Accurate breast mass segmentation of automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) images plays a crucial role in 3D breast reconstruction which can assist radiologists in surgery planning. Although the convolutional neural network has great potential for breast mass segmentation due to the remarkable progress of deep learning, the lack of annotated data limits the performance of deep CNNs. In this paper, we present an uncertainty aware temporal ensembling (UATE) model for semi-supervised ABUS mass segmentation. Specifically, a temporal ensembling segmentation (TEs) model is designed to segment breast mass using a few labeled images and a large number of unlabeled images. Considering the network output contains correct predictions and unreliable predictions, equally treating each prediction in pseudo label update and loss calculation may degrade the network performance. To alleviate this problem, the uncertainty map is estimated for each image. Then an adaptive ensembling momentum map and an uncertainty aware unsupervised loss are designed and integrated with TEs model. The effectiveness of the proposed UATE model is mainly verified on an ABUS dataset of 107 patients with 170 volumes, including 8856 2D labeled slices. The Jaccard index (JI), Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), pixel-wise accuracy (AC) and Hausdorff distance (HD) of the proposed method on testing set are 63.65%, 74.25%, 99.21% and 3.81mm respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our semi-supervised method outperforms the fully supervised method, and get a promising result compared with existing semi-supervised methods.

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to generate one image with comprehensive information. It can maintain rich texture characteristics and thermal information. However, for existing image fusion methods, the fused images either sacrifice the salience of thermal targets and the richness of textures or introduce the interference of useless information like artifacts. To alleviate these problems, an effective cross-modal coordinate attention network for infrared and visible image fusion called CCAFusion is proposed in this paper. To fully integrate complementary features, the cross-modal image fusion strategy based on coordinate attention is designed, which consists of the feature-awareness fusion module and the feature-enhancement fusion module. Moreover, a multiscale skip connection-based network is employed to obtain multiscale features in the infrared image and the visible image, which can fully utilize the multi-level information in the fusion process. To reduce the discrepancy between the fused image and the input images, a multiple constrained loss function including the base loss and the auxiliary loss is developed to adjust the gray-level distribution and ensure the harmonious coexistence of structure and intensity in fused images, thereby preventing the pollution of useless information like artifacts. Extensive experiments conducted on widely used datasets demonstrate that our CCAFusion achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art image fusion methods in both qualitative evaluation and quantitative measurement. Furthermore, the application to salient object detection reveals the potential of our CCAFusion for high-level vision tasks, which can effectively boost the detection performance.

Tumor segmentation in 3D automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) plays an important role in breast disease diagnosis and surgical planning. However, automatic segmentation of tumors in 3D ABUS images is still challenging, due to the large tumor shape and size variations, and uncertain tumor locations among patients. In this paper, we develop a novel cross-model attention-guided tumor segmentation network with a hybrid loss for 3D ABUS images. Specifically, we incorporate the tumor location into a segmentation network by combining an improved 3D Mask R-CNN head into V-Net as an end-to-end architecture. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-model attention mechanism that is able to aggregate the segmentation probability map from the improved 3D Mask R-CNN to each feature extraction level in the V-Net. Then, we design a hybrid loss to balance the contribution of each part in the proposed cross-model segmentation network. We conduct extensive experiments on 170 3D ABUS from 107 patients. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, by achieving the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 64.57%, Jaccard coefficient (JC) of 53.39%, recall (REC) of 64.43%, precision (PRE) of 74.51%, 95th Hausdorff distance (95HD) of 11.91 mm, and average surface distance (ASD) of 4.63 mm. Our code will be available online ( https://github.com/zhouyuegithub/CMVNet ).