Shanshan Song, Hui Tang, Honglong Yang, Xiaomeng Li
Radiology Report Generation (RRG) automates the creation of radiology reports from medical imaging, enhancing the efficiency of the reporting process. Longitudinal Radiology Report Generation (LRRG) extends RRG by incorporating the ability to compare current and prior exams, facilitating the tracking of temporal changes in clinical findings. Existing LRRG approaches only extract features from prior and current images using a visual pre-trained encoder, which are then concatenated to generate the final report. However, these methods struggle to effectively capture both spatial and temporal correlations during the feature extraction process. Consequently, the extracted features inadequately capture the information of difference across exams and thus underrepresent the expected progressions, leading to sub-optimal performance in LRRG. To address this, we develop a novel dynamic difference-aware temporal residual network (DDaTR). In DDaTR, we introduce two modules at each stage of the visual encoder to capture multi-level spatial correlations. The Dynamic Feature Alignment Module (DFAM) is designed to align prior features across modalities for the integrity of prior clinical information. Prompted by the enriched prior features, the dynamic difference-aware module (DDAM) captures favorable difference information by identifying relationships across exams. Furthermore, our DDaTR employs the dynamic residual network to unidirectionally transmit longitudinal information, effectively modelling temporal correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrated superior performance over existing methods on three benchmarks, proving its efficacy in both RRG and LRRG tasks.
Shanshan Song, Jiangyun Li, Jing Wang, Yuanxiu Cai, Wenkai Dong
There is a key problem in the medical visual question answering task that how to effectively realize the feature fusion of language and medical images with limited datasets. In order to better utilize multi-scale information of medical images, previous methods directly embed the multi-stage visual feature maps as tokens of same size respectively and fuse them with text representation. However, this will cause the confusion of visual features at different stages. To this end, we propose a simple but powerful multi-stage feature fusion method, MF2-MVQA, which stage-wise fuses multi-level visual features with textual semantics. MF2-MVQA achieves the State-Of-The-Art performance on VQA-Med 2019 and VQA-RAD dataset. The results of visualization also verify that our model outperforms previous work.
Haoran Shen, Yifu Zhang, Wenxuan Wang, Chen Chen, Jing Liu, Shanshan Song, Jiangyun Li
Recent works have shown that the computational efficiency of 3D medical image (e.g. CT and MRI) segmentation can be impressively improved by dynamic inference based on slice-wise complexity. As a pioneering work, a dynamic architecture network for medical volumetric segmentation (i.e. Med-DANet) has achieved a favorable accuracy and efficiency trade-off by dynamically selecting a suitable 2D candidate model from the pre-defined model bank for different slices. However, the issues of incomplete data analysis, high training costs, and the two-stage pipeline in Med-DANet require further improvement. To this end, this paper further explores a unified formulation of the dynamic inference framework from the perspective of both the data itself and the model structure. For each slice of the input volume, our proposed method dynamically selects an important foreground region for segmentation based on the policy generated by our Decision Network and Crop Position Network. Besides, we propose to insert a stage-wise quantization selector to the employed segmentation model (e.g. U-Net) for dynamic architecture adapting. Extensive experiments on BraTS 2019 and 2020 show that our method achieves comparable or better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods with much less model complexity. Compared with previous methods Med-DANet and TransBTS with dynamic and static architecture respectively, our framework improves the model efficiency by up to nearly 4.1 and 17.3 times with comparable segmentation results on BraTS 2019.
Tong Zhang, Yu Gou, Jun Liu, Shanshan Song, Tingting Yang, Jun-Hong Cui
Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) stand as promising technologies facilitating diverse underwater applications. However, the major design issues of the considered system are the severely limited energy supply and unexpected node malfunctions. This paper aims to provide fair, efficient, and reliable (FER) communication to the imperfect and energy-constrained UWSNs (IC-UWSNs). Therefore, we formulate a FER-communication optimization problem (FERCOP) and propose ICRL-JSA to solve the formulated problem. ICRL-JSA is a deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based optimizer for IC-UWSNs through joint link scheduling and power allocation, which automatically learns scheduling algorithms without human intervention. However, conventional RL methods are unable to address the challenges posed by underwater environments and IC-UWSNs. To construct ICRL-JSA, we integrate deep Q-network into IC-UWSNs and propose an advanced training mechanism to deal with complex acoustic channels, limited energy supplies, and unexpected node malfunctions. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ICRL-JSA scheme with an advanced training mechanism compared to various benchmark algorithms.
Honglong Yang, Shanshan Song, Yi Qin, Lehan Wang, Haonan Wang, Xinpeng Ding, Qixiang Zhang, Bodong Du, Xiaomeng Li
Generalist Medical AI (GMAI) systems have demonstrated expert-level performance in biomedical perception tasks, yet their clinical utility remains limited by inadequate multi-modal explainability and suboptimal prognostic capabilities. Here, we present XMedGPT, a clinician-centric, multi-modal AI assistant that integrates textual and visual interpretability to support transparent and trustworthy medical decision-making. XMedGPT not only produces accurate diagnostic and descriptive outputs, but also grounds referenced anatomical sites within medical images, bridging critical gaps in interpretability and enhancing clinician usability. To support real-world deployment, we introduce a reliability indexing mechanism that quantifies uncertainty through consistency-based assessment via interactive question-answering. We validate XMedGPT across four pillars: multi-modal interpretability, uncertainty quantification, and prognostic modeling, and rigorous benchmarking. The model achieves an IoU of 0.703 across 141 anatomical regions, and a Kendall's tau-b of 0.479, demonstrating strong alignment between visual rationales and clinical outcomes. For uncertainty estimation, it attains an AUC of 0.862 on visual question answering and 0.764 on radiology report generation. In survival and recurrence prediction for lung and glioma cancers, it surpasses prior leading models by 26.9%, and outperforms GPT-4o by 25.0%. Rigorous benchmarking across 347 datasets covers 40 imaging modalities and external validation spans 4 anatomical systems confirming exceptional generalizability, with performance gains surpassing existing GMAI by 20.7% for in-domain evaluation and 16.7% on 11,530 in-house data evaluation. Together, XMedGPT represents a significant leap forward in clinician-centric AI integration, offering trustworthy and scalable support for diverse healthcare applications.
Yu Gou, Tong Zhang, Jun Liu, Tingting Yang, Shanshan Song, Jun-Hong Cui
This paper investigates the fair-effective communication and robustness in imperfect and energy-constrained underwater acoustic sensor networks (IC-UASNs). Specifically, we investigate the impact of unexpected node malfunctions on the network performance under the time-varying acoustic channels. Each node is expected to satisfy Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, achieving individual QoS requirements may interfere with other concurrent communications. Underwater nodes rely excessively on the rationality of other underwater nodes when guided by fully cooperative approaches, making it difficult to seek a trade-off between individual QoS and global fair-effective communications under imperfect conditions. Therefore, this paper presents a SEmi-COoperative Power Allocation approach (SECOPA) that achieves fair-effective communication and robustness in IC-UASNs. The approach is distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based, and the objectives are twofold. On the one hand, each intelligent node individually decides the transmission power to simultaneously optimize individual and global performance. On the other hand, advanced training algorithms are developed to provide imperfect environments for training robust models that can adapt to the time-varying acoustic channels and handle unexpected node failures in the network. Numerical results are presented to validate our proposed approach.
Lai Wei, Shanshan Song
Multiview subspace clustering (MVSC) has attracted an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Most existing MVSC methods first collect complementary information from different views and consequently derive a consensus reconstruction coefficient matrix to indicate the subspace structure of a multi-view data set. In this paper, we initially assume the existence of a consensus reconstruction coefficient matrix and then use it to build a consensus graph filter. In each view, the filter is employed for smoothing the data and designing a regularizer for the reconstruction coefficient matrix. Finally, the obtained reconstruction coefficient matrices from different views are used to create constraints for the consensus reconstruction coefficient matrix. Therefore, in the proposed method, the consensus reconstruction coefficient matrix, the consensus graph filter, and the reconstruction coefficient matrices from different views are interdependent. We provide an optimization algorithm to obtain their optimal values. Extensive experiments on diverse multi-view data sets demonstrate that our approach outperforms some state-of-the-art methods.
Shanshan Song, Bingwen Huangfu, Jiani Guo, Jun Liu, Junhong Cui, Xuemin, Shen
Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) drive toward strong environmental adaptability, intelligence, and multifunctionality. However, due to unique UASN characteristics, such as long propagation delay, dynamic channel quality, and high attenuation, existing studies present untimeliness, inefficiency, and inflexibility in real practice. Digital twin (DT) technology is promising for UASNs to break the above bottlenecks by providing high-fidelity status prediction and exploring optimal schemes. In this article, we propose a Digital Twin-based Network Architecture (DTNA), enhancing UASNs' environmental adaptability, intelligence, and multifunctionality. By extracting real UASN information from local (node) and global (network) levels, we first design a layered architecture to improve the DT replica fidelity and UASN control flexibility. In local DT, we develop a resource allocation paradigm (RAPD), which rapidly perceives performance variations and iteratively optimizes allocation schemes to improve real-time environmental adaptability of resource allocation algorithms. In global DT, we aggregate decentralized local DT data and propose a collaborative Multi-agent reinforcement learning framework (CMFD) and a task-oriented network slicing (TNSD). CMFD patches scarce real data and provides extensive DT data to accelerate AI model training. TNSD unifies heterogeneous tasks' demand extraction and efficiently provides comprehensive network status, improving the flexibility of multi-task scheduling algorithms. Finally, practical and simulation experiments verify the high fidelity of DT. Compared with the original UASN architecture, experiment results demonstrate that DTNA can: (i) improve the timeliness and robustness of resource allocation; (ii) greatly reduce the training time of AI algorithms; (iii) more rapidly obtain network status for multi-task scheduling at a low cost.
Jiani Guo, Shanshan Song, Hao Chen, Bingwen Huangfu, Jun Liu, Jun-Hong Cui
Simulators are essential to troubleshoot and optimize Underwater Acoustic Network (UAN) schemes (network protocols and communication technologies) before real field experiments. However, due to programming differences between the above two contents, most existing simulators concentrate on one while weakening the other, leading to non-generic simulations and biased performance results. Moreover, novel UAN schemes increasingly integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, yet existing simulators lack support for necessary AI frameworks, failing to train and evaluate these intelligent methods. On the other hand, these novel schemes consider more UAN characteristics involving more complex parameter configurations, which also challenges simulators in flexibility and fineness. To keep abreast of advances in UANs, we propose the Fourth Generation (FG) ns-3-based simulator Aqua-Sim~FG, enhancing the general and intelligent simulation ability. On the basis of retaining previous generations' functions, we design a new general architecture, which is compatible with various programming languages, including MATLAB, C++, and Python. In this way, Aqua-Sim~FG provides a general environment to simulate communication technologies, network protocols, and AI models simultaneously. In addition, we expand six new features from node and communication levels by considering the latest UAN methods' requirements, which enhances the simulation flexibility and fineness of Aqua-Sim~FG. Experimental results show that Aqua-Sim~FG can simulate UANs' performance realistically, reflect intelligent methods' problems in real-ocean scenarios, and provide more effective troubleshooting and optimization for actual UANs. The basic simulator is available at https://github.com/JLU-smartocean/aqua-sim-fg.
Wenxuan Wang, Jing Wang, Chen Chen, Jianbo Jiao, Yuanxiu Cai, Shanshan Song, Jiangyun Li
The research community has witnessed the powerful potential of self-supervised Masked Image Modeling (MIM), which enables the models capable of learning visual representation from unlabeled data. In this paper, to incorporate both the crucial global structural information and local details for dense prediction tasks, we alter the perspective to the frequency domain and present a new MIM-based framework named FreMIM for self-supervised pre-training to better accomplish medical image segmentation tasks. Based on the observations that the detailed structural information mainly lies in the high-frequency components and the high-level semantics are abundant in the low-frequency counterparts, we further incorporate multi-stage supervision to guide the representation learning during the pre-training phase. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show the superior advantage of our FreMIM over previous state-of-the-art MIM methods. Compared with various baselines trained from scratch, our FreMIM could consistently bring considerable improvements to model performance. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Rubics-Xuan/FreMIM.
Shanshan Song, Tong Wang, Guohao Shen, Yuanyuan Lin, Jian Huang
In this paper, we propose a new and unified approach for nonparametric regression and conditional distribution learning. Our approach simultaneously estimates a regression function and a conditional generator using a generative learning framework, where a conditional generator is a function that can generate samples from a conditional distribution. The main idea is to estimate a conditional generator that satisfies the constraint that it produces a good regression function estimator. We use deep neural networks to model the conditional generator. Our approach can handle problems with multivariate outcomes and covariates, and can be used to construct prediction intervals. We provide theoretical guarantees by deriving non-asymptotic error bounds and the distributional consistency of our approach under suitable assumptions. We also perform numerical experiments with simulated and real data to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach over some existing approaches in various scenarios.
Shanshan Song, Mingyu Zhu, Hongcheng Ni, Jian Wu
Tunneling ionization is at the core of strong-field and attosecond science. In this paper, we present PyStructureFactor - a general Python code towards the calculation of the structure factor in the tunneling ionization rate of common molecules under intense laser fields. The numerical implementation is based on the well-developed weak-field asymptotic theory in the integral representation. The information of the electronic structure of the molecules is obtained via the PySCF quantum chemistry package. PyStructureFactor is a general computational framework that can be utilized to compute the molecular structure factor of various types of molecules, including polar and non-polar diatomic molecules, degenerate molecules, and open-shell molecules. Examples are given that are benchmarked against known results with good agreements. The present PyStructureFactor is implemented in an efficient manner and is easily applicable towards larger molecules.
Jiachen Shen, Wenxuan Wang, Chen Chen, Jianbo Jiao, Jing Liu, Yan Zhang, Shanshan Song, Jiangyun Li
The "pre-training then fine-tuning (FT)" paradigm is widely adopted to boost the model performance of deep learning-based methods for medical volumetric segmentation. However, conventional full FT incurs high computational and memory costs. Thus, it is of increasing importance to fine-tune pre-trained models for medical volumetric segmentation tasks in a both effective and parameter-efficient manner. In this paper, we introduce a new framework named Med-Tuning to realize parameter-efficient tuning (PET) for medical volumetric segmentation task and an efficient plug-and-play module named Med-Adapter for task-specific feature extraction. With a small number of tuned parameters, our framework enhances the 2D baselines's precision on segmentation tasks, which are pre-trained on natural images. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (CT and MRI modalities) show that our method achieves better results than previous PET methods on volumetric segmentation tasks. Compared to full FT, Med-Tuning reduces the fine-tuned model parameters by up to 4x, with even better segmentation performance. Our project webpage is at \url{https://rubics-xuan.github.io/Med-Tuning/}.
Bowen Liu, Li Yang, Shanshan Song, Mingyu Tang, Zhifang Gao, Qifeng Chen, Yangqiu Song, Huimin Chen, Xiaomeng Li
Capsule endoscopy (CE) enables non-invasive gastrointestinal screening, but current CE research remains largely limited to frame-level classification and detection, leaving video-level analysis underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce and formally define a new task, diagnosis-driven CE video summarization, which requires extracting key evidence frames that covers clinically meaningful findings and making accurate diagnoses from those evidence frames. This setting is challenging because diagnostically relevant events are extremely sparse and can be overwhelmed by tens of thousands of redundant normal frames, while individual observations are often ambiguous due to motion blur, debris, specular highlights, and rapid viewpoint changes. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce VideoCAP, the first CE dataset with diagnosis-driven annotations derived from real clinical reports. VideoCAP comprises 240 full-length videos and provides realistic supervision for both key evidence frame extraction and diagnosis. To address this task, we further propose DiCE, a clinician-inspired framework that mirrors the standard CE reading workflow. DiCE first performs efficient candidate screening over the raw video, then uses a Context Weaver to organize candidates into coherent diagnostic contexts that preserve distinct lesion events, and an Evidence Converger to aggregate multi-frame evidence within each context into robust clip-level judgments. Experiments show that DiCE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, producing concise and clinically reliable diagnostic summaries. These results highlight diagnosis-driven contextual reasoning as a promising paradigm for ultra-long CE video summarization.