Medical imaging plays a pivotal role in modern healthcare, with computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA) being a critical tool for diagnosing pulmonary embolism and other thoracic conditions. However, the complexity of interpreting CTPA scans and generating accurate radiology reports remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces Abn-BLIP (Abnormality-aligned Bootstrapping Language-Image Pretraining), an advanced diagnosis model designed to align abnormal findings to generate the accuracy and comprehensiveness of radiology reports. By leveraging learnable queries and cross-modal attention mechanisms, our model demonstrates superior performance in detecting abnormalities, reducing missed findings, and generating structured reports compared to existing methods. Our experiments show that Abn-BLIP outperforms state-of-the-art medical vision-language models and 3D report generation methods in both accuracy and clinical relevance. These results highlight the potential of integrating multimodal learning strategies for improving radiology reporting. The source code is available at https://github.com/zzs95/abn-blip.

Cross-domain medical image segmentation has gained increasing interest for its potential to reduce annotation efforts and improve clinical generalization capabilities. Domain adaptation aims to tackle the domain shift that appears in different image modalities. In cross-domain segmentation, generative models often suffer from limited accuracy due to their lack of domain-specific representations. Besides, many transfer learning approaches rely on additional manual annotations for supervision, emerging paradigms such as Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) facilitate effective knowledge transfer even when labels in the target domain are entirely absent. In this study, we propose a novel Point-cloud Structure Constrained Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (PSC-UDA) framework based on a Contour-Aware Segmentation (CAS) model with a 3D contour point cloud to bridge the domain gaps appearing in cross-site and cross-domain medical images. The CAS model distills the domain-invariant kidney structure from image texture to distinguish the point cloud and characterize the kidney contour in a coarse-to-fine way. With point-to-voxel self-learning on 3D structure constraints, the proposed PSC-UDA framework addresses visual domain shift, adapting discriminative information of the kidney from the labeled source domain (CT) to the unlabeled target domain (CT/MRI), so that it realizes precise cross-domain kidney segmentation with limited labels. Experimental results prove that the proposed method outperforms the generative UDA methods and the source-free methods on three cross-domain kidney segmentation datasets, outperforming even without a target domain adaptation strategy. The source code is available at https://github.com/zzs95/PSC-UDA .

Pulmonary nodule (PN) is the typical radiological indicator of early lung cancer. Compared with CT and LDCT, PN detection based on Chest X-ray (CXR) images is more costeffective and involves lower radiation exposure. However, since the limited contrast of CXR images, PN screening always relies on manual detection by radiologists, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose an automatical method for PN detection in CXR. As the small size of the PN region, we reformulate the PN detection as the point localization, which transfer the traditional coordinates regression in CNN to a heatmap regression by a dual-channel Gaussian modeling. For improving the detection accuracy of tiny PN, we construct a global localization network to realize coarse PN regression, which is cascaded by a local optimization network to further refine the results with high-resolution CXR image patches. The ablation and comparison experimental results indicate that our method can achieve superior and satisfying performance on spatial localization errors and detection metrics, respectively.

Automated radiology report generation offers an effective solution to alleviate radiologists’ workload. However, most existing methods focus primarily on single or fixed-view images to model current disease conditions, which limits diagnostic accuracy and overlooks disease progression. Although some approaches utilize longitudinal data to track disease progression, they still rely on single images to analyze current visits. To address these issues, we propose enhanced contrastive learning with Multi-view Longitudinal data to facilitate chest X-ray Report Generation, named MLRG. Specifically, we introduce a multi-view longitudinal contrastive learning method that integrates spatial information from current multi-view images and temporal information from longitudinal data. This method also utilizes the inherent spatiotemporal information of radiology reports to supervise the pre-training of visual and textual representations. Subsequently, we present a tokenized absence encoding technique to flexibly handle missing patient-specific prior knowledge, allowing the model to produce more accurate radiology reports based on available prior knowledge. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-CXR, MIMIC-ABN, and Two-view CXR datasets demonstrate that our MLRG outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 2.3% BLEU-4 improvement on MIMIC-CXR, a 5.5% F1 score improvement on MIMIC-ABN, and a 2.7% F1 RadGraph improvement on Two-view CXR.

The rapid advancements in Vision Language Models (VLMs) have prompted the development of multi-modal medical assistant systems. Despite this progress, current models still have inherent probabilistic uncertainties, often producing erroneous or unverified responses-an issue with serious implications in medical applications. Existing methods aim to enhance the performance of Medical Vision Language Model (MedVLM) by adjusting model structure, fine-tuning with high-quality data, or through preference fine-tuning. However, these training-dependent strategies are costly and still lack sufficient alignment with clinical expertise. To address these issues, we propose an expert-in-the-loop framework named Expert-Controlled Classifier-Free Guidance (Expert-CFG) to align MedVLM with clinical expertise without additional training. This framework introduces an uncertainty estimation strategy to identify unreliable outputs. It then retrieves relevant references to assist experts in highlighting key terms and applies classifier-free guidance to refine the token embeddings of MedVLM, ensuring that the adjusted outputs are correct and align with expert highlights. Evaluations across three medical visual question answering benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed Expert-CFG, with 4.2B parameters and limited expert annotations, outperforms state-of-the-art models with 13B parameters. The results demonstrate the feasibility of deploying such a system in resource-limited settings for clinical use.

Wireless signals are widely used for human sensing, but they require devices and targets to remain stationary, especially for fine-grained motions like respiration. To enable vital sign monitoring under motion using RFID, we employ dual tags to create a relative coordinate system that reduces motion interference. We also propose physics-informed generative models with frequency domain constraints to improve noise reduction, capturing both time and frequency features. Our method, tested across dynamic scenarios including walking, treadmill exercises, and driving and validated using real patient data, demonstrates superior performance compared to traditional approaches in accurately matching real respiratory signals and exhibits robustness against time shifts.

In response to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, advanced automated technologies have emerged as valuable tools to aid healthcare professionals in managing an increased workload by improving radiology report generation and prognostic analysis. This study proposes a Multi-modality Regional Alignment Network (MRANet), an explainable model for radiology report generation and survival prediction that focuses on high-risk regions. By learning spatial correlation in the detector, MRANet visually grounds region-specific descriptions, providing robust anatomical regions with a completion strategy. The visual features of each region are embedded using a novel survival attention mechanism, offering spatially and risk-aware features for sentence encoding while maintaining global coherence across tasks. A cross-domain LLMs-Alignment is employed to enhance the image-to-text transfer process, resulting in sentences rich with clinical detail and improved explainability for radiologists. Multi-center experiments validate the overall performance and each module's composition within the model, encouraging further advancements in radiology report generation research emphasizing clinical interpretation and trustworthiness in AI models applied to medical studies.

Heartbeat signals are useful to disease prediction, sub-health diagnosis, fatigue warning, and even emotion estimation. There is a compelling need for contactless, easy-to-deploy, and long-term heartbeat monitoring. This paper presents a contactless Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based system for heartbeat monitoring that leverages the insight that RFID signal fluctuations induced by chest motion are synchronous with both respiration and heartbeat. The proposed system collects the temporal phase information from the tag pair on the body to extract heartbeat signals using a sequence of signal processing techniques. We propose a signal separation method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to obtain heart rate after preprocessing. Furthermore, the estimated signal is input to an enhanced variational autoencoder (VAE) model to recover the heartbeat waveform. Implemented with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID devices, the system achieves accurate heart rate monitoring with less than 3% relative errors. The detected waveform exhibits a median cosine similarity of 0.83 as compared with the ground truth, which validate the system’s wide applicability and high reliability for fine-grained, contactless heartbeat monitoring.

Recent approaches to vision-language tasks are built on the remarkable capabilities of large vision-language models (VLMs). These models excel in zero-shot and few-shot learning, enabling them to learn new tasks without parameter updates. However, their primary challenge lies in their design, which primarily accommodates 2D input, thus limiting their effectiveness for medical images, particularly radiological images like MRI and CT, which are typically 3D. To bridge the gap between state-of-the-art 2D VLMs and 3D medical image data, we developed an innovative, one-pass, unsupervised representative slice selection method called Vote-MI, which selects representative 2D slices from 3D medical imaging. To evaluate the effectiveness of vote-MI when implemented with VLMs, we introduce BrainMD, a robust, multimodal dataset comprising 2,453 annotated 3D MRI brain scans with corresponding textual radiology reports and electronic health records. Based on BrainMD, we further develop two benchmarks, BrainMD-select (including the most representative 2D slice of 3D image) and BrainBench (including various vision-language downstream tasks). Extensive experiments on the BrainMD dataset and its two corresponding benchmarks demonstrate that our representative selection method significantly improves performance in zero-shot and few-shot learning tasks. On average, Vote-MI achieves a 14.6\% and 16.6\% absolute gain for zero-shot and few-shot learning, respectively, compared to randomly selecting examples. Our studies represent a significant step toward integrating AI in medical imaging to enhance patient care and facilitate medical research. We hope this work will serve as a foundation for data selection as vision-language models are increasingly applied to new tasks.

Semi-supervised learning methods have been explored to mitigate the scarcity of pixel-level annotation in medical image segmentation tasks. Consistency learning, serving as a mainstream method in semi-supervised training, suffers from low efficiency and poor stability due to inaccurate supervision and insufficient feature representation. Prototypical learning is one potential and plausible way to handle this problem due to the nature of feature aggregation in prototype calculation. However, the previous works have not fully studied how to enhance the supervision quality and feature representation using prototypical learning under the semi-supervised condition. To address this issue, we propose an implicit-explicit alignment (IEPAlign) framework to foster semi-supervised consistency training. In specific, we develop an implicit prototype alignment method based on dynamic multiple prototypes on-the-fly. And then, we design a multiple prediction voting strategy for reliable unlabeled mask generation and prototype calculation to improve the supervision quality. Afterward, to boost the intra-class consistency and inter-class separability of pixel-wise features in semi-supervised segmentation, we construct a region-aware hierarchical prototype alignment, which transmits information from labeled to unlabeled and from certain regions to uncertain regions. We evaluate IEPAlign on three medical image segmentation tasks. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other popular semi-supervised segmentation methods and achieves comparable performance with fully-supervised training methods.

Health disparities among marginalized populations with lower socioeconomic status significantly impact the fairness and effectiveness of healthcare delivery. The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare presents an opportunity to address these inequalities, provided that AI models are free from bias. This paper aims to address the bias challenges by population disparities within healthcare systems, existing in the presentation of and development of algorithms, leading to inequitable medical implementation for conditions such as pulmonary embolism (PE) prognosis. In this study, we explore the diverse bias in healthcare systems, which highlights the demand for a holistic framework to reducing bias by complementary aggregation. By leveraging de-biasing deep survival prediction models, we propose a framework that disentangles identifiable information from images, text reports, and clinical variables to mitigate potential biases within multimodal datasets. Our study offers several advantages over traditional clinical-based survival prediction methods, including richer survival-related characteristics and bias-complementary predicted results. By improving the robustness of survival analysis through this framework, we aim to benefit patients, clinicians, and researchers by enhancing fairness and accuracy in healthcare AI systems.

Camouflaged object detection, which aims to detect/segment the object(s) that blend in with their surrounding, remains challenging for deep models due to the intrinsic similarities between foreground objects and background surroundings. Ideally, an effective model should be capable of finding valuable clues from the given scene and integrating them into a joint learning framework to co-enhance the representation. Inspired by this observation, we propose a novel Mutual Graph Learning (MGL) model by shifting the conventional perspective of mutual learning from regular grids to graph domain. Specifically, an image is decoupled by MGL into two task-specific feature maps - one for finding the rough location of the target and the other for capturing its accurate boundary details. Then, the mutual benefits can be fully exploited by reasoning their high-order relations through graphs recurrently. It should be noted that our method is different from most mutual learning models that model all between-task interactions with the use of a shared function. To increase information interactions, MGL is built with typed functions for dealing with different complementary relations. To overcome the accuracy loss caused by interpolation to higher resolution and the computational redundancy resulting from recurrent learning, the S-MGL is equipped with a multi-source attention contextual recovery module, called R-MGL_v2, which uses the pixel feature information iteratively. Experiments on challenging datasets, including CHAMELEON, CAMO, COD10K, and NC4K demonstrate the effectiveness of our MGL with superior performance to existing state-of-the-art methods. The code can be found at https://github.com/fanyang587/MGL.

Segmentation of liver from CT scans is essential in computer-aided liver disease diagnosis and treatment. However, the 2DCNN ignores the 3D context, and the 3DCNN suffers from numerous learnable parameters and high computational cost. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose an Attentive Context-Enhanced Network (AC-E Network) consisting of 1) an attentive context encoding module (ACEM) that can be integrated into the 2D backbone to extract 3D context without a sharp increase in the number of learnable parameters; 2) a dual segmentation branch including complemental loss making the network attend to both the liver region and boundary so that getting the segmented liver surface with high accuracy. Extensive experiments on the LiTS and the 3D-IRCADb datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches and is competitive to the state-of-the-art 2D-3D hybrid method on the equilibrium of the segmentation precision and the number of model parameters.

Scene parsing, or semantic segmentation, aims at labeling all pixels in an image with the predefined categories of things and stuff. Learning a robust representation for each pixel is crucial for this task. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms employ deep neural networks to learn (discover) the representations needed for parsing from raw data. Nevertheless, these networks discover desired features or representations only from the given image (content), ignoring more generic knowledge contained in the dataset. To overcome this deficiency, we make the first attempt to explore the meaningful supportive knowledge, including general visual concepts (i.e., the generic representations for objects and stuff) and their relations from the whole dataset to enhance the underlying representations of a specific scene for better scene parsing. Specifically, we propose a novel supportive knowledge mining module (SKMM) and a knowledge augmentation operator (KAO), which can be easily plugged into modern scene parsing networks. By taking image-specific content and dataset-level supportive knowledge into full consideration, the resulting model, called knowledge augmented neural network (KANN), can better understand the given scene and provide greater representational power. Experiments are conducted on three challenging scene parsing and semantic segmentation datasets: Cityscapes, Pascal-Context, and ADE20K. The results show that our KANN is effective and achieves better results than all existing SOTA methods.

Accurate ovarian tumor differentiation is a challenging task where the benign and malignant tumors share similar T1C and T2WI MRI appearances. Therefore, it is necessary to leverage additional multi-modal data, e.g., the age, CA125level, and other clinical information, which are helpful but rarely exploited. In this paper, we propose a dynamic fusion network that can adaptively make full use of multi-modal data, including MRI and clinical information, to realize precise ovarian tumor differentiation. Specifically, we design a dynamic nonlinear module (D-Non-L module) on the top of the image representation. The D-Non-L module is formulated as an iterative nonlinear projection parameterized by the learned features of the patient-wise clinical information. With the help of this module, the interaction between clinical features and image features could be achieved to adaptively improve the discrimination of visual representations. Moreover, we construct a dual-path-based architecture to fully exploit the complementary information from T1C and T2WI MRIs. Extensive experimental results on the locally organized ovarian tumor dataset demonstrate that our methods are superior to the single-modal and single-path-based methods. And the proposed dynamic non-linear module obtains the best performance compared with other multi-modal fusion strategies.

In this paper, we introduce a light-weight and powerful convolutional neural network, termed asefficient feature reconstructing network(EFRNet), for real-time scene parsing. Our key idea is to decompose the process of learning high-resolution representations into two stages: i) bottom-up codebook/coding matrix learning and ii) top-down feature reconstructing. Specifically, the bottom-up process focuses on learningimage-specificcodewords (codebook) using deep-layer features and generating a coding matrix with the shallow-layer feature map. In the top-down process, the learned codebook and coding matrix are used to rebuild high-resolution features via a lightweightfeature reconstructing operator(FRO). In addition, our EFRNet is constructed on a new building block, named efficient adaptive abstraction (EAA) block, to further reduce the overall network parameters and achieve a significant speed up. Extensive experiments are conducted on challenging benchmarks, such as CamVid and Cityscapes. The results show that EFRNet demonstrates state-of-the-art performance with an optimal balance between accuracy and speed.

Crowd counting is an important yet challenging task due to the large scale and density variation. Recent investigations have shown that distilling rich relations among multi-scale features and exploiting useful information from the auxiliary task, i.e., localization, are vital for this task. Nevertheless, how to comprehensively leverage these relations within a unified network architecture is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a novel network structure called Hybrid Graph Neural Network (HyGnn) which targets to relieve the problem by interweaving the multi-scale features for crowd density as well as its auxiliary task (localization) together and performing joint reasoning over a graph. Specifically, HyGnn integrates a hybrid graph to jointly represent the task-specific feature maps of different scales as nodes, and two types of relations as edges: (i) multi-scale relations capturing the feature dependencies across scales and (ii) mutual beneficial relations building bridges for the cooperation between counting and localization. Thus, through message passing, HyGnn can capture and distill richer relations between nodes to obtain more powerful representations, providing robust and accurate results. Our HyGnn performs significantly well on four challenging datasets: ShanghaiTech Part A, ShanghaiTech Part B, UCF_CC_50 and UCF_QNRF, outperforming the state-of-the-art algorithms by a large margin.

High-resolution (HR) magnetic resonance images (MRI) provide more detailed information for clinical application. However, HR MRI is less available because of the longer scan time and lower signal-to-noise ratio. Spatial resolution is one of the key parameters of MRI. The image post-processing technique super-resolution (SR) is an alternative approach to improve the spatial resolution of MR images. Inspired by advanced deep learning based SR methods, we propose an MRI SR model named progressive sub-band residual learning SR network (PSR-SRN). The proposed model contains two parallel progressive learning streams, where one stream learns on missed high-frequency residuals by sub-band residual learning unit (ISRL) and the other focuses on reconstructing refined MR image. These two streams complement each other and enable to learn complex mappings between "Low-" and "High-" resolution MR images. Besides, we introduce brain-like mechanisms (in-depth supervision and local feedback mechanism) and progressive sub-band learning strategy to emphasize variant textures of MRI. Compared with traditional and deep learning MRI SR methods, our PSR-SRN model shows superior performance.

While convolutional neural network (CNN) has been demonstrating powerful ability to learn hierarchical spatial features from medical images, it is still difficult to apply it directly to resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) and the derived brain functional networks (BFNs). We propose a novel CNN framework to simultaneously learn embedded features from BFNs for brain disease diagnosis. Since BFNs can be built by considering both static and dynamic functional connectivity (FC), we first decompose rs-fMRI into multiple static BFNs with modified independent component analysis. Then, the voxel-wise variability in dynamic FC is used to quantify BFN dynamics. A set of paired 3D images representing static/dynamic BFNs can be fed into 3D CNNs, from which we can hierarchically and simultaneously learn static/dynamic BFN features. As a result, the dynamic BFN features can complement static BFN features and, at the meantime, different BFNs can help each other toward a joint and better classification. We validate our method with a publicly accessible, large cohort of rs-fMRI dataset in early-stage mild cognitive impairment (eMCI) diagnosis, which is one of the most challenging problems to the clinicians. By comparing with a conventional method, our method shows significant diagnostic performance improvement by almost 10%. This result demonstrates the effectiveness of deep learning in preclinical Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, based on the complex and high-dimensional voxel-wise spatiotemporal patterns of the resting-state brain functional connectomics. The framework provides a new but intuitive way to fully exploit deeply embedded diagnostic features from rs-fMRI for a better-individualized diagnosis of various neurological diseases.

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and deadly malignant brain tumor. For personalized treatment, an accurate pre-operative prognosis for GBM patients is highly desired. Recently, many machine learning-based methods have been adopted to predict overall survival (OS) time based on the pre-operative mono- or multi-modal imaging phenotype. The genotypic information of GBM has been proven to be strongly indicative of the prognosis; however, this has not been considered in the existing imaging-based OS prediction methods. The main reason is that the tumor genotype is unavailable pre-operatively unless deriving from craniotomy. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning-based OS prediction method for GBM patients, which can derive tumor genotype-related features from pre-operative multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain data and feed them to OS prediction. Specifically, we propose a multi-task convolutional neural network (CNN) to accomplish both tumor genotype and OS prediction tasks jointly. As the network can benefit from learning tumor genotype-related features for genotype prediction, the accuracy of predicting OS time can be prominently improved. In the experiments, multimodal MRI brain dataset of 120 GBM patients, with as many as four different genotypic/molecular biomarkers, are used to evaluate our method. Our method achieves the highest OS prediction accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Decoding visual stimuli from brain activities is an interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and computer vision. With the emerging of Human-AI Collaboration, Human-Computer Interaction, and the development of advanced machine learning models, brain decoding based on deep learning attracts more attention. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a widely used neurophysiology tool. Inspired by the success of deep learning on image representation and neural decoding, we proposed a visual-guided EEG decoding method that contains a decoding stage and a generation stage. In the classification stage, we designed a visual-guided convolutional neural network (CNN) to obtain more discriminative representations from EEG, which are applied to achieve the classification results. In the generation stage, the visual-guided EEG features are input to our improved deep generative model with a visual consistence module to generate corresponding visual stimuli. With the help of our visual-guided strategies, the proposed method outperforms traditional machine learning methods and deep learning models in the EEG decoding task.