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Xi Tao

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4 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Uncertainty-Propelled Physics-MAE Fusion for Self-Supervised Diffusion-Weighted Image Denoising

Zeyu Deng
Lihui Wang
Xi Tao
Qijian Chen
Ying Cao
XuLinHu
Yingfeng Ou

The inherently low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in diffusion-weighted (DW) imaging fundamentally impedes precise tissue microstructure characterization, rendering effective noise suppression a persistent challenge. Existing denoising methods frequently suffer from over-smoothing or distortion of microstructure information when handling spatially correlated or severe noise. To address these limitations, we propose UP2-MAE fusion model, a self-supervised DWI denoising method based on Uncertainty-Propelled Physics and Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE) fusion. This framework integrates two complementary branches: one leverages MAE to suppress noise through local context modeling, while the other constructs uncorrelated noisy pairs using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) physics and denoises them via a Noise2Noise approach, which can preserve texture details by exploiting directional relationships across diffusion encoding directions. To fully integrate the strengths of both branches, an uncertainty-propelled fusion strategy based on maximum likelihood estimation is proposed to derive the final denoised output. In addition, to further promote the performance, uncertainty-guided reconstruction and consistency loss are presented. Evaluations against state-of-the-art denoising methods on both simulated and acquired DW datasets confirm the efficacy of our approach.

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JBHI Journal 2024 Journal Article

DDT-Net: Dose-Agnostic Dual-Task Transfer Network for Simultaneous Low-Dose CT Denoising and Simulation

Mingqiang Meng
Yongbo Wang
Manman Zhu
Xi Tao
Zerui Mao
Jingyi Liao
Zhaoying Bian
Dong Zeng

Deep learning (DL) algorithms have achieved unprecedented success in low-dose CT (LDCT) imaging and are expected to be a new generation of CT reconstruction technology. However, most DL-based denoising models often lack the ability to generalize to unseen dose data. Moreover, most simulation tools for LDCT typically operate on proprietary projection data, which is generally not accessible without an established collaboration with CT manufacturers. To alleviate these issues, in this work, we propose a dose-agnostic dual-task transfer network, termed DDT-Net, for simultaneous LDCT denoising and simulation. Concretely, the dual-task learning module is constructed to integrate the LDCT denoising and simulation tasks into a unified optimization framework by learning the joint distribution of LDCT and NDCT data. We approximate the joint distribution of continuous dose level data by training DDT-Net with discrete dose data, which can be generalized to denoising and simulation of unseen dose data. In particular, the mixed-dose training strategy adopted by DDT-Net can promote the denoising performance of lower-dose data. The paired dataset simulated by DDT-Net can be used for data augmentation to further restore the tissue texture of LDCT images. Experimental results on synthetic data and clinical data show that the proposed DDT-Net outperforms competing methods in terms of denoising and generalization performance at unseen dose data, and it also provides a simulation tool that can quickly simulate realistic LDCT images at arbitrary dose levels.

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JBHI Journal 2021 Journal Article

Quantifying Axial Spine Images Using Object-Specific Bi-Path Network

Liyan Lin
Xi Tao
Wei Yang
Shumao Pang
Zhihai Su
Hai Lu
Shuo Li
Qianjin Feng

Automatic estimation of indices from medical images is the main goal of computer-aided quantification (CADq), which speeds up diagnosis and lightens the workload of radiologists. Deep learning technique is a good choice for implementing CADq. Usually, to acquire high-accuracy quantification, specific network architecture needs to be designed for a given CADq task. In this study, considering that the target organs are the intervertebral disc and the dural sac, we propose an object-specific bi-path network (OSBP-Net) for axial spine image quantification. Each path of the OSBP-Net comprises a shallow feature extraction layer (SFE) and a deep feature extraction sub-network (DFE). The SFEs use different convolution strides because the two target organs have different anatomical sizes. The DFEs use average pooling for downsampling based on the observation that the target organs have lower intensity than the background. In addition, an inter-path dissimilarity constraint is proposed and applied to the output of the SFEs, taking into account that the activated regions in the feature maps of two paths should be different theoretically. An inter-index correlation regularization is introduced and applied to the output of the DFEs based on the observation that the diameter and area of the same object express an approximately linear relation. The prediction results of OSBP-Net are compared to several state-of-the-art machine learning-based CADq methods. The comparison reveals that the proposed methods precede other competing methods extensively, indicating its great potential for spine CADq.

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JBHI Journal 2020 Journal Article

Multiple Axial Spine Indices Estimation via Dense Enhancing Network With Cross-Space Distance-Preserving Regularization

Liyan Lin
Xi Tao
Shumao Pang
Zhihai Su
Hai Lu
Shuo Li
Qianjin Feng
Bo Chen

Automatic estimation of axial spine indices is clinically desired for various spine computer aided procedures, such as disease diagnosis, therapeutic evaluation, pathophysiological understanding, risk assessment, and biomechanical modeling. Currently, the spine indices are manually measured by physicians, which is time-consuming and laborious. Even worse, the tedious manual procedure might result in inaccurate measurement. To deal with this problem, in this paper, we aim at developing an automatic method to estimate multiple indices from axial spine images. Inspired by the success of deep learning for regression problems and the densely connected network for image classification, we propose a dense enhancing network (DE-Net) which uses the dense enhancing blocks (DEBs) as its main body, where a feature enhancing layer is added to each of the bypass in a dense block. The DEB is designed to enhance discriminative feature embedding from the intervertebral disc and the dural sac areas. In addition, the cross-space distance-preserving regularization (CSDPR), which enforces consistent inter-sample distances between the output and the label spaces, is proposed to regularize the loss function of the DE-Net. To train and validate the proposed method, we collected 895 axial spine MRI images from 143 subjects and manually measured the indices as the ground truth. The results show that all deep learning models obtain very small prediction errors, and the proposed DE-Net with CSDPR acquires the smallest error among all methods, indicating that our method has great potential for spine computer aided procedures.

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