Ensuring fairness in medical image segmentation is critical due to biases in imbalanced clinical data acquisition caused by demographic attributes (e.g., age, sex, race) and clinical factors (e.g., disease severity). To address these challenges, we introduce Distribution-aware Mixture of Experts (dMoE), inspired by optimal control theory. We provide a comprehensive analysis of its underlying mechanisms and clarify dMoE's role in adapting to heterogeneous distributions in medical image segmentation. Furthermore, we integrate dMoE into multiple network architectures, demonstrating its broad applicability across diverse medical image analysis tasks. By incorporating demographic and clinical factors, dMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance on two 2D benchmark datasets and a 3D in-house dataset. Our results highlight the effectiveness of dMoE in mitigating biases from imbalanced distributions, offering a promising approach to bridging control theory and medical image segmentation within fairness learning paradigms. The source code is available at https://github.com/tvseg/dMoE.

Recent advances in AI foundation models have significant potential for lightening the clinical workload by mimicking the comprehensive and multi-faceted approaches used by medical professionals. In the field of radiation oncology, the integration of multiple modalities holds great importance, so the opportunity of foundational model is abundant. Inspired by this, here we present RO-LMM, a multi-purpose, comprehensive large multimodal model (LMM) tailored for the field of radiation oncology. This model effectively manages a series of tasks within the clinical workflow, including clinical context summarization, radiotherapy strategy suggestion, and plan-guided target volume segmentation by leveraging the capabilities of LMM. In particular, to perform consecutive clinical tasks without error accumulation, we present a novel Consistency Embedding Fine-Tuning (CEFTune) technique, which boosts LMM's robustness to noisy inputs while preserving the consistency of handling clean inputs. We further extend this concept to LMM-driven segmentation framework, leading to a novel Consistency Embedding Segmentation (CESEG) techniques. Experimental results including multi-center validation confirm that our RO-LMM with CEFTune and CESEG results in promising performance for multiple clinical tasks with generalization capabilities.

Gastric endoscopic screening is an effective way to decide appropriate gastric cancer treatment at an early stage, reducing gastric cancer-associated mortality rate. Although artificial intelligence has brought a great promise to assist pathologist to screen digitalized endoscopic biopsies, existing artificial intelligence systems are limited to be utilized in planning gastric cancer treatment. We propose a practical artificial intelligence-based decision support system that enables five subclassifications of gastric cancer pathology, which can be directly matched to general gastric cancer treatment guidance. The proposed framework is designed to efficiently differentiate multi-classes of gastric cancer through multiscale self-attention mechanism using 2-stage hybrid vision transformer networks, by mimicking the way how human pathologists understand histology. The proposed system demonstrates its reliable diagnostic performance by achieving class-average sensitivity of above 0.85 for multicentric cohort tests. Moreover, the proposed system demonstrates its great generalization capability on gastrointestinal track organ cancer by achieving the best class-average sensitivity among contemporary networks. Furthermore, in the observational study, artificial intelligence-assisted pathologists show significantly improved diagnostic sensitivity within saved screening time compared to human pathologists. Our results demonstrate that the proposed artificial intelligence system has a great potential for providing presumptive pathologic opinion and supporting decision of appropriate gastric cancer treatment in practical clinical settings.

Under the global pandemic of COVID-19, the use of artificial intelligence to analyze chest X-ray (CXR) image for COVID-19 diagnosis and patient triage is becoming important. Unfortunately, due to the emergent nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, a systematic collection of CXR data set for deep neural network training is difficult. To address this problem, here we propose a patch-based convolutional neural network approach with a relatively small number of trainable parameters for COVID-19 diagnosis. The proposed method is inspired by our statistical analysis of the potential imaging biomarkers of the CXR radiographs. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and provides clinically interpretable saliency maps, which are useful for COVID-19 diagnosis and patient triage.