# Uncertainty-aware Diffusion and Reinforcement Learning for Joint Plane Localization and Anomaly Diagnosis in 3D Ultrasound

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23538 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23538/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14795/) (2021)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [Med3D: Transfer Learning for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00625/) (2019)
- [Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15233/) (2023)
- [UniFormerV2: Spatiotemporal Learning by Arming Image ViTs with Video UniFormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09552/) (2022)
- [nnMamba: 3D Biomedical Image Segmentation, Classification and Landmark Detection with State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03526/) (2024)
- [Sketch guided and progressive growing GAN for realistic and editable ultrasound image synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06929/) (2022)
- [Automatic View Planning with Multi-scale Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03228/) (2018)
- [Standard Plane Detection in 3D Fetal Ultrasound Using an Iterative Transformation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07486/) (2018)
- [Searching Collaborative Agents for Multi-plane Localization in 3D Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15273/) (2020)
- [Agent with Warm Start and Adaptive Dynamic Termination for Plane Localization in 3D Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14502/) (2021)
- [Conditional Diffusion Models are Medical Image Classifiers that Provide Explainability and Uncertainty for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03687/) (2025)
- [Key-frame Guided Network for Thyroid Nodule Recognition using Ultrasound Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13318/) (2022)
- [Boosting Breast Ultrasound Video Classification by the Guidance of Keyframe Feature Centers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06877/) (2023)
- [Agent with Tangent-based Formulation and Anatomical Perception for Standard Plane Localization in 3D Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00475/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Prototype Memory-Guided Training-Free Anomaly Classification and Localization in Prenatal Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00744/) (2026)
- [Deep Learning-based Intelligent Diagnosis of Congenital Uterine Anomalies in 3D Ultrasound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15225/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Congenital uterine anomalies (CUAs) can lead to infertility, miscarriage, preterm birth, and an increased risk of pregnancy complications. Compared to traditional 2D ultrasound (US), 3D US can reconstruct the coronal plane, providing a clear visualization of the uterine morphology for assessing CUAs accurately. In this paper, we propose an intelligent system for simultaneous automated plane localization and CUA diagnosis. Our highlights are: 1) we develop a denoising diffusion model with local (plane) and global (volume/text) guidance, using an adaptive weighting strategy to optimize attention allocation to different conditions; 2) we introduce a reinforcement learning-based framework with unsupervised rewards to extract the key slice summary from redundant sequences, fully integrating information across multiple planes to reduce learning difficulty; 3) we provide text-driven uncertainty modeling for coarse prediction, and leverage it to adjust the classification probability for overall performance improvement. Extensive experiments on a large 3D uterine US dataset show the efficacy of our method, in terms of plane localization and CUA diagnosis. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhoo0302/CUA-US.