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Federated learning (FL) is a learning paradigm that enables collaborative training of models using decentralized data. Recently, the utilization of pre-trained weight initialization in FL has been demonstrated to effectively improve model performance. However, the evolving complexity of current pre-trained models, characterized by a substantial increase in parameters, markedly intensifies the challenges associated with communication rounds required for their adaptation to FL. To address these communication cost issues and increase the performance of pre-trained model adaptation in FL, we propose an innovative model interpolation-based local training technique called ``Local Superior Soups.'' Our method enhances local training across different clients, encouraging the exploration of a connected low-loss basin within a few communication rounds through regularized model interpolation. This approach acts as a catalyst for the seamless adaptation of pre-trained models in in FL. We demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency across diverse widely-used FL datasets. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ubc-tea/Local-Superior-Soups}{https://github.com/ubc-tea/Local-Superior-Soups}., Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2024

Visualizing surgical scenes is crucial for revealing internal anatomical structures during minimally invasive procedures. Novel View Synthesis is a vital technique that offers geometry and appearance reconstruction, enhancing understanding, planning, and decision-making in surgical scenes. Despite the impressive achievements of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), its direct application to surgical scenes produces unsatisfying results due to two challenges: endoscopic sparse views and significant photometric inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose uncertainty-aware conditional NeRF for novel view synthesis to tackle the severe shape-radiance ambiguity from sparse surgical views. The core of UC-NeRF is to incorporate the multi-view uncertainty estimation to condition the neural radiance field for modeling the severe photometric inconsistencies adaptively. Specifically, our UC-NeRF first builds a consistency learner in the form of multi-view stereo network, to establish the geometric correspondence from sparse views and generate uncertainty estimation and feature priors. In neural rendering, we design a base-adaptive NeRF network to exploit the uncertainty estimation for explicitly handling the photometric inconsistencies. Furthermore, an uncertainty-guided geometry distillation is employed to enhance geometry learning. Experiments on the SCARED and Hamlyn datasets demonstrate our superior performance in rendering appearance and geometry, consistently outperforming the current state-of-the-art approaches. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/wrld/UC-NeRF}.

This paper addresses the limitations of adverse weather image restoration approaches trained on synthetic data when applied to real-world scenarios. We formulate a semi-supervised learning framework employing vision-language models to enhance restoration performance across diverse adverse weather conditions in real-world settings. Our approach involves assessing image clearness and providing semantics using vision-language models on real data, serving as supervision signals for training restoration models. For clearness enhancement, we use real-world data, utilizing a dual-step strategy with pseudo-labels assessed by vision-language models and weather prompt learning. For semantic enhancement, we integrate real-world data by adjusting weather conditions in vision-language model descriptions while preserving semantic meaning. Additionally, we introduce an effective training strategy to bootstrap restoration performance. Our approach achieves superior results in real-world adverse weather image restoration, demonstrated through qualitative and quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art works., Comment: Accepted by ECCV 2024

Multimodal learning leverages complementary information derived from different modalities, thereby enhancing performance in medical image segmentation. However, prevailing multimodal learning methods heavily rely on extensive well-annotated data from various modalities to achieve accurate segmentation performance. This dependence often poses a challenge in clinical settings due to limited availability of such data. Moreover, the inherent anatomical misalignment between different imaging modalities further complicates the endeavor to enhance segmentation performance. To address this problem, we propose a novel semi-supervised multimodal segmentation framework that is robust to scarce labeled data and misaligned modalities. Our framework employs a novel cross modality collaboration strategy to distill modality-independent knowledge, which is inherently associated with each modality, and integrates this information into a unified fusion layer for feature amalgamation. With a channel-wise semantic consistency loss, our framework ensures alignment of modality-independent information from a feature-wise perspective across modalities, thereby fortifying it against misalignments in multimodal scenarios. Furthermore, our framework effectively integrates contrastive consistent learning to regulate anatomical structures, facilitating anatomical-wise prediction alignment on unlabeled data in semi-supervised segmentation tasks. Our method achieves competitive performance compared to other multimodal methods across three tasks: cardiac, abdominal multi-organ, and thyroid-associated orbitopathy segmentations. It also demonstrates outstanding robustness in scenarios involving scarce labeled data and misaligned modalities.

Scale-aware monocular depth estimation poses a significant challenge in computer-aided endoscopic navigation. However, existing depth estimation methods that do not consider the geometric priors struggle to learn the absolute scale from training with monocular endoscopic sequences. Additionally, conventional methods face difficulties in accurately estimating details on tissue and instruments boundaries. In this paper, we tackle these problems by proposing a novel enhanced scale-aware framework that only uses monocular images with geometric modeling for depth estimation. Specifically, we first propose a multi-resolution depth fusion strategy to enhance the quality of monocular depth estimation. To recover the precise scale between relative depth and real-world values, we further calculate the 3D poses of instruments in the endoscopic scenes by algebraic geometry based on the image-only geometric primitives (i.e., boundaries and tip of instruments). Afterwards, the 3D poses of surgical instruments enable the scale recovery of relative depth maps. By coupling scale factors and relative depth estimation, the scale-aware depth of the monocular endoscopic scenes can be estimated. We evaluate the pipeline on in-house endoscopic surgery videos and simulated data. The results demonstrate that our method can learn the absolute scale with geometric modeling and accurately estimate scale-aware depth for monocular scenes.

Augmented Reality (AR) holds the potential to revolutionize surgical procedures by allowing surgeons to visualize critical structures within the patient's body. This is achieved through superimposing preoperative organ models onto the actual anatomy. Challenges arise from dynamic deformations of organs during surgery, making preoperative models inadequate for faithfully representing intraoperative anatomy. To enable reliable navigation in augmented surgery, modeling of intraoperative deformation to obtain an accurate alignment of the preoperative organ model with the intraoperative anatomy is indispensable. Despite the existence of various methods proposed to model intraoperative organ deformation, there are still few literature reviews that systematically categorize and summarize these approaches. This review aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive and technical-oriented overview of modeling methods for intraoperative organ deformation in augmented reality in surgery. Through a systematic search and screening process, 112 closely relevant papers were included in this review. By presenting the current status of organ deformation modeling methods and their clinical applications, this review seeks to enhance the understanding of organ deformation modeling in AR-guided surgery, and discuss the potential topics for future advancements.

Accurate segmentation of tools in robot-assisted surgery is critical for machine perception, as it facilitates numerous downstream tasks including augmented reality feedback. While current feed-forward neural network-based methods exhibit excellent segmentation performance under ideal conditions, these models have proven susceptible to even minor corruptions, significantly impairing the model's performance. This vulnerability is especially problematic in surgical settings where predictions might be used to inform high-stakes decisions. To better understand model behavior under non-adversarial corruptions, prior work has explored introducing artificial corruptions, like Gaussian noise or contrast perturbation to test set images, to assess model robustness. However, these corruptions are either not photo-realistic or model/task agnostic. Thus, these investigations provide limited insights into model deterioration under realistic surgical corruptions. To address this limitation, we introduce the SegSTRONG-C challenge that aims to promote the development of algorithms robust to unforeseen but plausible image corruptions of surgery, like smoke, bleeding, and low brightness. We collect and release corruption-free mock endoscopic video sequences for the challenge participants to train their algorithms and benchmark them on video sequences with photo-realistic non-adversarial corruptions for a binary robot tool segmentation task. This new benchmark will allow us to carefully study neural network robustness to non-adversarial corruptions of surgery, thus constituting an important first step towards more robust models for surgical computer vision. In this paper, we describe the data collection and annotation protocol, baseline evaluations of established segmentation models, and data augmentation-based techniques to enhance model robustness.

Eye gaze that reveals human observational patterns has increasingly been incorporated into solutions for vision tasks. Despite recent explorations on leveraging gaze to aid deep networks, few studies exploit gaze as an efficient annotation approach for medical image segmentation which typically entails heavy annotating costs. In this paper, we propose to collect dense weak supervision for medical image segmentation with a gaze annotation scheme. To train with gaze, we propose a multi-level framework that trains multiple networks from discriminative human attention, simulated with a set of pseudo-masks derived by applying hierarchical thresholds on gaze heatmaps. Furthermore, to mitigate gaze noise, a cross-level consistency is exploited to regularize overfitting noisy labels, steering models toward clean patterns learned by peer networks. The proposed method is validated on two public medical datasets of polyp and prostate segmentation tasks. We contribute a high-quality gaze dataset entitled GazeMedSeg as an extension to the popular medical segmentation datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first gaze dataset for medical image segmentation. Our experiments demonstrate that gaze annotation outperforms previous label-efficient annotation schemes in terms of both performance and annotation time. Our collected gaze data and code are available at: https://github.com/med-air/GazeMedSeg., Comment: MICCAI 2024

The rapid advancement of foundation models in medical imaging represents a significant leap toward enhancing diagnostic accuracy and personalized treatment. However, the deployment of foundation models in healthcare necessitates a rigorous examination of their trustworthiness, encompassing privacy, robustness, reliability, explainability, and fairness. The current body of survey literature on foundation models in medical imaging reveals considerable gaps, particularly in the area of trustworthiness. Additionally, existing surveys on the trustworthiness of foundation models do not adequately address their specific variations and applications within the medical imaging domain. This survey aims to fill that gap by presenting a novel taxonomy of foundation models used in medical imaging and analyzing the key motivations for ensuring their trustworthiness. We review current research on foundation models in major medical imaging applications, focusing on segmentation, medical report generation, medical question and answering (Q\&A), and disease diagnosis. These areas are highlighted because they have seen a relatively mature and substantial number of foundation models compared to other applications. We focus on literature that discusses trustworthiness in medical image analysis manuscripts. We explore the complex challenges of building trustworthy foundation models for each application, summarizing current concerns and strategies for enhancing trustworthiness. Furthermore, we examine the potential of these models to revolutionize patient care. Our analysis underscores the imperative for advancing towards trustworthy AI in medical image analysis, advocating for a balanced approach that fosters innovation while ensuring ethical and equitable healthcare delivery.

The advent of foundation models (FMs) in healthcare offers unprecedented opportunities to enhance medical diagnostics through automated classification and segmentation tasks. However, these models also raise significant concerns about their fairness, especially when applied to diverse and underrepresented populations in healthcare applications. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive benchmarks, standardized pipelines, and easily adaptable libraries to evaluate and understand the fairness performance of FMs in medical imaging, leading to considerable challenges in formulating and implementing solutions that ensure equitable outcomes across diverse patient populations. To fill this gap, we introduce FairMedFM, a fairness benchmark for FM research in medical imaging.FairMedFM integrates with 17 popular medical imaging datasets, encompassing different modalities, dimensionalities, and sensitive attributes. It explores 20 widely used FMs, with various usages such as zero-shot learning, linear probing, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and prompting in various downstream tasks -- classification and segmentation. Our exhaustive analysis evaluates the fairness performance over different evaluation metrics from multiple perspectives, revealing the existence of bias, varied utility-fairness trade-offs on different FMs, consistent disparities on the same datasets regardless FMs, and limited effectiveness of existing unfairness mitigation methods. Checkout FairMedFM's project page and open-sourced codebase, which supports extendible functionalities and applications as well as inclusive for studies on FMs in medical imaging over the long term., Comment: 29 pages, 17 figures

In this paper, we introduce a novel path to $\textit{general}$ human motion generation by focusing on 2D space. Traditional methods have primarily generated human motions in 3D, which, while detailed and realistic, are often limited by the scope of available 3D motion data in terms of both the size and the diversity. To address these limitations, we exploit extensive availability of 2D motion data. We present $\textbf{Holistic-Motion2D}$, the first comprehensive and large-scale benchmark for 2D whole-body motion generation, which includes over 1M in-the-wild motion sequences, each paired with high-quality whole-body/partial pose annotations and textual descriptions. Notably, Holistic-Motion2D is ten times larger than the previously largest 3D motion dataset. We also introduce a baseline method, featuring innovative $\textit{whole-body part-aware attention}$ and $\textit{confidence-aware modeling}$ techniques, tailored for 2D $\underline{\text T}$ext-driv$\underline{\text{EN}}$ whole-bo$\underline{\text D}$y motion gen$\underline{\text{ER}}$ation, namely $\textbf{Tender}$. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of $\textbf{Holistic-Motion2D}$ and $\textbf{Tender}$ in generating expressive, diverse, and realistic human motions. We also highlight the utility of 2D motion for various downstream applications and its potential for lifting to 3D motion. The page link is: https://holistic-motion2d.github.io., Comment: 22 pages, 11figures, 17 tables

The current variants of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which include the original SAM and Medical SAM, still lack the capability to produce sufficiently accurate segmentation for medical images. In medical imaging contexts, it is not uncommon for human experts to rectify segmentations of specific test samples after SAM generates its segmentation predictions. These rectifications typically entail manual or semi-manual corrections employing state-of-the-art annotation tools. Motivated by this process, we introduce a novel approach that leverages the advantages of online machine learning to enhance Segment Anything (SA) during test time. We employ rectified annotations to perform online learning, with the aim of improving the segmentation quality of SA on medical images. To improve the effectiveness and efficiency of online learning when integrated with large-scale vision models like SAM, we propose a new method called Auxiliary Online Learning (AuxOL). AuxOL creates and applies a small auxiliary model (specialist) in conjunction with SAM (generalist), entails adaptive online-batch and adaptive segmentation fusion. Experiments conducted on eight datasets covering four medical imaging modalities validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our work proposes and validates a new, practical, and effective approach for enhancing SA on downstream segmentation tasks (e.g., medical image segmentation)., Comment: Project Link: https://sam-auxol.github.io/AuxOL/

Surgical robot task automation has been a promising research topic for improving surgical efficiency and quality. Learning-based methods have been recognized as an interesting paradigm and been increasingly investigated. However, existing approaches encounter difficulties in long-horizon goal-conditioned tasks due to the intricate compositional structure, which requires decision-making for a sequence of sub-steps and understanding of inherent dynamics of goal-reaching tasks. In this paper, we propose a new learning-based framework by leveraging the strong reasoning capability of the GPT-based architecture to automate surgical robotic tasks. The key to our approach is developing a goal-conditioned decision transformer to achieve sequential representations with goal-aware future indicators in order to enhance temporal reasoning. Moreover, considering to exploit a general understanding of dynamics inherent in manipulations, thus making the model's reasoning ability to be task-agnostic, we also design a cross-task pretraining paradigm that uses multiple training objectives associated with data from diverse tasks. We have conducted extensive experiments on 10 tasks using the surgical robot learning simulator SurRoL~\cite{long2023human}. The results show that our new approach achieves promising performance and task versatility compared to existing methods. The learned trajectories can be deployed on the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) for validating its practicality in real surgical robot settings. Our project website is at: https://med-air.github.io/SurRoL.

Tissue deformation poses a key challenge for accurate surgical scene reconstruction. Despite yielding high reconstruction quality, existing methods suffer from slow rendering speeds and long training times, limiting their intraoperative applicability. Motivated by recent progress in 3D Gaussian Splatting, an emerging technology in real-time 3D rendering, this work presents a novel fast reconstruction framework, termed Deform3DGS, for deformable tissues during endoscopic surgery. Specifically, we introduce 3D GS into surgical scenes by integrating a point cloud initialization to improve reconstruction. Furthermore, we propose a novel flexible deformation modeling scheme (FDM) to learn tissue deformation dynamics at the level of individual Gaussians. Our FDM can model the surface deformation with efficient representations, allowing for real-time rendering performance. More importantly, FDM significantly accelerates surgical scene reconstruction, demonstrating considerable clinical values, particularly in intraoperative settings where time efficiency is crucial. Experiments on DaVinci robotic surgery videos indicate the efficacy of our approach, showcasing superior reconstruction fidelity PSNR: (37.90) and rendering speed (338.8 FPS) while substantially reducing training time to only 1 minute/scene. Our code is available at https://github.com/jinlab-imvr/Deform3DGS., Comment: Early accepted at MICCAI 2024, 10 pages, 2 figures

The Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System (PI-RADS) is pivotal in the diagnosis of clinically significant prostate cancer through MRI imaging. Current deep learning-based PI-RADS scoring methods often lack the incorporation of common PI-RADS clinical guideline~(PICG) utilized by radiologists, potentially compromising scoring accuracy. This paper introduces a novel approach that adapts a multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to incorporate PICG into PI-RADS scoring model without additional annotations and network parameters. We present a designed two-stage fine-tuning process aiming at adapting a MLLM originally trained on natural images to the MRI images while effectively integrating the PICG. Specifically, in the first stage, we develop a domain adapter layer tailored for processing 3D MRI inputs and instruct the MLLM to differentiate MRI sequences. In the second stage, we translate PICG for guiding instructions from the model to generate PICG-guided image features. Through such a feature distillation step, we align the scoring network's features with the PICG-guided image features, which enables the model to effectively incorporate the PICG information. We develop our model on a public dataset and evaluate it on an in-house dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively improves the performance of current scoring networks. Code is available at: https://github.com/med-air/PICG2scoring

Surgical scene simulation plays a crucial role in surgical education and simulator-based robot learning. Traditional approaches for creating these environments with surgical scene involve a labor-intensive process where designers hand-craft tissues models with textures and geometries for soft body simulations. This manual approach is not only time-consuming but also limited in the scalability and realism. In contrast, data-driven simulation offers a compelling alternative. It has the potential to automatically reconstruct 3D surgical scenes from real-world surgical video data, followed by the application of soft body physics. This area, however, is relatively uncharted. In our research, we introduce 3D Gaussian as a learnable representation for surgical scene, which is learned from stereo endoscopic video. To prevent over-fitting and ensure the geometrical correctness of these scenes, we incorporate depth supervision and anisotropy regularization into the Gaussian learning process. Furthermore, we apply the Material Point Method, which is integrated with physical properties, to the 3D Gaussians to achieve realistic scene deformations. Our method was evaluated on our collected in-house and public surgical videos datasets. Results show that it can reconstruct and simulate surgical scenes from endoscopic videos efficiently-taking only a few minutes to reconstruct the surgical scene-and produce both visually and physically plausible deformations at a speed approaching real-time. The results demonstrate great potential of our proposed method to enhance the efficiency and variety of simulations available for surgical education and robot learning.

Recently, fiber optic sensors such as fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) have been widely investigated for shape reconstruction and force estimation of flexible surgical robots. However, most existing approaches need precise model parameters of FBGs inside the fiber and their alignments with the flexible robots for accurate sensing results. Another challenge lies in online acquiring external forces at arbitrary locations along the flexible robots, which is highly required when with large deflections in robotic surgery. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven paradigm for simultaneous estimation of shape and force along highly deformable flexible robots by using sparse strain measurement from a single-core FBG fiber. A thin-walled soft sensing tube helically embedded with FBG sensors is designed for a robotic-assisted flexible ureteroscope with large deflection up to 270 degrees and a bend radius under 10 mm. We introduce and study three learning models by incorporating spatial strain encoders, and compare their performances in both free space and constrained environments with contact forces at different locations. The experimental results in terms of dynamic shape-force sensing accuracy demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed methods., Comment: Accepted to ICRA 2024

Medical vision-language pre-training has emerged as a promising approach for learning domain-general representations of medical image and text. Current algorithms that exploit the global and local alignment between medical image and text could however be marred by the redundant information in medical data. To address this issue, we propose a grounded knowledge-enhanced medical vision-language pre-training (GK-MVLP) framework for chest X-ray. In this framework, medical knowledge is grounded to the appropriate anatomical regions by using a transformer-based grounded knowledge-enhanced module for fine-grained alignment between anatomical region-level visual features and the textural features of medical knowledge. The performance of GK-MVLP is competitive with or exceeds the state of the art on downstream chest X-ray disease classification, disease localization, report generation, and medical visual question-answering tasks. Our results show the advantage of incorporating grounding mechanism to remove biases and improve the alignment between chest X-ray image and radiology report.

The healthcare industry has a growing need for realistic modeling and efficient simulation of surgical scenes. With effective models of deformable surgical scenes, clinicians are able to conduct surgical planning and surgery training on scenarios close to real-world cases. However, a significant challenge in achieving such a goal is the scarcity of high-quality soft tissue models with accurate shapes and textures. To address this gap, we present a data-driven framework that leverages emerging neural radiance field technology to enable high-quality surgical reconstruction and explore its application for surgical simulations. We first focus on developing a fast NeRF-based surgical scene 3D reconstruction approach that achieves state-of-the-art performance. This method can significantly outperform traditional 3D reconstruction methods, which have failed to capture large deformations and produce fine-grained shapes and textures. We then propose an automated creation pipeline of interactive surgical simulation environments through a closed mesh extraction algorithm. Our experiments have validated the superior performance and efficiency of our proposed approach in surgical scene 3D reconstruction. We further utilize our reconstructed soft tissues to conduct FEM and MPM simulations, showcasing the practical application of our method in data-driven surgical simulations., Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Accepted by International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery

Gradient-based saliency maps have been widely used to explain the decisions of deep neural network classifiers. However, standard gradient-based interpretation maps, including the simple gradient and integrated gradient algorithms, often lack desired structures such as sparsity and connectedness in their application to real-world computer vision models. A frequently used approach to inducing sparsity structures into gradient-based saliency maps is to alter the simple gradient scheme using sparsification or norm-based regularization. A drawback with such post-processing methods is their frequently-observed significant loss in fidelity to the original simple gradient map. In this work, we propose to apply adversarial training as an in-processing scheme to train neural networks with structured simple gradient maps. We show a duality relation between the regularized norms of the adversarial perturbations and gradient-based maps, based on which we design adversarial training loss functions promoting sparsity and group-sparsity properties in simple gradient maps. We present several numerical results to show the influence of our proposed norm-based adversarial training methods on the standard gradient-based maps of standard neural network architectures on benchmark image datasets., Comment: Accepted at CVPR 2024

Precise camera tracking, high-fidelity 3D tissue reconstruction, and real-time online visualization are critical for intrabody medical imaging devices such as endoscopes and capsule robots. However, existing SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) methods often struggle to achieve both complete high-quality surgical field reconstruction and efficient computation, restricting their intraoperative applications among endoscopic surgeries. In this paper, we introduce EndoGSLAM, an efficient SLAM approach for endoscopic surgeries, which integrates streamlined Gaussian representation and differentiable rasterization to facilitate over 100 fps rendering speed during online camera tracking and tissue reconstructing. Extensive experiments show that EndoGSLAM achieves a better trade-off between intraoperative availability and reconstruction quality than traditional or neural SLAM approaches, showing tremendous potential for endoscopic surgeries. The project page is at https://EndoGSLAM.loping151.com

Classical object detectors are incapable of detecting novel class objects that are not encountered before. Regarding this issue, Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) is proposed, which aims to detect the objects in the candidate class list. However, current OVOD models are suffering from overfitting on the base classes, heavily relying on the large-scale extra data, and complex training process. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel framework with Meta prompt and Instance Contrastive learning (MIC) schemes. Firstly, we simulate a novel-class-emerging scenario to help the prompt learner that learns class and background prompts generalize to novel classes. Secondly, we design an instance-level contrastive strategy to promote intra-class compactness and inter-class separation, which benefits generalization of the detector to novel class objects. Without using knowledge distillation, ensemble model or extra training data during detector training, our proposed MIC outperforms previous SOTA methods trained with these complex techniques on LVIS. Most importantly, MIC shows great generalization ability on novel classes, e.g., with $+4.3\%$ and $+1.9\% \ \mathrm{AP}$ improvement compared with previous SOTA on COCO and Objects365, respectively., Comment: BMVC 2023

Large-scale pre-training followed by downstream fine-tuning is an effective solution for transferring deep-learning-based models. Since finetuning all possible pre-trained models is computational costly, we aim to predict the transferability performance of these pre-trained models in a computational efficient manner. Different from previous work that seek out suitable models for downstream classification and segmentation tasks, this paper studies the efficient transferability assessment of pre-trained object detectors. To this end, we build up a detector transferability benchmark which contains a large and diverse zoo of pre-trained detectors with various architectures, source datasets and training schemes. Given this zoo, we adopt 7 target datasets from 5 diverse domains as the downstream target tasks for evaluation. Further, we propose to assess classification and regression sub-tasks simultaneously in a unified framework. Additionally, we design a complementary metric for evaluating tasks with varying objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in assessing transferability under different target domains while efficiently reducing wall-clock time 32$\times$ and requires a mere 5.2\% memory footprint compared to brute-force fine-tuning of all pre-trained detectors., Comment: WACV 2024

Soft tissue tracking is crucial for computer-assisted interventions. Existing approaches mainly rely on extracting discriminative features from the template and videos to recover corresponding matches. However, it is difficult to adopt these techniques in surgical scenes, where tissues are changing in shape and appearance throughout the surgery. To address this problem, we exploit optical flow to naturally capture the pixel-wise tissue deformations and adaptively correct the tracked template. Specifically, we first implement an inter-frame matching mechanism to extract a coarse region of interest based on optical flow from consecutive frames. To accommodate appearance change and alleviate drift, we then propose an adaptive-template matching method, which updates the tracked template based on the reliability of the estimates. Our approach, Ada-Tracker, enjoys both short-term dynamics modeling by capturing local deformations and long-term dynamics modeling by introducing global temporal compensation. We evaluate our approach on the public SurgT benchmark, which is generated from Hamlyn, SCARED, and Kidney boundary datasets. The experimental results show that Ada-Tracker achieves superior accuracy and performs more robustly against prior works. Code is available at https://github.com/wrld/Ada-Tracker., Comment: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024

The emerging trend of advancing generalist artificial intelligence, such as GPTv4 and Gemini, has reshaped the landscape of research (academia and industry) in machine learning and many other research areas. However, domain-specific applications of such foundation models (e.g., in medicine) remain untouched or often at their very early stages. It will require an individual set of transfer learning and model adaptation techniques by further expanding and injecting these models with domain knowledge and data. The development of such technologies could be largely accelerated if the bundle of data, algorithms, and pre-trained foundation models were gathered together and open-sourced in an organized manner. In this work, we present OpenMEDLab, an open-source platform for multi-modality foundation models. It encapsulates not only solutions of pioneering attempts in prompting and fine-tuning large language and vision models for frontline clinical and bioinformatic applications but also building domain-specific foundation models with large-scale multi-modal medical data. Importantly, it opens access to a group of pre-trained foundation models for various medical image modalities, clinical text, protein engineering, etc. Inspiring and competitive results are also demonstrated for each collected approach and model in a variety of benchmarks for downstream tasks. We welcome researchers in the field of medical artificial intelligence to continuously contribute cutting-edge methods and models to OpenMEDLab, which can be accessed via https://github.com/openmedlab., Comment: Technical Report. Visit https://github.com/openmedlab for more details

Surgical robot simulation platform plays a crucial role in enhancing training efficiency and advancing research on robot learning. Much effort have been made by scholars on developing open-sourced surgical robot simulators to facilitate research. We also developed SurRoL formerly, an open-source, da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) compatible and interactive embodied environment for robot learning. Despite its advancements, the simulation of soft bodies still remained a major challenge within the open-source platforms available for surgical robotics. To this end, we develop an interactive physically based soft body simulation framework and integrate it to SurRoL. Specifically, we utilized a high-performance adaptation of the Material Point Method (MPM) along with the Neo-Hookean model to represent the deformable tissue. Lagrangian particles are used to track the motion and deformation of the soft body throughout the simulation and Eulerian grids are leveraged to discretize space and facilitate the calculation of forces, velocities, and other physical quantities. We also employed an efficient collision detection and handling strategy to simulate the interaction between soft body and rigid tool of the surgical robot. By employing the Taichi programming language, our implementation harnesses parallel computing to boost simulation speed. Experimental results show that our platform is able to simulate soft bodies efficiently with strong physical interpretability and plausible visual effects. These new features in SurRoL enable the efficient simulation of surgical tasks involving soft tissue manipulation and pave the path for further investigation of surgical robot learning. The code will be released in a new branch of SurRoL github repo., Comment: 8 pages

Customized text-to-video generation aims to generate high-quality videos guided by text prompts and subject references. Current approaches for personalizing text-to-video generation suffer from tackling multiple subjects, which is a more challenging and practical scenario. In this work, our aim is to promote multi-subject guided text-to-video customization. We propose CustomVideo, a novel framework that can generate identity-preserving videos with the guidance of multiple subjects. To be specific, firstly, we encourage the co-occurrence of multiple subjects via composing them in a single image. Further, upon a basic text-to-video diffusion model, we design a simple yet effective attention control strategy to disentangle different subjects in the latent space of diffusion model. Moreover, to help the model focus on the specific area of the object, we segment the object from given reference images and provide a corresponding object mask for attention learning. Also, we collect a multi-subject text-to-video generation dataset as a comprehensive benchmark, with 63 individual subjects from 13 different categories and 68 meaningful pairs. Extensive qualitative, quantitative, and user study results demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches. The project page is https://kyfafyd.wang/projects/customvideo., Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, 7 tables