Breast cancer, a prevalent and diverse form of cancer, is characterized by unique clinicopathologic features. Accurate classification of its molecular subtype, essential for targeted treatment and improved survival rates, relies on testing molecular biomarkers such as estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), and Ki67 antigen. This study introduces an innovative two-stage machine learning pipeline for breast cancer PR molecular biomarker classification using whole slide immunohistochemistry images. Our approach consists of two specialized stages. In the first stage, a watershed algorithm segments the Cells from the input image. Morphological and statistical features extracted from these segments are then used by machine learning classifiers to distinguish between tumor and nontumor tissues [1] –[3]. The second stage focuses on the tumor tissues that were identified in the first stage, extracting texture and appearance features to classify them into positive or negative biomarker responses, again using machine learning classifiers [4], [5]. This method not only automates the classification of PR biomarkers in tumor regions but also generates a detailed image map for each cell in the Whole Slide Image (WSI). By doing so, it can determine whether the tissue represents tumor cells and whether the tumor tissue exhibits positive or negative PR status. The results show the ability of our machine learning-based approach to augment pathologists’ diagnostic capabilities, offering significant advancements in the automated classification of histopathological images.

Accurate early diagnosis is crucial in addressing Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), a chronic retinal disease that is a leading cause of blindness among the elderly. Medical imaging, particularly fundus imaging, is essential in facilitating timely detection and intervention. Due to the variability in image sizes within our dataset, this paper introduces the SABiT-MNet model, which effectively discriminates between healthy retinas, dry AMD, and wet AMD. The model integrates a novel scale-adaptive (SA) approach by combining an autoencoder with Big Transfer (BiT) as its backbone. Unlike traditional resizing methods, which often result in the loss of critical diagnostic information, the SA model dynamically adjusts to varying image sizes, preserving key retinal features essential for accurate diagnosis. The primary aim of this architecture is to retain crucial details in fundus images to ensure precise classification. In this study, 648 subjects were recruited through the Comparisons of AMD Treatments Trials study group, sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SABiT-MNet model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, including transformer-based models, achieving superior diagnostic accuracy. The model recorded performance metrics of 94% accuracy, 97% sensitivity, and 93.94% specificity. To further validate the robustness of the system, we tested it on the public ODiR dataset, where it achieved similarly promising results, confirming the effectiveness of our approach.

This paper presents AFMUNet, an Adaptive Filter-Based Frequency Modulation U-Net for Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) segmentation. The model addresses the challenge of segmenting both small blood vessels and larger vascular structures, which exhibit significant variations in scale, contrast, and connectivity. To tackle these issues, AFMUNet achieves an image-sized receptive field while capturing global dependencies, enhancing performance across diverse vessel sizes. Specifically, it incorporates the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) applied to feature maps across multiple scales of a UNet-like architecture. This component is crucial for identifying critical global frequency patterns, enabling the model to represent the intricate details of small vessels alongside larger ones. Simultaneously, a lightweight attention block is employed to learn adaptive frequency filters from the FFT-derived representations. This mechanism selectively emphasizes transferable frequency components essential for highlighting small and thin vessels while suppressing noise and less informative features that could detract from the segmentation of large vascular structures. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that AFMUNet outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving mean Dice and mean Intersection over Union (IoU) scores of 91.69% and 84.65%, respectively. These results underscore its robustness and superior ability to accurately segment OCTA images, effectively addressing the dual challenge of capturing both fine-grained and coarse vascular details.

This paper introduces a novel framework, termed RAW (Region Attention-Weighted Network with Inter-Region Information Exchange), specifically developed for Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) grading using high-resolution input images. The framework begins with a High-Fidelity Detail Retention (HFDR) block, designed to preserve critical image details essential for accurate analysis. Furthermore, a lightweight network, inspired by ResNet, is incorporated to facilitate efficient feature extraction. This is augmented by a Region Attention-Weighted (RAW) block, which highlights significant regions while mitigating interference from less relevant areas. To ensure the effective propagation of crucial information for precise AMD grading, we developed the Inter-Region Information Exchange (IRIE) block. The efficacy of the proposed RAW framework was evaluated using a dataset comprising 864 Color Retinal Fundus (CRF) images, demonstrating outstanding performance compared to existing methods. It achieved a mean accuracy of 98.08%, a mean F1-score of 98.06%, and a mean Cohen’s Kappa of 97.42%. Statistical analysis further confirms the framework’s significant advantage, particularly in terms of F1-score, underscoring its robustness and exceptional capability for AMD grading.

Breast cancer is a highly complex disease that requires precise molecular subtyping to guide tailored treatment strategies. In this study, we employed a marker-based watershed segmentation technique on a breast cancer dataset, enabling the extraction of essential morphometric parameters. These included area, perimeter, circularity, maximal and minimal calipers, and eccentricity, along with hematoxylin and diaminobenzidine (DAB) staining characteristics for individual cells, nuclei, and cytoplasm. We utilized Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) models to classify molecular biomarker response scores to identify their molecular subtypes, leveraging these extracted features as discriminative factors. The dataset comprised whole-slide images (WSI) annotated with Progestin Receptors (PR) molecular biomarker response scores, categorizing cell regions into different classes: "other", "tumor: negative", "tumor: +1", "tumor: +2", and "tumor: +3". These detailed annotations enhanced the AI-driven classification of breast cancer molecular biomarkers response score detection on cell level. Performance evaluation of the proposed framework demonstrated substantial classification accuracy, with SVM achieving over 93% in precision, recall, F1-score, and overall accuracy, while RF exceeded 96% across these metrics. The study's findings highlight the efficacy of integrating marker-based watershed segmentation with morphometric and staining analysis for precise breast cancer molecular biomarkers response score classification. This approach provides deeper insights into tumor heterogeneity, reinforcing the importance of incorporating morphometric and staining parameters in molecular biomarkers response score classification and hence improved personalized treatment and prognosis.

This paper introduces CrossDR, a novel approach unifying 2D and 3D feature representations through a context-aware cross-attention mechanism for diabetic retinopathy (DR) classification in 3D Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) scans. The model uncovers critical diagnostic cues embedded in 3D-OCT images, which offer rich information for DR detection. The framework comprises three core components: the Lightweight Attention (LA) block, a CNN-based encoder, and the Context-Aware Cross-Attention (CA)2block. The LA block highlights volume-specific features that are crucial for DR diagnosis. It achieves this by applying a series of 1×1 convolutions followed by softmax operations, enabling the extraction of spatially informative DR-specific features. Meanwhile, the CNN-based encoder extracts high-level semantic features from the 3D-OCT slices, offering a robust representation of retinal structures. The (CA)2block further boosts the model’s performance by dynamically capturing and reweighting feature dependencies. This block models relationships between feature maps at different abstraction levels, improving the discriminative power of the extracted features. By integrating these refined features through the (CA)2block, the model achieves accurate DR classification. The CrossDR framework was evaluated on 481 volumetric OCT images, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods with an accuracy of 94%. Multiple experiments and ablation studies were conducted to assess our model’s performance.

We propose an automated, explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) system for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) diagnosis. Mimicking the physician's perceptions, the proposed xAI system is capable of deriving clinically meaningful features from optical coherence tomography (OCT) B-scan images to differentiate between a normal retina, different grades of AMD (early, intermediate, geographic atrophy (GA), inactive wet or active neovascular disease [exudative or wet AMD]), and non-AMD diseases. Particularly, we extract retinal OCT-based clinical imaging markers that are correlated with the progression of AMD, which include: (i) subretinal tissue, sub-retinal pigment epithelial tissue, intraretinal fluid, subretinal fluid, and choroidal hypertransmission detection using a DeepLabV3+ network; (ii) detection of merged retina layers using a novel convolutional neural network model; (iii) drusen detection based on 2D curvature analysis; (iv) estimation of retinal layers' thickness, and first-order and higher-order reflectivity features. Those clinical features are used to grade a retinal OCT in a hierarchical decision tree process. The first step looks for severe disruption of retinal layers' indicative of advanced AMD. These cases are analyzed further to diagnose GA, inactive wet AMD, active wet AMD, and non-AMD diseases. Less severe cases are analyzed using a different pipeline to identify OCT with AMD-specific pathology, which is graded as intermediate-stage or early-stage AMD. The remainder is classified as either being a normal retina or having other non-AMD pathology. The proposed system in the multi-way classification task, evaluated on 1285 OCT images, achieved 90.82% accuracy. These promising results demonstrated the capability to automatically distinguish between normal eyes and all AMD grades in addition to non-AMD diseases.

Breast cancer is a prevalent and diverse type of cancer that exhibits unique clinicopathologic characteristics, making the correct identification of its subtype critical to providing targeted treatment and increasing survival rates. This identification process involves testing for the presence of four key molecular biomarkers, namely estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), and antigen Ki67. For accurate diagnosis ,the expertise of a pathologist and immunohistochemistry is required. To overcome this diagnostic challenge, we present a novel approach based on a deep learning pipeline for automated classification. Our approach can detect tumor and non-tumoral regions of the HER2 biomarker. Our deep learning framework comprises a Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet), which process whole slide images (WSIs) of breast tissues, dividing them into patches for input into the network. Moreover, our approach provides both patchwise and pixelwise classification and analyzes ten WSIs of breast cancer histology. Our proposed approach generates an image map that classifies slide images on the pixel-level, detecting the status of hormone HER2 receptor as either positive or negative. The obtained results show that our deep learning-based approach has the potential to enhance the pathologist’s capabilities in diagnosing histopathological images with automated classification.

Early detection and diagnosis of thyroid nodules are very important to rescue patients before the cancer spreads all over the patient’s body. A computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system is proposed to detect the malignancy of thyroid nodules using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. This system extracts three descriptive features from T2-weighted (T2) MRI. These features are 1st-order reflectivity, 2nd-order reflectivity, and spherical harmonic. The 1st-order reflectivity is represented by sufficient statistics, (i.e. CDF percentiles), extracted from the cumulative distribution function (CDF) generated from it. After-ward, these features are fed to a neural network (NN) individually for diagnosis. Then, the classification outputs for these networks are fused using another NN for final diagnosis. The developed system is trained and tested using leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation technique on MRI scans from 63 patients. The proposed fusion system shows incredible improvements in diagnostic accuracy, compared with other machine learning approach and a well-know pretrained deep learning network as well as individual feature classification. The overall sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and accuracy of the proposed system are 91.3%, 95%, 91.3%, and 93.65%, respectively. The reported results, based on the fusion of reflectivity features as well as morphological feature, show the promise of the developed system in differentiating between benign and malignant thyroid nodules.