Automatic medical image segmentation has made great progress owing to powerful deep representation learning. Inspired by the success of self-attention mechanism in transformer, considerable efforts are devoted to designing the robust variants of the encoder–decoder architecture with transformer. However, the patch division used in the existing transformer-based models usually ignores the pixel-level intrinsic structural features inside each patch. In this article, we propose a novel deep medical image segmentation framework called dual swin transformer U-Net (DS-TransUNet), which aims to incorporate the hierarchical swin transformer into both the encoder and the decoder of the standard U-shaped architecture. Our DS-TransUNet benefits from the self-attention computation in swin transformer and the designed dual-scale encoding, which can effectively model the non-local dependencies and multiscale contexts for enhancing the semantic segmentation quality of varying medical images. Unlike many prior transformer-based solutions, the proposed DS-TransUNet adopts a well-established dual-scale encoding mechanism that uses dual-scale encoders based on swin transformer to extract the coarse and fine-grained feature representations of different semantic scales. Meanwhile, a well-designed transformer interactive fusion (TIF) module is proposed to effectively perform multiscale information fusion through the self-attention mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce the swin transformer block into the decoder to further explore the long-range contextual information during the up-sampling process. Extensive experiments across four typical tasks for medical image segmentation demonstrate the effectiveness of DS-TransUNet, and our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Clustering is a long-standing important research problem, however, remains challenging when handling large-scale image data from diverse sources. In this paper, we present a novel Binary Multi-View Clustering (BMVC) framework, which can dexterously manipulate multi-view image data and easily scale to large data. To achieve this goal, we formulate BMVC by two key components: compact collaborative discrete representation learning and binary clustering structure learning, in a joint learning framework. Specifically, BMVC collaboratively encodes the multi-view image descriptors into a compact common binary code space by considering their complementary information; the collaborative binary representations are meanwhile clustered by a binary matrix factorization model, such that the cluster structures are optimized in the Hamming space by pure, extremely fast bit-operations. For efficiency, the code balance constraints are imposed on both binary data representations and cluster centroids. Finally, the resulting optimization problem is solved by an alternating optimization scheme with guaranteed fast convergence. Extensive experiments on four large-scale multi-view image datasets demonstrate that the proposed method enjoys the significant reduction in both computation and memory footprint, while observing superior (in most cases) or very competitive performance, in comparison with state-of-the-art clustering methods.

Accurate segmentation of organs or lesions from medical images is crucial for reliable diagnosis of diseases and organ morphometry. In recent years, convolutional encoder-decoder solutions have achieved substantial progress in the field of automatic medical image segmentation. Due to the inherent bias in the convolution operations, prior models mainly focus on local visual cues formed by the neighboring pixels, but fail to fully model the long-range contextual dependencies. In this article, we propose a novel Transformer-based Attention Guided Network called TransAttUnet , in which the multi-level guided attention and multi-scale skip connection are designed to jointly enhance the performance of the semantical segmentation architecture. Inspired by Transformer, the self-aware attention (SAA) module with Transformer Self Attention (TSA) and Global Spatial Attention (GSA) is incorporated into TransAttUnet to effectively learn the non-local interactions among encoder features. Moreover, we also use additional multi-scale skip connections between decoder blocks to aggregate the upsampled features with different semantic scales. In this way, the representation ability of multi-scale context information is strengthened to generate discriminative features. Benefitting from these complementary components, the proposed TransAttUnet can effectively alleviate the loss of fine details caused by the stacking of convolution layers and the consecutive sampling operations, finally improving the segmentation quality of medical images. Extensive experiments were conducted on multiple medical image segmentation datasets from various imaging modalities, which demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.

An important underlying assumption that guides the success of the existing multiview learning algorithms is the full observation of the multiview data. However, such rigorous precondition clearly violates the common-sense knowledge in practical applications, where in most cases, only incomplete fractions of the multiview data are given. The presence of the incomplete settings generally disables the conventional multiview clustering methods. In this article, we propose a simple but effective incomplete multiview clustering (IMC) framework, which simultaneously considers the local geometric information and the unbalanced discriminating powers of these incomplete multiview observations. Specifically, a novel graph-regularized matrix factorization model, on the one hand, is developed to preserve the local geometric similarities of the learned common representations from different views. On the other hand, the semantic consistency constraint is introduced to stimulate these view-specific representations toward a unified discriminative representation. Moreover, the importance of different views is adaptively determined to reduce the negative influence of the unbalanced incomplete views. Furthermore, an efficient learning algorithm is proposed to solve the resulting optimization problem. Extensive experimental results performed on several incomplete multiview datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve superior clustering performance in comparison with some state-of-the-art multiview learning methods.

Conventional multiview clustering seeks to partition data into respective groups based on the assumption that all views are fully observed. However, in practical applications, such as disease diagnosis, multimedia analysis, and recommendation system, it is common to observe that not all views of samples are available in many cases, which leads to the failure of the conventional multiview clustering methods. Clustering on such incomplete multiview data is referred to as incomplete multiview clustering (IMC). In view of the promising application prospects, the research of IMC has noticeable advances in recent years. However, there is no survey to summarize the current progresses and point out the future research directions. To this end, we review the recent studies of IMC. Importantly, we provide some frameworks to unify the corresponding IMC methods and make an in-depth comparative analysis for some representative methods from theoretical and experimental perspectives. Finally, some open problems in the IMC field are offered for researchers. The related codes are released at https://github.com/DarrenZZhang/Survey_IMC .