Accurate compensation of brain deformation is critical for reliable image-guided neurosurgery. Surgical manipulation and tumor resection induce tissue motion, causing preoperative planning images to become misaligned with the intraoperative anatomy. In this review, we examine data-driven methods developed between 2020 and 2025 for brain deformation registration and modeling, with a particular focus on learning-based approaches. A comprehensive literature search was conducted in PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and Web of Science using predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria for computational methods addressing brain deformation in neurosurgical imaging, resulting in 46 eligible studies. We provide a unified analysis of methodological strategies, including deep learning-based image registration, direct deformation field regression, synthesis-driven multimodal alignment, resection-aware architectures for handling missing correspondences, and hybrid models integrating biomechanical priors. We also examine dataset utilization, evaluation metrics, validation protocols, and the assessment of uncertainty and generalization across studies. While learning-based methods demonstrate promising accuracy and computational efficiency, current approaches remain limited by out-of-distribution robustness, standardized benchmarking, interpretability, and readiness for clinical deployment. Our review highlights these gaps and outlines future directions toward more robust, generalizable, and clinically translatable solutions for neurosurgical guidance. By organizing recent advances and critically assessing evaluation practices, this work provides a comprehensive reference for researchers and clinicians working on data-driven registration and modeling of brain deformation.

Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) reveals the spatial distribution of gene expression in tissues, offering critical insights into biological processes and disease mechanisms. However, the high cost, limited coverage, and technical complexity of current ST technologies restrict their widespread use in clinical and research settings, making obtaining high-resolution transcriptomic profiles across large tissue areas challenging. Predicting ST from H&E-stained histology images has emerged as a promising alternative to address these limitations but remains challenging due to the heterogeneous relationship between histomorphology and gene expression, which is affected by substantial variability across patients and tissue sections. In response, we propose PH2ST, a prompt-guided hypergraph learning framework, which leverages limited ST signals to guide multi-scale histological representation learning for accurate and robust spatial gene expression prediction. Extensive evaluations on two public ST datasets and multiple prompt sampling strategies simulating real-world scenarios demonstrate that PH2ST not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, but also shows strong potential for practical applications such as imputing missing spots, ST super-resolution, and local-to-global prediction, highlighting its value for scalable and cost-effective spatial gene expression mapping in biomedical contexts.

Interactive segmentation offers greater clinical potential in computational pathology compared to traditional automatic segmentation. By incorporating interactive input, it addresses the limitations of fully automatic segmentation models, which often fail to meet pathologists' requirements and rely heavily on large-scale, pixel-level annotated datasets. However, current interactive segmentation methods struggle to balance interaction cost and segmentation performance, and they fail to adapt effectively to slide-level segmentation, a task that is even more crucial in routine pathology analysis. In this study, we propose a Prototype-Guided Interactive Segmentation (ProGIS) framework for pathological image segmentation, designed to deliver precise segmentation results efficiently with minimal interaction signals. ProGIS identifies all same-type tissue connected components in a single interaction and supports multi-class segmentation without predefined categories during inference. Moreover, ProGIS can be easily adapted for slide-level interactive segmentation. Specifically, ProGIS consists of three modules: Prototype Initialization, Prototype Navigation, and Local Refinement. First, the Prototype Initialization module identifies categorical prototypes, which are then utilized in the Prototype Navigation module to identify all tissue connected components belonging to the same type. The local refinement module further refines the segmentation results using detailed correction signals to ensure the accuracy of challenging-to-distinguish regions. We evaluate our framework on two regions of interest level and two slide-level pathological segmentation datasets, achieving new state-of-the-art performance with fewer interactions than existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/JSGe-AI/ProGIS.

MOTIVATION: Survival analysis is a branch of statistics that is crucial in medicine for modeling the time to critical events such as death or relapse, in order to improve treatment strategies and patient outcomes. Selecting survival models often involves a trade-off between performance and interpretability; deep learning models offer high performance but lack the transparency of more traditional approaches. This poses a significant issue in medicine, where practitioners are reluctant to use black-box models for critical patient decisions. RESULTS: We introduce CoxKAN, a Cox proportional hazards Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for interpretable, high-performance survival analysis. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) were recently proposed as an interpretable and accurate alternative to multi-layer perceptrons. We evaluated CoxKAN on four synthetic and nine real datasets, including five cohorts with clinical data and four with genomics biomarkers. In synthetic experiments, CoxKAN accurately recovered interpretable hazard function formulae and excelled in automatic feature selection. Evaluations on real datasets showed that CoxKAN consistently outperformed the traditional Cox proportional hazards model (by up to 4% in C-index) and matched or surpassed the performance of deep learning-based models. Importantly, CoxKAN revealed complex interactions between predictor variables and uncovered symbolic formulae, which are key capabilities that other survival analysis methods lack, to provide clear insights into the impact of key biomarkers on patient risk. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: CoxKAN is available at GitHub and Zenodo.

Accurate histopathological image segmentation is crucial for precise disease diagnosis and prognosis. Yet, challenges like staining variations, imaging conditions, and tissue diversity impede model generalization across domains, such as different institutes or organs. Traditional domain generalization (DG) techniques, such as data augmentation and feature alignment, excel in classification tasks but face challenges in segmentation tasks due to their dense prediction requirements. These tasks are particularly computationally demanding, and are complicated due to the fine-grained feature variability that arises from the domain differences in histopathological images. To tackle this, we propose the Shallow-Deep Synergy (SDS) approach for the U-Net-based segmentation framework, which capitalizes on the distinctive characteristics of both shallow and deep layers of the U-Net. Specifically, we introduce the fine-grained domain variations in image intensities and textures for shallow layers, while focusing on aligning the pixel-level classification decision boundaries in deep layers by adjusting the optimization trajectory through class-wise gradient and feature alignment. Moreover, the SDS is equipped with a big-batch strategy further boosting alignment efficiency, achieving high accuracy without substantial GPU memory. Extensive experiments conducted on two histopathological segmentation datasets, each representing different domain types, demonstrate that the proposed SDS achieves superior generalization performance compared to existing domain generalization methods, even being competitive with intra-domain models in some cases.