimal amounts of new annotated data as well as training time. We do so by designing specialized contrastive losses that leverage the few annotated samples very efficiently. A large set of results show that 3 to 5 annotations lead to models with accuracy that: 1) significantly mitigate the covariate shift effects; 2) matches or surpasses other adaptation methods; 3) even approaches methods that have been fully retrained on the target distribution. The adaptation training is only a few minutes, paving a path towards a balance between model performance, computing requirements and expert-level annotation needs.

Neural compression offers a domain-agnostic approach to creating codecs for lossy or lossless compression via deep generative models. For sequence compression, however, most deep sequence models have costs that scale with the sequence length rather than the sequence complexity. In this work, we instead treat data sequences as observations from an underlying continuous-time process and learn how to efficiently discretize while retaining information about the full sequence. As a consequence of decoupling sequential information from its temporal discretization, our approach allows for greater compression rates and smaller computational complexity. Moreover, the continuous-time approach naturally allows us to decode at different time intervals. We empirically verify our approach on multiple domains involving compression of video and motion capture sequences, showing that our approaches can automatically achieve reductions in bit rates by learning how to discretize.