Silicon photonic bandpass filter based on apodized subwavelength grating with high suppression ratio and short coupling length.

A compact silicon bandpass filter with high sidelobe suppression is proposed and experimentally demonstrated using an apodized subwavelength grating (SWG) coupler. The device is implemented by placing a SWG waveguide next to a strip waveguide, and apodization is employed with a Gaussian profile to taper the gap between the two waveguides. A high sidelobe suppression ratio of 27 dB can be obtained with a 3-dB bandwidth of 8.8 nm and an insertion loss of 2.5 dB. Owing to the large optical phase mismatch between the two waveguides and the presence of the SWG waveguide, the coupling length of the device is reduced to 100.3 µm. The experimental results validate our proposed apodized-SWG-based contradirectional coupler (contra-DC) as a promising device in suppressing out-of-band components in coarse wavelength division multiplexed (CWDM) optical communication systems.

Boundary-aware information maximization for self-supervised medical image segmentation.

Self-supervised representation learning can boost the performance of a pre-trained network on downstream tasks for which labeled data is limited. A popular method based on this paradigm, known as contrastive learning, works by constructing sets of positive and negative pairs from the data, and then pulling closer the representations of positive pairs while pushing apart those of negative pairs. Although contrastive learning has been shown to improve performance in various classification tasks, its application to image segmentation has been more limited. This stems in part from the difficulty of defining positive and negative pairs for dense feature maps without having access to pixel-wise annotations. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised pre-training method that overcomes the challenges of contrastive learning in image segmentation. Our method leverages Information Invariant Clustering (IIC) as an unsupervised task to learn a local representation of images in the decoder of a segmentation network, but addresses three important drawbacks of this approach: (i) the difficulty of optimizing the loss based on mutual information maximization; (ii) the lack of clustering consistency for different random transformations of the same image; (iii) the poor correspondence of clusters obtained by IIC with region boundaries in the image. Toward this goal, we first introduce a regularized mutual information maximization objective that encourages the learned clusters to be balanced and consistent across different image transformations. We also propose a boundary-aware loss based on cross-correlation, which helps the learned clusters to be more representative of important regions in the image. Compared to contrastive learning applied in dense features, our method does not require computing positive and negative pairs and also enhances interpretability through the visualization of learned clusters. Comprehensive experiments involving four different medical image segmentation tasks reveal the high effectiveness of our self-supervised representation learning method. Our results show the proposed method to outperform by a large margin several state-of-the-art self-supervised and semi-supervised approaches for segmentation, reaching a performance close to full supervision with only a few labeled examples.

Shape-Aware Joint Distribution Alignment for Cross-Domain Image Segmentation.

We present an unsupervised domain adaptation method for image segmentation which aligns high-order statistics, computed for the source and target domains, encoding domain-invariant spatial relationships between segmentation classes. Our method first estimates the joint distribution of predictions for pairs of pixels whose relative position corresponds to a given spatial displacement. Domain adaptation is then achieved by aligning the joint distributions of source and target images, computed for a set of displacements. Two enhancements of this method are proposed. The first one uses an efficient multi-scale strategy that enables capturing long-range relationships in the statistics. The second one extends the joint distribution alignment loss to features in intermediate layers of the network by computing their cross-correlation. We test our method on the task of unpaired multi-modal cardiac segmentation using the Multi-Modality Whole Heart Segmentation Challenge dataset and prostate segmentation task where images from two datasets are taken as data in different domains. Our results show the advantages of our method compared to recent approaches for cross-domain image segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/WangPing521/Domain_adaptation_shape_prior.

CAT: Constrained Adversarial Training for Anatomically-Plausible Semi-Supervised Segmentation.

Deep learning models for semi-supervised medical image segmentation have achieved unprecedented performance for a wide range of tasks. Despite their high accuracy, these models may however yield predictions that are considered anatomically impossible by clinicians. Moreover, incorporating complex anatomical constraints into standard deep learning frameworks remains challenging due to their non-differentiable nature. To address these limitations, we propose a Constrained Adversarial Training (CAT) method that learns how to produce anatomically plausible segmentations. Unlike approaches focusing solely on accuracy measures like Dice, our method considers complex anatomical constraints like connectivity, convexity, and symmetry which cannot be easily modeled in a loss function. The problem of non-differentiable constraints is solved using a Reinforce algorithm which enables to obtain a gradient for violated constraints. To generate constraint-violating examples on the fly, and thereby obtain useful gradients, our method adopts an adversarial training strategy which modifies training images to maximize the constraint loss, and then updates the network to be robust to these adversarial examples. The proposed method offers a generic and efficient way to add complex segmentation constraints on top of any segmentation network. Experiments on synthetic data and four clinically-relevant datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of segmentation accuracy and anatomical plausibility.

Self-paced and self-consistent co-training for semi-supervised image segmentation.

Deep co-training has recently been proposed as an effective approach for image segmentation when annotated data is scarce. In this paper, we improve existing approaches for semi-supervised segmentation with a self-paced and self-consistent co-training method. To help distillate information from unlabeled images, we first design a self-paced learning strategy for co-training that lets jointly-trained neural networks focus on easier-to-segment regions first, and then gradually consider harder ones. This is achieved via an end-to-end differentiable loss in the form of a generalized Jensen Shannon Divergence (JSD). Moreover, to encourage predictions from different networks to be both consistent and confident, we enhance this generalized JSD loss with an uncertainty regularizer based on entropy. The robustness of individual models is further improved using a self-ensembling loss that enforces their prediction to be consistent across different training iterations. We demonstrate the potential of our method on three challenging image segmentation problems with different image modalities, using a small fraction of labeled data. Results show clear advantages in terms of performance compared to the standard co-training baselines and recently proposed state-of-the-art approaches for semi-supervised segmentation.

Discretely-constrained deep network for weakly supervised segmentation.

An efficient strategy for weakly-supervised segmentation is to impose constraints or regularization priors on target regions. Recent efforts have focused on incorporating such constraints in the training of convolutional neural networks (CNN), however this has so far been done within a continuous optimization framework. Yet, various segmentation constraints and regularization priors can be modeled and optimized more efficiently in a discrete formulation. This paper proposes a method, based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm, to train a CNN with discrete constraints and regularization priors. This method is applied to the segmentation of medical images with weak annotations, where both size constraints and boundary length regularization are enforced. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for medical image segmentation show our method to provide significant improvements compared to existing approaches in terms of segmentation accuracy, constraint satisfaction and convergence speed.