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Deep learning based PET image reconstruction methods have achieved promising results recently. However, most of these methods follow a supervised learning paradigm, which rely heavily on the availability of high-quality training labels. In particular, the long scanning time required and high radiation exposure associated with PET scans make obtaining these labels impractical. In this paper, we propose a dual-domain unsupervised PET image reconstruction method based on learned descent algorithm, which reconstructs high-quality PET images from sinograms without the need for image labels. Specifically, we unroll the proximal gradient method with a learnable norm for PET image reconstruction problem. The training is unsupervised, using measurement domain loss based on deep image prior as well as image domain loss based on rotation equivariance property. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of proposed method compared with maximum-likelihood expectation-maximization (MLEM), total-variation regularized EM (EM-TV) and deep image prior based method (DIP). 

Objective. Dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, which can provide information on dynamic changes in physiological metabolism, is now widely used in clinical diagnosis and cancer treatment. However, the reconstruction from dynamic data is extremely challenging due to the limited counts received in individual frame, especially in ultra short frames. Recently, the unrolled modelbased deep learning methods have shown inspiring results for low-count PET image reconstruction with good interpretability. Nevertheless, the existing model-based deep learning methods mainly focus on the spatial correlations while ignore the temporal domain. Approach. In this paper, inspired by the learned primal dual (LPD) algorithm, we propose the spatio-temporal primal dual network (STPDnet) for dynamic low-count PET image reconstruction. Both spatial and temporal correlations are encoded by 3D convolution operators. The physical projection of PET is embedded in the iterative learning process of the network, which provides the physical constraints and enhances interpretability. Main results. The experiments of both simulation data and real rat scan data have shown that the proposed method can achieve substantial noise reduction in both temporal and spatial domains and outperform the maximum likelihood expectation maximization, spatio-temporal kernel method, LPD and FBPnet. Significance. Experimental results show STPDnet better reconstruction performance in the low count situation, which makes the proposed method particularly suitable in whole-body dynamic imaging and parametric PET imaging that require extreme short frames and usually suffer from high level of noise. 

Simulation-to-real domain adaptation for semantic segmentation has been actively studied for various applications such as autonomous driving. Existing methods mainly focus on a single-source setting, which cannot easily handle a more practical scenario of multiple sources with different distributions. In this paper, we propose to investigate multi-source domain adaptation for semantic segmentation. Specifically, we design a novel framework, termed Multi-source Adversarial Domain Aggregation Network (MADAN), which can be trained in an end-to-end manner. First, we generate an adapted domain for each source with dynamic semantic consistency while aligning at the pixel-level cycle-consistently towards the target. Second, we propose sub-domain aggregation discriminator and cross-domain cycle discriminator to make different adapted domains more closely aggregated. Finally, feature-level alignment is performed between the aggregated domain and target domain while training the segmentation network. Extensive experiments from synthetic GTA and SYNTHIA to real Cityscapes and BDDS datasets demonstrate that the proposed MADAN model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Our source code is released at: https://github.com/Luodian/MADAN. 

This paper details the mechanical design and control of a human safety robotic arm with variable stiffness, starting from conceptual design to prototype. The mechanism designed is based on parallel guided beam with a roller slider actuated by a power screw and a DC motor with an encoder for position feedback. Unlike conventional robotic systems that control the stiffness in joints, this design introduces compliance to the robotic arm link itself. By controlling the slider position, the effective length of the link can be adjusted to provide the necessary stiffness change. A PID position controller is employed and the position accuracy is experimentally evaluated. The stiffness variation of the prototype is validated by experiments and FEA simulation. The overall stiffness change achieved is 20-fold.