Underwater object detection presents significant challenges due to the unique visual degradations in underwater environments, such as low contrast, poor visibility, and blurry object boundaries. While ANNs have achieved impressive detection accuracy, their high computational cost and power consumption limit their deployment in resource-constrained underwater platforms. In this work, we propose a Spatial-Frequency Spiking Neural Network (SFSNN) that combines the energy-efficient and event-driven nature of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with the discriminative power of spatial-frequency analysis. SFSNN introduces a novel spatial-frequency spiking module that integrates spatial and frequency-domain representations, enhancing edge and texture features crucial for object detection in murky waters. Furthermore, we adapt the YOLOX architecture into a spike-based detector via ANN-to-SNN conversion using signed spiking neurons. Extensive experiments on the RUOD dataset demonstrate that SFSNN achieves superior performance over both SNN- and ANN-based detection models, offering a compelling solution for low-power underwater object detection.

Immunohistochemical (IHC) biomarker prediction greatly benefits from multimodal data fusion. However, the simultaneous acquisition of genomic and pathological data is often constrained by cost or technical limitations. To address this, we propose a novel Genomics-guided Multimodal Knowledge Decomposition Network (GMKDN), a framework that effectively integrates genomics and pathology data during training while dynamically adapting to available data during inference. GMKDN introduces two key innovations: 1) the Batch-Sample Multimodal Knowledge Decomposition (BMKD) module, which decomposes input features into pathology-specific, modality-general, and genomics-specific components to reduce redundancy and enhance knowledge transferability, and 2) the Online Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation (OSKD) module, which optimizes activation similarity matrices to facilitate robust knowledge transfer between teacher and student models. The BMKD module improves generalization across modalities, while the OSKD module enhances model robustness, particularly when certain modalities are unavailable during inference. Extensive evaluations conducted on the TCGA-BRCA dataset and an external test cohort (QHSU) demonstrate that GMKDN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) slide-based multiple instance learning (MIL) approaches as well as existing multimodal learning models, establishing a new benchmark for breast cancer biomarker prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/qiyuanzz/GMKDN.

Spatial transcriptomics measures gene expression and spatial location in tissue sections, but high sequencing costs limit adoption. Predicting spatial gene expression from histopathology offers a lower-cost alternative, yet current models rely on local/adjacent regions, lack effective multi-scale integration, and miss broader histological context. Performance is further impacted by variability across platforms and the heterogeneity of cancer tissues. In this study, we propose MSFF-ST, a Multi-Scale Feature Fusion model for spatial transcriptomics prediction. MSFF-ST first uses a pathology foundation model to extract features from whole-slide images (WSIs), then fuses features from spatially adjacent and morphologically similar spot regions, and finally incorporates hierarchical WSI-level context via cross-scale attention. Evaluated on three cancer datasets spanning two spatial transcriptomics platforms, MSFF-ST achieves superior performance and generalizability over state-of-the-art methods. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/chenw-u/MSFF-ST

The molecular classification of adult-type diffuse gliomas is essential for determining appropriate therapeutic strategies, but genomic sequencing remains costly. Recent advances in digital pathology and deep learning have led to several studies exploring molecular classification using multiple instance learning (MIL) on whole slide images (WSIs). However, achieving optimal classification performance using only histological slides is challenging due to the lack of guidance from genomic data. In this study, we propose a teacher-student distillation framework for glioma molecular classification using WSIs. Our method leverages a pretrained self-normalizing neural network (SNN) as the genomic teacher model, which selects genes based on survival analysis-driven criteria to guide the MIL-based student model in learning effective histological representations. During training, both genomic and pathological data are utilized, while inference relies solely on WSIs. Experimental validation on the TCGA GBM-LGG datasets shows that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) MIL models, highlighting its effectiveness in glioma diagnostic subtyping using WSIs.

Recently, virtual staining has emerged as a promising alternative to revolutionize histological staining by digitally generating stains. However, most existing methods suffer from the curse of staining unreality and unreliability. In this paper, we propose the Orthogonal Decoupling Alignment Generative Adversarial Network (ODA-GAN) for unpaired virtual immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining. Our approach is based on the assumption that an image consists of IHC staining-related features, which influence staining distribution and intensity, and staining-unrelated features, such as tissue morphology. Leveraging a pathology foundation model, we first develop a weakly-supervised segmentation pipeline as an alternative to expert annotations. We introduce an Orthogonal MLP (O-MLP) module to project image features into an orthogonal space, decoupling them into staining-related and unrelated components. Additionally, we propose a Dual-stream PatchNCE (DPNCE) loss to resolve contrastive learning contradictions in the staining-related space, thereby enhancing staining accuracy. To further improve realism, we introduce a Multi-layer Domain Alignment (MDA) module to bridge the domain gap between generated and real IHC images. Evaluations on three benchmark datasets show that our ODA-GAN reaches state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ittong/ODA-GAN.

Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have garnered significant attention due to their bio-plausibility and low power consumption advantages compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, the application of SNN in computer vision remains limited, primarily due to their inferior performance. In this work, we aim to bridge the performance gap between ANNs and SNNs in object detection by our Advanced SpikingYOLOX. The proposed approach extends the SpikingYOLOX with two key innovations: PSA-SNN and 2D-Spiking Transformer, both designed to enhance object detection performance. PSA-SNN extends spike-based self-attention by incorporating high-speed partial self-attention with an SNN-based 2D-Spiking Transformer in the deepest layer of the backbone, significantly improving feature extraction. The 2D-Spiking Transformer redefines the role of spiking neurons in Transformer sequences (Key, Query, Value), demonstrating that applying an additional spiking layer solely to the Value sequence yields the best performance while maintaining computational efficiency in spike-driven Transformers. We conduct extensive experiments on static images and the Advanced SpikingYOLOX achieves state-of-the-art performance among other SNN-based object detection methods. This work paves the way for more advanced SNN applications in object detection and broader computer vision tasks.

Automated detection of lymph node metastasis (LNM) holds great potential to alleviate the workload of doctors and reduce misinterpretations. Despite the practical successes achieved, effectively addressing the highly complex and heterogeneous tumor microenvironment remains an open and challenging problem, especially when tumor subtypes intermingle and are difficult to delineate. In this paper, we propose a multi-task adaptive resolution network, named MAR-Net, for LNM detection and subtyping in complex mixed-type cancers. Specifically, we construct a resolution-aware module to mine heterogeneous diagnostic information, which exploits the multi-scale pyramid information and adaptively combines multi-resolution structured features for comprehensive representation. Additionally, we adopt a multi-task learning approach that simultaneously addresses LNM detection and subtyping, reducing model instability during optimization and improving performance across both tasks. More importantly, to rectify the potential misclassification of tumor subtypes, we elaborately design a hierarchical subtying refinement (HSR) algorithm that leverages a generic segmentation model informed by pathologists' prior knowledge. Evaluations have been conducted on three private and one public cancer datasets (554 WSIs, 4.8 million patches). Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods, achieving 0.5% to 3.2% higher AUC in LNM detection and 3.8% to 4.4% higher AUC in LNM subtyping.

The emergence of deep and large-scale spiking neural networks (SNNs) exhibiting high performance across diverse complex datasets has led to a need for compressing network models due to the presence of a significant number of redundant structural units, aiming to more effectively leverage their low-power consumption and biological interpretability advantages. Currently, most model compression techniques for SNNs are based on unstructured pruning of individual connections, which requires specific hardware support. Hence, we propose a structured pruning approach based on the activity levels of convolutional kernels named Spiking Channel Activity-based (SCA) network pruning framework. Inspired by synaptic plasticity mechanisms, our method dynamically adjusts the network’s structure by pruning and regenerating convolutional kernels during training, enhancing the model’s adaptation to the current target task. While maintaining model performance, this approach refines the network architecture, ultimately reducing computational load and accelerating the inference process. This indicates that structured dynamic sparse learning methods can better facilitate the application of deep SNNs in low-power and high-efficiency scenarios.

Histological Gleason grading of tumor patterns is one of the most powerful prognostic predictors in prostate cancer. However, manual analysis and grading performed by pathologists are typically subjective and time-consuming. In this paper, we present an automatic technique for Gleason grading of prostate cancer from H&E stained whole slide pathology images using a set of novel completed and statistical local binary pattern (CSLBP) descriptors. First, the technique divides the whole slide image (WSI) into a set of small image tiles, where salient tumor tiles with high nuclei densities are selected for analysis. The CSLBP texture features that encode pixel intensity variations from circularly surrounding neighborhoods are extracted from salient image tiles to characterize different Gleason patterns. Finally, the CSLBP texture features computed from all tiles are integrated and utilized by the multi-class support vector machine (SVM) that assigns patient slides with different Gleason scores such as 6, 7, or ≥ 8. Experiments have been performed on 312 different patient cases selected from the cancer genome atlas (TCGA) and have achieved superior performances over state-of-the-art texture descriptors and baseline methods including deep learning models for prostate cancer Gleason grading.