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As one of the popular deep learning methods, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have been widely adopted in segmentation tasks and have received positive feedback. However, in segmentation tasks, DCNN-based frameworks are known for their incompetence in dealing with global relations within imaging features. Although several techniques have been proposed to enhance the global reasoning of DCNN, these models are either not able to gain satisfying performances compared with traditional fully-convolutional structures or not capable of utilizing the basic advantages of CNN-based networks (namely the ability of local reasoning). In this study, compared with current attempts to combine FCNs and global reasoning methods, we fully extracted the ability of self-attention by designing a novel attention mechanism for 3D computation and proposed a new segmentation framework (named 3DTU) for three-dimensional medical image segmentation tasks. This new framework processes images in an end-to-end manner and executes 3D computation on both the encoder side (which contains a 3D transformer) and the decoder side (which is based on a 3D DCNN). We tested our framework on two independent datasets that consist of 3D MRI and CT images. Experimental results clearly demonstrate that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art segmentation methods in various metrics. 

Brain networks have attracted increasing attention due to the potential to better characterize brain dynamics and abnormalities in neurological and psychiatric conditions. Recent years have witnessed enormous successes in deep learning. Many AI algorithms, especially graph learning methods, have been proposed to analyze brain networks. An important issue for existing graph learning methods is that those models are not typically easy to interpret. In this study, we proposed an interpretable graph learning model for brain network regression analysis. We applied this new framework on the subjects from Human Connectome Project (HCP) for predicting multiple Adult Self-Report (ASR) scores. We also use one of the ASR scores as the example to demonstrate how to identify sex differences in the regression process using our model. In comparison with other state-of-the-art methods, our results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our new model in effectiveness, fairness, and transparency.