Segment Anything Model (SAM) has revolutionized the way of segmentation due to its remarkable capacity for generalized segmentation. However, SAM’s performance may decline when applied to tasks involving domains that differ from natural images. Nonetheless, by employing fine-tuning techniques, SAM exhibits promising capabilities in specific domains, such as medicine and planetary science. Notably, there is a lack of research on the application of SAM to sonar imaging. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by conducting a comprehensive investigation of SAM’s performance on sonar images. Specifically, we evaluate SAM with various settings on sonar images. Moreover, we fine-tune SAM for sonar images using effective methods both with prompts and for semantic segmentation. The experimental results reveal a substantial enhancement in the performance of the fine-tuned SAM, increasing from 0.24 to 0.75 in mIoU. This underscores the promising potential of SAM for sonar image segmentation applications. Additionally, even when only 2 out of the 11 categories are utilized for training, the model with box prompt sustains an mIoU of 0.69, showcasing its outstanding capability for general segmentation in sonar images. The code is available at https://github.com/wangsssky/SonarSAM.

In the real world, medical datasets often exhibit a long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes occupy the majority of the data, while most classes have only a limited number of samples), which results in a challenging long-tailed learning scenario. Some recently published datasets in ophthalmology AI consist of more than 40 kinds of retinal diseases with complex abnormalities and variable morbidity. Nevertheless, more than 30 conditions are rarely seen in global patient cohorts. From a modeling perspective, most deep learning models trained on these datasets may lack the ability to generalize to rare diseases where only a few available samples are presented for training. In addition, there may be more than one disease for the presence of the retina, resulting in a challenging label co-occurrence scenario, also known as multi-label, which can cause problems when some re-sampling strategies are applied during training. To address the above two major challenges, this paper presents a novel method that enables the deep neural network to learn from a long-tailed fundus database for various retinal disease recognition. Firstly, we exploit the prior knowledge in ophthalmology to improve the feature representation using a hierarchy-aware pre-training. Secondly, we adopt an instance-wise class-balanced sampling strategy to address the label co-occurrence issue under the long-tailed medical dataset scenario. Thirdly, we introduce a novel hybrid knowledge distillation to train a less biased representation and classifier. We conducted extensive experiments on four databases, including two public datasets and two in-house databases with more than one million fundus images. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods with recognition accuracy outperforming the state-of-the-art competitors, especially for these rare diseases.

Generalizing a deep learning model to new domains is crucial for computer-aided medical diagnosis systems. Most existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods have made significant progress in reducing the domain distribution gap through adversarial training. However, these methods may still produce overconfident but erroneous results on unseen target images. This paper proposes a new unsupervised domain adaptation framework for cross-modality medical image segmentation. Specifically, We first introduce two data augmentation approaches to generate two sets of semantics-preserving augmented images. Based on the model's predictive consistency on these two sets of augmented images, we identify reliable and unreliable pixels. We then perform a selective entropy constraint: we minimize the entropy of reliable pixels to increase their confidence while maximizing the entropy of unreliable pixels to reduce their confidence. Based on the identified reliable and unreliable pixels, we further propose an adaptive semantic alignment module which performs class-level distribution adaptation by minimizing the distance between same class prototypes between domains, where unreliable pixels are removed to derive more accurate prototypes. We have conducted extensive experiments on the cross-modality cardiac structure segmentation task. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art comparison algorithms. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/fengweie/SE_ASA.

The application of deep learning to nursing procedure activity understanding has the potential to greatly enhance the quality and safety of nurse-patient interactions. By utilizing the technique, we can facilitate training and education, improve quality control, and enable operational compliance monitoring. However, the development of automatic recognition systems in this field is currently hindered by the scarcity of appropriately labeled datasets. The existing video datasets pose several limitations: 1) these datasets are small-scale in size to support comprehensive investigations of nursing activity; 2) they primarily focus on single procedures, lacking expert-level annotations for various nursing procedures and action steps; and 3) they lack temporally localized annotations, which prevents the effective localization of targeted actions within longer video sequences. To mitigate these limitations, we propose NurViD, a large video dataset with expert-level annotation for nursing procedure activity understanding. NurViD consists of over 1.5k videos totaling 144 hours, making it approximately four times longer than the existing largest nursing activity datasets. Notably, it encompasses 51 distinct nursing procedures and 177 action steps, providing a much more comprehensive coverage compared to existing datasets that primarily focus on limited procedures. To evaluate the efficacy of current deep learning methods on nursing activity understanding, we establish three benchmarks on NurViD: procedure recognition on untrimmed videos, procedure and action recognition on trimmed videos, and action detection. Our benchmark and code will be available at https://github.com/minghu0830/NurViD-benchmark.

Deep neural networks are known to be data-driven and label noise can have a marked impact on model performance. Recent studies have shown great robustness to classic image recognition even under a high noisy rate. In medical applications, learning from datasets with label noise is more challenging since medical imaging datasets tend to have instance-dependent noise (IDN) and suffer from high observer variability. In this paper, we systematically discuss the two common types of label noise in medical images - disagreement label noise from inconsistency expert opinions and single-target label noise from biased aggregation of individual annotations. We then propose an uncertainty estimation-based framework to handle these two label noise amid the medical image classification task. We design a dual-uncertainty estimation approach to measure the disagreement label noise and single-target label noise via improved Direct Uncertainty Prediction and Monte-Carlo-Dropout. A boosting-based curriculum training procedure is later introduced for robust learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by conducting extensive experiments on three different diseases with synthesized and real-world label noise: skin lesions, prostate cancer, and retinal diseases. We also release a large re-engineered database that consists of annotations from more than ten ophthalmologists with an unbiased golden standard dataset for evaluation and benchmarking. The dataset is available at https://mmai.group/peoples/julie/.