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Whole slide image (WSI) analysis has become increasingly important in the medical imaging community, enabling automated and objective diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic-response prediction. However, in clinical practice, the ever-evolving environment hamper the utility of WSI analysis models. In this paper, we propose the FIRST continual learning framework for WSI analysis, named ConSlide, to tackle the challenges of enormous image size, utilization of hierarchical structure, and catastrophic forgetting by progressive model updating on multiple sequential datasets. Our framework contains three key components. The Hierarchical Interaction Transformer (HIT) is proposed to model and utilize the hierarchical structural knowledge of WSI. The Breakup-Reorganize (BuRo) rehearsal method is developed for WSI data replay with efficient region storing buffer and WSI reorganizing operation. The asynchronous updating mechanism is devised to encourage the network to learn generic and specific knowledge respectively during the replay stage, based on a nested cross-scale similarity learning (CSSL) module. We evaluated the proposed ConSlide on four public WSI datasets from TCGA projects. It performs best over other state-of-the-art methods with a fair WSI-based continual learning setting and achieves a better trade-off of the overall performance and forgetting on previous task, Comment: To be appeared in ICCV 2023

Deep neural networks (DNN) have been designed to predict the chronological age of a healthy brain from T1-weighted magnetic resonance images (T1 MRIs), and the predicted brain age could serve as a valuable biomarker for the early detection of development-related or aging-related disorders. Recent DNN models for brain age estimations usually rely too much on large sample sizes and complex network structures for multi-stage feature refinement. However, in clinical application scenarios, researchers usually cannot obtain thousands or tens of thousands of MRIs in each data center for thorough training of these complex models. This paper proposes a simple fully convolutional network (SFCNeXt) for brain age estimation in small-sized cohorts with biased age distributions. The SFCNeXt consists of Single Pathway Encoded ConvNeXt (SPEC) and Hybrid Ranking Loss (HRL), aiming to estimate brain ages in a lightweight way with a sufficient exploration of MRI, age, and ranking features of each batch of subjects. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of our approach., Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE ISBI 2023

Gait recognition is widely used in diversified practical applications. Currently, the most prevalent approach is to recognize human gait from RGB images, owing to the progress of computer vision technologies. Nevertheless, the perception capability of RGB cameras deteriorates in rough circumstances, and visual surveillance may cause privacy invasion. Due to the robustness and non-invasive feature of millimeter wave (mmWave) radar, radar-based gait recognition has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In this research, we propose a Hierarchical Dynamic Network (HDNet) for gait recognition using mmWave radar. In order to explore more dynamic information, we propose point flow as a novel point clouds descriptor. We also devise a dynamic frame sampling module to promote the efficiency of computation without deteriorating performance noticeably. To prove the superiority of our methods, we perform extensive experiments on two public mmWave radar-based gait recognition datasets, and the results demonstrate that our model is superior to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Chronological age of healthy brain is able to be predicted using deep neural networks from T1-weighted magnetic resonance images (T1 MRIs), and the predicted brain age could serve as an effective biomarker for detecting aging-related diseases or disorders. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural network architecture, referred to as optimal transport based feature pyramid fusion (OTFPF) network, for the brain age estimation with T1 MRIs. The OTFPF consists of three types of modules: Optimal Transport based Feature Pyramid Fusion (OTFPF) module, 3D overlapped ConvNeXt (3D OL-ConvNeXt) module and fusion module. These modules strengthen the OTFPF network's understanding of each brain's semi-multimodal and multi-level feature pyramid information, and significantly improve its estimation performances. Comparing with recent state-of-the-art models, the proposed OTFPF converges faster and performs better. The experiments with 11,728 MRIs aged 3-97 years show that OTFPF network could provide accurate brain age estimation, yielding mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.097, Pearson's correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.993 and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC) of 0.989, between the estimated and chronological ages. Widespread quantitative experiments and ablation experiments demonstrate the superiority and rationality of OTFPF network. The codes and implement details will be released on GitHub: https://github.com/ZJU-Brain/OTFPF after final decision.

Altered functional brain networks have been a typical manifestation that distinguishes major depressive disorder (MDD) patients from healthy control (HC) subjects in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. Recently, rich club and diverse club metrics have been proposed for network or network neuroscience analyses. The rich club defines a set of nodes that tend to be the hubs of specific communities, and the diverse club defines the nodes that span more communities and have edges diversely distributed across different communities. Considering the heterogeneity of rich clubs and diverse clubs, combining them and on the basis to derive a novel indicator may reveal new evidence of brain functional integration and separation, which might provide new insights into MDD. This study for the first time discussed the differences between MDD and HC using both rich club and diverse club metrics and found the complementarity of them in analyzing brain networks. Besides, a novel index, termed "active index", has been proposed in this study. The active index defines a group of nodes that tend to be diversely distributed across communities while avoiding being a hub of a community. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of active index in analyzing MDD brain mechanisms.