Sparse Convolutional Neural Networks for Medical Image Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditional convolutional neural network (CNN) methods rely on dense tensors, which makes them suboptimal for spatially sparse data. In this paper, we propose a CNN model based on sparse tensors for efficient processing of large and sparse medical images. In contrast to a dense CNN that takes the entire voxel grid as input, a sparse CNN processes only on the non-empty voxels, thus reducing the memory and computation overhead caused by the sparse input data. We evaluate our method on two clinically relevant skull reconstruction tasks: (1) given a defective skull, reconstruct the complete skull (i.e., skull shape completion), and (2) given a coarse skull, reconstruct a high-resolution skull with fine geometric details (shape super-resolution). Our method outperforms the state of the art in the skull reconstruction task quantitatively and qualitatively, while requiring substantially less memory for training and inference. We observed that, on the 3D skull data, the overall memory consumption of the sparse CNN grows approximately linearly during inference with respect to the image resolutions. During training, the memory usage remains clearly below increases in image resolution - an x8 increase in voxel number leads to less than x8 increase in memory requirements. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of using a sparse CNN for skull reconstruction tasks, and our findings can be applied to other spatially sparse problems. We proof this by additional experimental results on other sparse medical datasets, like the aorta and the heart. Project page at https://github.com/Jianningli/SparseCNN
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".