The robust segmentation of different targets in multiple modality images is challenging due to factors such as low contrast, variations in target size and shape, and interference from diseases, which may lead to segmentation ambiguity. In addition, the assessment of the reliability of artificial intelligence is crucial for its clinical application. This paper proposes the Online Bayesian approximation based Uncertainty-aware Network (OBU-Net) for robust ophthalmic image segmentation. Our approach introduces an efficient online Bayesian method to update a spatial uncertainty map during training continuously. Then, the Spatial Uncertainty Aware Block (SUA-B) leverages the uncertainty map to localize and prioritize attention to ambiguous regions. Additionally, we extract pixel-wise confidence from multi-scale predictions to integrate hierarchical predictions. We compare OBU-Net with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on six datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the best overall performance across different modalities and segmentation tasks, highlighting the robustness of our approach. Additionally, metamorphic testing experiments were conducted, exploring the algorithm's stability against random perturbations. Lastly, we propose an image-level uncertainty score and demonstrate its effectiveness for evaluating the model's segmentation reliability.

Abstract In the production of low‐voltage apparatus, assembly quality inspection is of great relevance for ensuring the final quality of the entire product. With the continuous improvement of production efficiency and people's requirements for production quality, traditional manual inspection methods can no longer meet the quality inspection requirements. In this paper, an Attention‐guided Feature‐fusion ConvNeXt Network (AFCN) for the automated visual inspection is proposed. By embedding the attention mechanism of the Coordinate Attention block into the residual channel of the ConvNeXt block, the position‐aware information and features of the low‐voltage apparatus images can be effectively captured to locate the quality problems. Then, an improved attention feature fusion module is adopted to merge the output features at different stages, which introduces a 3D non‐parameter attention SimAM block and adapts output accordingly. Therefore, this model can capture the key information of the feature map in a coordinated way in terms of channel and position, fully integrating multiscale features and obtaining contour texture information and semantic information of the low‐voltage apparatus. Experiments show the proposed approach can effectively classify defective and normal products.

The segmentation of blurred cell boundaries in cornea endothelium microscope images is challenging, which affects the clinical parameter estimation accuracy. Existing deep learning methods only consider pixel-wise classification accuracy and lack of utilization of cell structure knowledge. Therefore, the segmentation of the blurred cell boundary is discontinuous. This paper proposes a structural prior guided network (SPG-Net) for corneal endothelium cell segmentation. We first employ a hybrid transformer convolution backbone to capture more global context. Then, we use Feature Enhancement (FE) module to improve the representation ability of features and Local Affinity-based Feature Fusion (LAFF) module to propagate structural information among hierarchical features. Finally, we introduce the joint loss based on cross entropy and structure similarity index measure (SSIM) to supervise the training process under pixel and structure levels. We compare the SPG-Net with various state-of-the-art methods on four corneal endothelial datasets. The experiment results suggest that the SPG-Net can alleviate the problem of discontinuous cell boundary segmentation and balance the pixel-wise accuracy and structure preservation. We also evaluate the agreement of parameter estimation between ground truth and the prediction of SPG-Net. The statistical analysis results show a good agreement and correlation.

Corneal endothelial cell segmentation plays an important role in quantifying clinical indicators for the cornea health state evaluation. Although Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely used for medical image segmentation, their receptive fields are limited. Recently, Transformer outperforms convolution in modeling long-range dependencies but lacks local inductive bias so the pure transformer network is difficult to train on small medical image datasets. Moreover, Transformer networks cannot be effectively adopted for secular microscopes as they are parameter-heavy and computationally complex. To this end, we find that appropriately limiting attention spans and modeling information at different granularity can introduce local constraints and enhance attention representations. This paper explores a hierarchy full self-attention lightweight network for medical image segmentation, using Local and Global (LoGo) transformers to separately model attention representation at low-level and high-level layers. Specifically, the local efficient transformer (LoTr) layer is employed to decompose features into finer-grained elements to model local attention representation, while the global axial transformer (GoTr) is utilized to build long-range dependencies across the entire feature space. With this hierarchy structure, we gradually aggregate the semantic features from different levels efficiently. Experiment results on segmentation tasks of the corneal endothelial cell, the ciliary body, and the liver prove the accuracy, effectiveness, and robustness of our method. Compared with the convolution neural networks (CNNs) and the hybrid CNN-Transformer state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, the LoGo transformer obtains the best result.