EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Weifang Zhu
dblp:158/8026
· DBLP profile ↗
29ranked-venue papers
1as first author
16since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-9540-4101ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 20 · 11 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 7 · 2 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 3 · 3 since 2021Computer networks · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Designing a hybrid optimization methodology for delineating boundary of ultrasound prostate cancer with an explainable mathematical model
Tao Peng 0013, Dehui Xiang, Binbin Jiang, Baoqing Nie, Derun Li, Caishan Wang, Weifang Zhu, Jing Cai 0001, Enting Gao, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
Neurocomputing | 9 |
| 2026 | OphFusionNet: Uncertainty-Driven Multi-Scale Multimodal Feature Fusion Network for Ophthalmic Diseases ClassificationabstractMultimodal imaging has become an essential tool in clinical ophthalmology, offering complementary perspectives for disease diagnosis. However, current automated diagnostic approaches often fail to fully exploit the rich, complementary information provided by different imaging modalities. In this paper, to advance automated ophthalmic disease diagnosis through effective multimodal data integration, we propose the OphFusionNet, a novel multimodal learning framework based on uncertainty-driven multi-scale multimodal feature fusion. Drawing inspiration from clinical observations that ophthalmic lesions often appear at multiple spatial scales, we design a multi-scale feature fusion module with sparse self-attention (MSFF-SSA). This module captures hierarchical representations while suppressing redundancy, thereby enhancing both the expressiveness and efficiency of the extracted features. To further improve multimodal fusion, we introduce an uncertainty-aware multimodal fusion module with a game-theoretic selection strategy (UMF-GTSS). This component estimates the uncertainty associated with different features and adaptively weights them based on their relative reliability, yielding more robust and trustworthy diagnostic outcomes. To mitigate the tendency to over-rely on dominant modalities and underutilize the informative potential of subordinate ones, we propose a modality distillation strategy (MDS), which leverages multimodal features to guide and refine the learning of single-modal representations. This strategy enhances generalization and boosts the discriminative capacity of each individual modality. The OphFusionNet was evaluated on four publicly available ophthalmic datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior multimodal integration, resulting in state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in multimodal ophthalmic disease diagnosis. The code will be available at: https://github.com/wb66715/OphFusionNet. Weifang Zhu, Dehui Xiang, Xinjian Chen 0001, Tao Peng 0013, Chenwei Gui, Qing Peng |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 2 |
| 2025 | Task Augmentation-Based Meta-Learning Segmentation Method for RetinopathyabstractDeep learning (DL) requires large amounts of labeled data, which is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive to obtain for medical image segmentation tasks. Meta-learning focuses on developing learning strategies that enable quick adaptation to new tasks with limited labeled data. However, rich-class medical image segmentation datasets for constructing meta-learning multi-tasks are currently unavailable. In addition, data collected from various healthcare sites and devices may present significant distribution differences, potentially degrading model's performance. In this paper, we propose a task augmentation-based meta-learning method for retinal image segmentation (TAMS) to meet labor-intensive annotation demand. A retinal Lesion Simulation Algorithm (LSA) is proposed to automatically generate multi-class retinal disease datasets with pixel-level segmentation labels, such that meta-learning tasks can be augmented without collecting data from various sources. In addition, a novel simulation function library is designed to control generation process and ensure interpretability. Moreover, a generative simulation network (GSNet) with an improved adversarial training strategy is introduced to maintain high-quality representations of complex retinal diseases. TAMS is evaluated on three different OCT and CFP image datasets, and comprehensive experiments have demonstrated that TAMS achieves superior segmentation performance than state-of-the-art models. Muhammad Mateen, Dehui Xiang, Weifang Zhu, Jingcheng Xu, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 4 |
| 2025 | Moment-Consistent Contrastive CycleGAN for Cross-Domain Pancreatic Image SegmentationabstractCT and MR are currently the most common imaging techniques for pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Accurate segmentation of the pancreas in CT and MR images can provide significant help in the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer. Traditional supervised segmentation methods require a large number of labeled CT and MR training data, which is usually time-consuming and laborious. Meanwhile, due to domain shift, traditional segmentation networks are difficult to be deployed on different imaging modality datasets. Cross-domain segmentation can utilize labeled source domain data to assist unlabeled target domains in solving the above problems. In this paper, a cross-domain pancreas segmentation algorithm is proposed based on Moment-Consistent Contrastive Cycle Generative Adversarial Networks (MC-CCycleGAN). MC-CCycleGAN is a style transfer network, in which the encoder of its generator is used to extract features from real images and style transfer images, constrain feature extraction through a contrastive loss, and fully extract structural features of input images during style transfer while eliminate redundant style features. The multi-order central moments of the pancreas are proposed to describe its anatomy in high dimensions and a contrastive loss is also proposed to constrain the moment consistency, so as to maintain consistency of the pancreatic structure and shape before and after style transfer. Multi-teacher knowledge distillation framework is proposed to transfer the knowledge from multiple teachers to a single student, so as to improve the robustness and performance of the student network. The experimental results have demonstrated the superiority of our framework over state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods. Yun Bian, Erwei Shen, Ligang Fan, Weifang Zhu, Chengwei Shao, Xinjian Chen 0001, Dehui Xiang |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 5 |
| 2024 | Style Consistency Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Medical Image SegmentationabstractUnsupervised domain adaptation medical image segmentation is aimed to segment unlabeled target domain images with labeled source domain images. However, different medical imaging modalities lead to large domain shift between their images, in which well-trained models from one imaging modality often fail to segment images from anothor imaging modality. In this paper, to mitigate domain shift between source domain and target domain, a style consistency unsupervised domain adaptation image segmentation method is proposed. First, a local phase-enhanced style fusion method is designed to mitigate domain shift and produce locally enhanced organs of interest. Second, a phase consistency discriminator is constructed to distinguish the phase consistency of domain-invariant features between source domain and target domain, so as to enhance the disentanglement of the domain-invariant and style encoders and removal of domain-specific features from the domain-invariant encoder. Third, a style consistency estimation method is proposed to obtain inconsistency maps from intermediate synthesized target domain images with different styles to measure the difficult regions, mitigate domain shift between synthesized target domain images and real target domain images, and improve the integrity of interested organs. Fourth, style consistency entropy is defined for target domain images to further improve the integrity of the interested organ by the concentration on the inconsistent regions. Comprehensive experiments have been performed with an in-house dataset and a publicly available dataset. The experimental results have demonstrated the superiority of our framework over state-of-the-art methods. Lang Chen, Yun Bian, Jianbin Zeng, Qingquan Meng, Weifang Zhu, Chengwei Shao, Xinjian Chen 0001, Dehui Xiang |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 5 |
| 2024 | A New Class of Analog Precoding for Multi-Antenna Multi-User Communications Over High-Frequency BandsabstractA network relying on a large antenna-array-aided base station is designed for delivering multiple information streams to multi-antenna users over high-frequency bands such as the millimeter-wave and sub-Terahertz bands. The state-of-the-art analog precoder (AP) dissipates excessive circuit power due to its reliance on a large number of phase shifters. To mitigate the power consumption, we propose a novel AP relying on a controlled number of phase shifters. Within this new AP framework, we design a hybrid precoder (HP) for maximizing the users’ minimum throughput, which poses a computationally challenging problem of large-scale, nonsmooth mixed discrete-continuous log-determinant optimization. To tackle this challenge, we develop an algorithm which iterates through solving convex problems to generate a sequence of HPs that converges to the max-min solution. We also introduce a new framework of smooth optimization termed soft max-min throughput optimization. Additionally, we develop another algorithm, which iterates by evaluating closed-form expressions to generate a sequence of HPs that converges to the soft max-min solution. Simulation results reveal that the HP soft max-min solution approaches the Pareto-optimal solution constructed for simultaneously optimizing both the minimum throughput and sum-throughput. Explicitly, it achieves a minimum throughput similar to directly maximizing the users’ minimum throughput and it also attains a sum-throughput similar to directly maximizing the sum-throughput. Weifang Zhu, Hoang Duong Tuan, Eryk Dutkiewicz, H. Vincent Poor, Lajos Hanzo |
IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun. | 1 |
| 2023 | Interactive Skin Wound Segmentation Based on Feature Augment NetworksabstractSkin wound segmentation in photographs allows non-invasive analysis of wounds that supports dermatological diagnosis and treatment. In this paper, we propose a novel feature augment network (FANet) to achieve automatic segmentation of skin wounds, and design an interactive feature augment network (IFANet) to provide interactive adjustment on the automatic segmentation results. The FANet contains the edge feature augment (EFA) module and the spatial relationship feature augment (SFA) module, which can make full use of the notable edge information and the spatial relationship information be-tween the wound and the skin. The IFANet, with FANet as the backbone, takes the user interactions and the initial result as inputs, and outputs the refined segmentation result. The pro-posed networks were tested on a dataset composed of miscellaneous skin wound images, and a public foot ulcer segmentation challenge dataset. The results indicate that the FANet gives good segmentation results while the IFANet can effectively improve them based on simple marking. Comprehensive comparative experiments show that our proposed networks outperform some other existing automatic or interactive segmentation methods, respectively. Xinjian Chen 0001, Ziting Yin, Qingxin Jiang, Weifang Zhu, Dehui Xiang |
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics | 6 |
| 2023 | Graph Attention U-Net for Retinal Layer Surface Detection and Choroid Neovascularization Segmentation in OCT ImagesabstractChoroidal neovascularization (CNV) is a typical symptom of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and is one of the leading causes for blindness. Accurate segmentation of CNV and detection of retinal layers are critical for eye disease diagnosis and monitoring. In this paper, we propose a novel graph attention U-Net (GA-UNet) for retinal layer surface detection and CNV segmentation in optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Due to retinal layer deformation caused by CNV, it is challenging for existing models to segment CNV and detect retinal layer surfaces with the correct topological order. We propose two novel modules to address the challenge. The first module is a graph attention encoder (GAE) in a U-Net model that automatically integrates topological and pathological knowledge of retinal layers into the U-Net structure to achieve effective feature embedding. The second module is a graph decorrelation module (GDM) that takes reconstructed features by the decoder of the U-Net as inputs, it then decorrelates and removes information unrelated to retinal layer for improved retinal layer surface detection. In addition, we propose a new loss function to maintain the correct topological order of retinal layers and the continuity of their boundaries. The proposed model learns graph attention maps automatically during training and performs retinal layer surface detection and CNV segmentation simultaneously with the attention maps during inference. We evaluated the proposed model on our private AMD dataset and another public dataset. Experiment results show that the proposed model outperformed the competing methods for retinal layer surface detection and CNV segmentation and achieved new state of the arts on the datasets. Yuhe Shen, Jiang Li 0001, Weifang Zhu, Kai Yu 0009, Meng Wang 0038, Yi Zhou 0024, Liling Guan, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 3 |
| 2022 | Multi-Discriminator Adversarial Convolutional Network for Nerve Fiber Segmentation in Confocal Corneal Microscopy ImagesabstractQuantitative measurements of corneal sub-basal nerves are biomarkers for many ocular surface disorders and are also important for early diagnosis and assessment of progression of neurodegenerative diseases. This paper aims to develop an automatic method for nerve fiber segmentation from in vivo corneal confocal microscopy (CCM) images, which is fundamental for nerve morphology quantification. A novel multi-discriminator adversarial convolutional network (MDACN) is proposed, where both the generator and the two discriminators emphasize multi-scale feature representations. The generator is a U-shaped fully convolutional network with multi-scale split and concatenate blocks, and the two discriminators have different effective receptive fields, sensitive to features of different scales. A novel loss function is also proposed which enables the network to pay more attention to thin fibers. The MDACN framework was evaluated on four datasets. Experiment results show that our method has excellent segmentation performance for corneal nerve fibers and outperforms some state-of-the-art methods. Changqing Yang, Weifang Zhu, Dehui Xiang, Zhongyue Chen, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics | 3 |
| 2022 | Speckle Noise Reduction for OCT Images Based on Image Style Transfer and Conditional GANabstractRaw optical coherence tomography (OCT) images typically are of low quality because speckle noise blurs retinal structures, severely compromising visual quality and degrading performances of subsequent image analysis tasks. In our previous study (Ma et al., 2018), we have developed a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) for speckle noise removal in OCT images collected by several commercial OCT scanners, which we collectively refer to as scanner T. In this paper, we improve the cGAN model and apply it to our in-house OCT scanner (scanner B) for speckle noise suppression. The proposed model consists of two steps: 1) We train a Cycle-Consistent GAN (CycleGAN) to learn style transfer between two OCT image datasets collected by different scanners. The purpose of the CycleGAN is to leverage the ground truth dataset created in our previous study. 2) We train a mini-cGAN model based on the PatchGAN mechanism with the ground truth dataset to suppress speckle noise in OCT images. After training, we first apply the CycleGAN model to convert raw images collected by scanner B to match the style of the images from scanner T, and subsequently use the mini-cGAN model to suppress speckle noise in the style transferred images. We evaluate the proposed method on a dataset collected by scanner B. Experimental results show that the improved model outperforms our previous method and other state-of-the-art models in speckle noise removal, retinal structure preservation and contrast enhancement. Yi Zhou 0024, Kai Yu 0009, Meng Wang 0038, Yuhui Ma, Zhongyue Chen, Weifang Zhu, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics | 7 |
| 2022 | Global and Local Feature Reconstruction for Medical Image SegmentationabstractLearning how to capture long-range dependencies and restore spatial information of down-sampled feature maps are the basis of the encoder-decoder structure networks in medical image segmentation. U-Net based methods use feature fusion to alleviate these two problems, but the global feature extraction ability and spatial information recovery ability of U-Net are still insufficient. In this paper, we propose a Global Feature Reconstruction (GFR) module to efficiently capture global context features and a Local Feature Reconstruction (LFR) module to dynamically up-sample features, respectively. For the GFR module, we first extract the global features with category representation from the feature map, then use the different level global features to reconstruct features at each location. The GFR module establishes a connection for each pair of feature elements in the entire space from a global perspective and transfers semantic information from the deep layers to the shallow layers. For the LFR module, we use low-level feature maps to guide the up-sampling process of high-level feature maps. Specifically, we use local neighborhoods to reconstruct features to achieve the transfer of spatial information. Based on the encoder-decoder architecture, we propose a Global and Local Feature Reconstruction Network (GLFRNet), in which the GFR modules are applied as skip connections and the LFR modules constitute the decoder path. The proposed GLFRNet is applied to four different medical image segmentation tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Jiahuan Song, Xinjian Chen 0001, Qianlong Zhu, Dehui Xiang, Zhongyue Chen, Lingjiao Pan, Weifang Zhu |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 9 |
| 2022 | MsTGANet: Automatic Drusen Segmentation From Retinal OCT ImagesabstractDrusen is considered as the landmark for diagnosis of AMD and important risk factor for the development of AMD. Therefore, accurate segmentation of drusen in retinal OCT images is crucial for early diagnosis of AMD. However, drusen segmentation in retinal OCT images is still very challenging due to the large variations in size and shape of drusen, blurred boundaries, and speckle noise interference. Moreover, the lack of OCT dataset with pixel-level annotation is also a vital factor hindering the improvement of drusen segmentation accuracy. To solve these problems, a novel multi-scale transformer global attention network (MsTGANet) is proposed for drusen segmentation in retinal OCT images. In MsTGANet, which is based on U-Shape architecture, a novel multi-scale transformer non-local (MsTNL) module is designed and inserted into the top of encoder path, aiming at capturing multi-scale non-local features with long-range dependencies from different layers of encoder. Meanwhile, a novel multi-semantic global channel and spatial joint attention module (MsGCS) between encoder and decoder is proposed to guide the model to fuse different semantic features, thereby improving the model's ability to learn multi-semantic global contextual information. Furthermore, to alleviate the shortage of labeled data, we propose a novel semi-supervised version of MsTGANet (Semi-MsTGANet) based on pseudo-labeled data augmentation strategy, which can leverage a large amount of unlabeled data to further improve the segmentation performance. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed MsTGANet and Semi-MsTGANet. The experimental results show that our proposed methods achieve better segmentation accuracy than other state-of-the-art CNN-based methods. Meng Wang 0038, Weifang Zhu, Jinzhu Su, Haoyu Chen 0002, Kai Yu 0009, Yi Zhou 0024, Zhongyue Chen, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 2 |
| 2021 | High-Resolution Hierarchical Adversarial Learning for OCT Speckle Noise Reduction
Yi Zhou 0024, Jiang Li 0001, Meng Wang 0038, Weifang Zhu, Zhongyue Chen, Lianyu Wang, Chenpu Yao, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
MICCAI (6) | 4 |
| 2021 | Three-dimensional choroid neovascularization growth prediction from longitudinal retinal OCT images based on a hybrid model
Qingquan Meng, Chang Zuo, Weifang Zhu, Dehui Xiang, Haoyu Chen 0002, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
Pattern Recognit. Lett. | 4 |
| 2021 | Automatic Staging for Retinopathy of Prematurity With Deep Feature Fusion and Ordinal Classification StrategyabstractRetinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a retinal disease which frequently occurs in premature babies with low birth weight and is considered as one of the major preventable causes of childhood blindness. Although automatic and semi-automatic diagnoses of ROP based on fundus image have been researched, most of the previous studies focused on plus disease detection and ROP screening. There are few studies focusing on ROP staging, which is important for the severity evaluation of the disease. To be consistent with clinical 5-level ROP staging, a novel and effective deep neural network based 5-level ROP staging network is proposed, which consists of multi-stream based parallel feature extractor, concatenation based deep feature fuser and clinical practice based ordinal classifier. First, the three-stream parallel framework including ResNet18, DenseNet121 and EfficientNetB2 is proposed as the feature extractor, which can extract rich and diverse high-level features. Second, the features from three streams are deeply fused by concatenation and convolution to generate a more effective and comprehensive feature. Finally, in the classification stage, an ordinal classification strategy is adopted, which can effectively improve the ROP staging performance. The proposed ROP staging network was evaluated with per-image and per-examination strategies. For per-image ROP staging, the proposed method was evaluated on 635 retinal fundus images from 196 examinations, including 303 Normal, 26 Stage 1, 127 Stage 2, 106 Stage 3, 61 Stage 4 and 12 Stage 5, which achieves 0.9055 for weighted recall, 0.9092 for weighted precision, 0.9043 for weighted F1 score, 0.9827 for accuracy with 1 (ACC1) and 0.9786 for Kappa, respectively. While for per-examination ROP staging, 1173 examinations with a 4-fold cross validation strategy were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which prove the validity and advantage of the proposed method. Weifang Zhu, Zhongyue Chen, Meng Wang 0038, Le Geng, Kai Yu 0009, Yi Zhou 0024, Daoman Xiang, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 2 |
| 2021 | Semi-Supervised Capsule cGAN for Speckle Noise Reduction in Retinal OCT ImagesabstractSpeckle noise is the main cause of poor optical coherence tomography (OCT) image quality. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown remarkable performances for speckle noise reduction. However, speckle noise denoising still meets great challenges because the deep learning-based methods need a large amount of labeled data whose acquisition is time-consuming or expensive. Besides, many CNNs-based methods design complex structure based networks with lots of parameters to improve the denoising performance, which consume hardware resources severely and are prone to overfitting. To solve these problems, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning based method for speckle noise denoising in retinal OCT images. First, to improve the model's ability to capture complex and sparse features in OCT images, and avoid the problem of a great increase of parameters, a novel capsule conditional generative adversarial network (Caps-cGAN) with small number of parameters is proposed to construct the semi-supervised learning system. Then, to tackle the problem of retinal structure information loss in OCT images caused by lack of detailed guidance during unsupervised learning, a novel joint semi-supervised loss function composed of unsupervised loss and supervised loss is proposed to train the model. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed semi-supervised method is suitable for retinal OCT images collected from different OCT devices and can achieve better performance even only using half of the training data. Meng Wang 0038, Weifang Zhu, Kai Yu 0009, Zhongyue Chen, Yi Zhou 0024, Yuhui Ma, Dengsen Bao, Shuanglang Feng, Dehui Xiang, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 2 |
| 2020 | Macular Hole and Cystoid Macular Edema Joint Segmentation by Two-Stage Network and Entropy Minimization
Weifang Zhu, Dengsen Bao, Shuanglang Feng, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
MICCAI (5) | 2 |
| 2020 | M2E-Net: Multiscale Morphological Enhancement Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Le Geng, Panming Li, Weifang Zhu, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
PRCV (1) | 3 |
| 2020 | CPFNet: Context Pyramid Fusion Network for Medical Image SegmentationabstractAccurate and automatic segmentation of medical images is a crucial step for clinical diagnosis and analysis. The convolutional neural network (CNN) approaches based on the U-shape structure have achieved remarkable performances in many different medical image segmentation tasks. However, the context information extraction capability of single stage is insufficient in this structure, due to the problems such as imbalanced class and blurred boundary. In this paper, we propose a novel Context Pyramid Fusion Network (named CPFNet) by combining two pyramidal modules to fuse global/multi-scale context information. Based on the U-shape structure, we first design multiple global pyramid guidance (GPG) modules between the encoder and the decoder, aiming at providing different levels of global context information for the decoder by reconstructing skip-connection. We further design a scale-aware pyramid fusion (SAPF) module to dynamically fuse multi-scale context information in high-level features. These two pyramidal modules can exploit and fuse rich context information progressively. Experimental results show that our proposed method is very competitive with other state-of-the-art methods on four different challenging tasks, including skin lesion segmentation, retinal linear lesion segmentation, multi-class segmentation of thoracic organs at risk and multi-class segmentation of retinal edema lesions. Shuanglang Feng, Heming Zhao, Xuena Cheng, Meng Wang 0038, Yuhui Ma, Dehui Xiang, Weifang Zhu, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 8 |
| 2019 | Surrogate-Assisted Retinal OCT Image Classification Based on Convolutional Neural NetworksabstractOptical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is beco-ming one of the most important modalities for the noninvasive assessment of retinal eye diseases. As the number of acquired OCT volumes increases, automating the OCT image analysis is becoming increasingly relevant. In this paper, we propose a surrogate-assisted classification method to classify retinal OCT images automatically based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Image denoising is first performed to reduce the noise. Thresholding and morphological dilation are applied to extract the masks. The denoised images and the masks are then employed to generate a lot of surrogate images, which are used to train the CNN model. Finally, the prediction for a test image is determined by the average of the outputs from the trained CNN model on the surrogate images. The proposed method has been evaluated on different databases. The results (AUC of 0.9783 in the local database and AUC of 0.9856 in the Duke database) show that the proposed method is a very promising tool for classifying the retinal OCT images automatically. Yibiao Rong, Dehui Xiang, Weifang Zhu, Kai Yu 0009, Zhun Fan, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics | 3 |
| 2019 | Automatic Retinal Layer Segmentation of OCT Images With Central Serous RetinopathyabstractIn this paper, an automatic method is reported for simultaneously segmenting layers and fluid in 3-D OCT retinal images of subjects suffering from central serous retinopathy. To enhance contrast between adjacent layers, multiscale bright and dark layer detection filters are proposed. Due to appearance of serous fluid or pigment epithelial detachment caused fluid, contrast between adjacent layers is often reduced, and also large morphological changes are caused. In addition, 24 features are designed for random forest classifiers. Then, 8 coarse surfaces are obtained based on the trained random forest classifiers. Finally, a hypergraph is constructed based on the smoothed image and the layer structure detection responses. A modified live wire algorithm is proposed to accurately detect surfaces between retinal layers, even though OCT images with fluids are of low contrast and layers are largely deformed. The proposed method was evaluated on 48 spectral domain OCT images with central serous retinopathy. The experimental results showed that the proposed method outperformed the state-of-art methods with regard to layers and fluid segmentation. Dehui Xiang, Weifang Zhu, Qinghuai Liu, Songtao Yuan, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics | 4 |
| 2019 | Automatic Pathological Lung Segmentation in Low-Dose CT Image Using Eigenspace Sparse Shape CompositionabstractThe segmentation of lungs with severe pathology is a nontrivial problem in the clinical application. Due to complex structures, pathological changes, individual differences, and low image quality, accurate lung segmentation in clinical 3-D computed tomography (CT) images is still a challenging task. To overcome these problems, a novel dictionary-based approach is introduced to automatically segment pathological lungs in 3-D low-dose CT images. Sparse shape composition is integrated with the eigenvector space shape prior model, called eigenspace sparse shape composition, to reduce local shape reconstruction error caused by the weak and misleading appearance prior information. To initialize the shape model, a landmark recognition method based on discriminative appearance dictionary is introduced to handle lesions and local details. Furthermore, a new vertex search strategy based on the gradient vector flow field is also proposed to drive the shape deformation to the target boundary. The proposed algorithm is tested on 78 3-D low-dose CT images with lung tumors. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach can robustly and accurately detect pathological lung surface. Dehui Xiang, Bin Zhang 0049, Haihong Tian, Weifang Zhu, Bei Tian, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 7 |
| 2018 | Automatic Segmentation of Retinal Layer in OCT Images With Choroidal NeovascularizationabstractAge-related macular degeneration is one of the main causes of blindness. However, the internal structures of retinas are complex and difficult to be recognized due to the occurrence of neovascularization. Traditional surface detection methods may fail in the layer segmentation. In this paper, a supervised method is reported for simultaneously segmenting layers and neovascularization. Three spatial features, seven gray-level-based features, and 14 layer-like features are extracted for the neural network classifier. The coarse surfaces of different optical coherence tomography (OCT) images can thus be found. To describe and enhance retinal layers with different thicknesses and abnormalities, multi-scale bright and dark layer detection filters are introduced. A constrained graph search algorithm is also proposed to accurately detect retinal surfaces. The weights of nodes in the graph are computed based on these layer-like responses. The proposed method was evaluated on 42 spectral-domain OCT images with age-related macular degeneration. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Dehui Xiang, Haihong Tian, Weifang Zhu, Haoyu Chen 0002, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 5 |
| 2017 | CorteXpert: A model-based method for automatic renal cortex segmentation
Dehui Xiang, Ulas Bagci, Weifang Zhu, Jianhua Yao 0001, Milan Sonka, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
Medical Image Anal. | 5 |
| 2017 | A Framework for Classification and Segmentation of Branch Retinal Artery Occlusion in SD-OCTabstractBranch retinal artery occlusion (BRAO) is an ocular emergency, which could lead to blindness. Quantitative analysis of the BRAO region in the retina is necessary for the assessment of the severity of retinal ischemia. In this paper, a fully automatic framework was proposed to segment BRAO regions based on 3D spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first automatic 3D BRAO segmentation framework. First, the input 3D image is automatically classified into BRAO of acute phase and BRAO of chronic phase or normal retina using an AdaBoost classifier based on combining local structural, intensity, textural features with our new feature distribution analyzing strategy. Then, BRAO regions of acute phase and chronic phase are segmented separately. A thickness model is built to segment BRAO in the chronic phase. While for segmenting BRAO in the acute phase, a two-step segmentation strategy is performed: rough initialization and refine segmentation. The proposed method was tested on SD-OCT images of 35 patients (12 BRAO acute phase, 11 BRAO chronic phase, and 12 normal eyes) using the leave-one-out strategy. The classification accuracy for BRAO acute phase, BRAO chronic phase, and normal retina were 100%, 90.9%, and 91.7%, respectively. The overall true positive volume fraction (TPVF) and false positive volume fraction (FPVF) for the acute phase were 91.1% and 5.5% and for the chronic phase were 92.7% and 8.4%, respectively. Jingyun Guo, Weifang Zhu, Dehui Xiang, Haoyu Chen 0002, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 2 |
| 2017 | Choroid Neovascularization Growth Prediction With Treatment Based on Reaction-Diffusion Model in 3-D OCT ImagesabstractChoroid neovascularization (CNV) is caused by new blood vessels growing in the choroid and penetrating the bruch membrane. It is the major cause of vision disability in many retinal diseases. Though anti-vascular endothelial growth factor injection has proved to be effective for treating CNV, treatment planning is essential to ensure the efficacy while reducing the risk. For this purpose, we propose a CNV growth model based on longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. The reaction-diffusion model is applied to simulate the growth and shrinkage of CNV volumes, and is solved by using the finite-element method. A fitted curve of the CNV growth/shrinkage rate is obtained by optimizing the growth parameters. Then, the trained parameters are applied to the predicted image to get the simulated image, which is compared with the validated image to evaluate the accuracy of prediction. The proposed method was tested on a dataset with seven patients in which each patient has 12 longitudinal OCT images. The resulted mean dice coefficient is 76.40% ± 8.20%. The experimental results show a promising step towards the image-guided patient-specific treatment. Shuxia Zhu, Dehui Xiang, Weifang Zhu, Haoyu Chen 0002, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics | 4 |
| 2016 | 3D Fast Automatic Segmentation of Kidney Based on Modified AAM and Random ForestabstractIn this paper, a fully automatic method is proposed to segment the kidney into multiple components: renal cortex, renal column, renal medulla and renal pelvis, in clinical 3D CT abdominal images. The proposed fast automatic segmentation method of kidney consists of two main parts: localization of renal cortex and segmentation of kidney components. In the localization of renal cortex phase, a method which fully combines 3D Generalized Hough Transform (GHT) and 3D Active Appearance Models (AAM) is applied to localize the renal cortex. In the segmentation of kidney components phase, a modified Random Forests (RF) method is proposed to segment the kidney into four components based on the result from localization phase. During the implementation, a multithreading technology is applied to speed up the segmentation process. The proposed method was evaluated on a clinical abdomen CT data set, including 37 contrast-enhanced volume data using leave-one-out strategy. The overall true-positive volume fraction and false-positive volume fraction were 93.15%, 0.37% for renal cortex segmentation; 83.09%, 0.97% for renal column segmentation; 81.92%, 0.55% for renal medulla segmentation; and 80.28%, 0.30% for renal pelvis segmentation, respectively. The average computational time of segmenting kidney into four components took 20 seconds. Dehui Xiang, Xueqing Jiang, Bin Zhang 0049, Ximing Wang, Weifang Zhu, Enting Gao, Xinjian Chen 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 7 |
| 2015 | Automatic Liver Segmentation Based on Shape Constraints and Deformable Graph Cut in CT ImagesabstractLiver segmentation is still a challenging task in medical image processing area due to the complexity of the liver's anatomy, low contrast with adjacent organs, and presence of pathologies. This investigation was used to develop and validate an automated method to segment livers in CT images. The proposed framework consists of three steps: 1) preprocessing; 2) initialization; and 3) segmentation. In the first step, a statistical shape model is constructed based on the principal component analysis and the input image is smoothed using curvature anisotropic diffusion filtering. In the second step, the mean shape model is moved using thresholding and Euclidean distance transformation to obtain a coarse position in a test image, and then the initial mesh is locally and iteratively deformed to the coarse boundary, which is constrained to stay close to a subspace of shapes describing the anatomical variability. Finally, in order to accurately detect the liver surface, deformable graph cut was proposed, which effectively integrates the properties and inter-relationship of the input images and initialized surface. The proposed method was evaluated on 50 CT scan images, which are publicly available in two databases Sliver07 and 3Dircadb. The experimental results showed that the proposed method was effective and accurate for detection of the liver surface. Xinjian Chen 0001, Weifang Zhu, Jie Tian 0001, Dehui Xiang |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 4 |
| 2015 | Automated 3-D Retinal Layer Segmentation of Macular Optical Coherence Tomography Images With Serous Pigment Epithelial DetachmentsabstractAutomated retinal layer segmentation of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images has been successful for normal eyes but becomes challenging for eyes with retinal diseases if the retinal morphology experiences critical changes. We propose a method to automatically segment the retinal layers in 3-D OCT data with serous retinal pigment epithelial detachments (PED), which is a prominent feature of many chorioretinal disease processes. The proposed framework consists of the following steps: fast denoising and B-scan alignment, multi-resolution graph search based surface detection, PED region detection and surface correction above the PED region. The proposed technique was evaluated on a dataset with OCT images from 20 subjects diagnosed with PED. The experimental results showed the following. 1) The overall mean unsigned border positioning error for layer segmentation is 7.87±3.36 μm , and is comparable to the mean inter-observer variability ( 7.81±2.56 μm). 2) The true positive volume fraction (TPVF), false positive volume fraction (FPVF) and positive predicative value (PPV) for PED volume segmentation are 87.1%, 0.37%, and 81.2%, respectively. 3) The average running time is 220 s for OCT data of 512 × 64 × 480 voxels. Xinjian Chen 0001, Heming Zhao, Weifang Zhu, Dehui Xiang, Enting Gao, Milan Sonka, Haoyu Chen 0002 |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 4 |