By carefully analyzing latent image properties, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems are able to recover pertinent images without relying on text descriptions, natural language tags, or keywords related to the image. This search procedure makes it quite easy to automatically retrieve images in huge, well-balanced datasets. However, in the medical field, such datasets are usually not available. This study proposed an advanced DL technique to enhance the accuracy of image retrieval in complex medical datasets. The proposed model can be integrated into five stages, namely pre-processing, decomposing the images, feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, and classification with an image retrieval mechanism. The hybridized Wavelet-Hadamard Transform (HWHT) was utilized to obtain both low and high frequency detail for analysis. In order to extract the main characteristics, the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) was employed. Furthermore, to minimize feature complexity, Sine chaos based artificial rabbit optimization (SCARO) was utilized. By employing the Bhattacharyya Coefficient for improved similarity matching, the Bhattacharya Context performance aware global attention-based Transformer (BCGAT) improves classification accuracy. The experimental results proved that the COVID-19 Chest X-ray image dataset attained higher accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-Score of 99.5%, 97.1%, 97.1%, and 97.1%, 97.1%, respectively. However, the chest x-ray image (pneumonia) dataset has attained higher accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score values of 98.60%, 98.49%, 97.40%, and 98.50%, respectively. For the NIH chest X-ray dataset, the accuracy value is 99.67%.

Cardiomyopathy is a life-threatening condition associated with heart failure, arrhythmias, thromboembolism, and sudden cardiac death, posing a significant contribution to worldwide morbidity and mortality. Cardiomegaly, which is usually the initial radiologic sign, may reflect the progression of an underlying heart disease or an underlying undiagnosed cardiac condition. Chest radiography is the most frequently used imaging method for detecting heart enlargement. Prompt and accurate diagnosis is essential for prompt intervention and appropriate treatment planning to prevent disease progression and improve patient outcomes. The current work provides a new methodology for automated cardiomegaly diagnosis using X-ray images through the fusion of Block-Matching and 3D Filtering (BM3D) within the Ensemble Hilbert-Huang Transform (EHHT), convolutional neural networks like Pretrained VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, DenseNet169, and Spiking Neural Networks (SNN), and Classifiers. BM3D is first used for image edge retention and noise reduction, and then EHHT is applied to obtain informative features from X-ray images. The features that have been extracted are then processed using an SNN that simulates neural processes at a biological level and offers a biologically possible classification solution. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (GradCAM) emphasized important areas that affected model predictions. The SNN performed the best among all the models tested, with 97.6 % accuracy, 96.3 % sensitivity, and 98.2 % specificity. These findings show the SNN's high potential for facilitating accurate and efficient cardiomyopathy diagnosis, leading to enhanced clinical decision-making and patient outcomes.

To assess how artificial intelligence (AI) models perform in evaluating bone quality and quantity in the preoperative planning process for dental implants. This review included studies that utilized AI-based assessments of bone quality and/or quantity based on radiographic images in the preoperative phase. Studies published in English before April 2025 were used in this review, which were obtained from searches in PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, Scopus, and the Cochrane Library, as well as from manual searches. Eleven studies met the inclusion criteria. Five studies focused on bone quality evaluation and six studies included volumetric assessments using AI models. The performance measures included accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F1 score, and Dice coefficient, and were compared with human expert evaluations. AI models demonstrated high accuracy (76.2%-99.84%), high sensitivity (78.9%-100%), and high specificity (66.2%-99%). AI models have potential for the evaluation of bone quality and quantity, although standardization and external validation studies are lacking. Future studies should propose multicenter datasets, integration into clinical workflows, and the development of refined models to better reflect real-life conditions. AI has the potential to offer clinicians with reliable automated evaluations of bone quality and quantity, with the promise of a fully automated system of implant planning. It may also support preoperative workflows for clinical decision-making based on evidence more efficiently.

Chronological age is an important component of medical risk scores and decision-making. However, there is considerable variability in how individuals age. We recently published an open-source deep learning model to assess biological age from chest radiographs (CXR-Age), which predicts all-cause and cardiovascular mortality better than chronological age. Here, we compare CXR-Age to two established epigenetic aging clocks (First generation-Horvath Age; Second generation-DNAm PhenoAge) to test which is more strongly associated with cardiopulmonary disease and frailty. Our cohort consisted of 2,097 participants from the Project Baseline Health Study, a prospective cohort study of individuals from four US sites. We compared the association between the different aging clocks and measures of cardiopulmonary disease, frailty, and protein abundance collected at the participant's first annual visit using linear regression models adjusted for common confounders. We found that CXR-Age was associated with coronary calcium, cardiovascular risk factors, worsening pulmonary function, increased frailty, and abundance in plasma of two proteins implicated in neuroinflammation and aging. Associations with DNAm PhenoAge were weaker for pulmonary function and all metrics in middle-age adults. We identified thirteen proteins that were associated with DNAm PhenoAge, one (CDH13) of which was also associated with CXR-Age. No associations were found with Horvath Age. These results suggest that CXR-Age may serve as a better metric of cardiopulmonary aging than epigenetic aging clocks, especially in midlife adults.

The diagnosis of craniosynostosis, a condition involving the premature fusion of cranial sutures in infants, is essential for ensuring timely treatment and optimal surgical outcomes. Current diagnostic approaches often require CT scans, which expose children to significant radiation risks. To address this, we present a novel deep learning-based model utilizing multi-view X-ray images for craniosynostosis detection. The proposed model integrates advanced multi-view fusion (MVF) and cross-attention mechanisms, effectively combining features from three X-ray views (AP, lateral right, lateral left) and patient metadata (age, sex). By leveraging these techniques, the model captures comprehensive semantic and structural information for high diagnostic accuracy while minimizing radiation exposure. Tested on a dataset of 882 X-ray images from 294 pediatric patients, the model achieved an AUROC of 0.975, an F1-score of 0.882, a sensitivity of 0.878, and a specificity of 0.937. Grad-CAM visualizations further validated its ability to localize disease-relevant regions using only classification annotations. The model demonstrates the potential to revolutionize pediatric care by providing a safer, cost-effective alternative to CT scans.

This study aimed to develop and evaluate an artificial intelligence model to predict 28-day mortality of pneumonia patients at the time of disposition from emergency department (ED). A multicenter retrospective study was conducted on data from pneumonia patients who visited the ED of a tertiary academic hospital for 8 months and from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-IV) database. We combined chest X-ray information, clinical data, and CURB-65 score to develop three models with the CURB-65 score as a baseline. A total of 2,874 ED visits were analyzed. The RSF model using CXR, clinical data and CURB-65 achieved a C-index of 0.872 in test set, significantly outperforming the CURB-65 score. This study developed a prediction model in pneumonia patients' prognosis, highlighting the potential for supporting clinical decision making in ED through multi-modal clinical information.

Medical diagnostics often rely on the interpretation of complex medical images. However, manual analysis and report generation by medical practitioners are time-consuming, and the inherent ambiguity in chest X-rays presents significant challenges for automated systems in producing interpretable results. To address this, we propose Attention-Infused Mask Recurrent Neural Network (AIMR-MediTell), a deep learning framework integrating instance segmentation using Mask RCNN with attention-based feature extraction to identify and highlight abnormal regions in chest X-rays. This framework also incorporates an encoder-decoder structure with pretrained BioWordVec embeddings to generate explanatory reports based on augmented images. We evaluated AIMR-MediTell on the Open-I dataset, achieving a BLEU-4 score of 0.415, outperforming existing models. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, showing that incorporating masked regions enhances report accuracy and interpretability. By identifying malfunction areas and automating report generation for X-ray images, our approach has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of medical image analysis.

Data binary encoding has proven to be a versatile tool for optimizing data processing and memory efficiency in various machine learning applications. This includes deep barcoding, generating barcodes from deep learning feature extraction for image retrieval of similar cases among millions of indexed images. Despite the recent advancement in barcode generation methods, converting high-dimensional feature vectors (e.g., deep features) to compact and discriminative binary barcodes is still an urgent necessity and remains an unresolved problem. Difference-based binarization of features is one of the most efficient binarization methods, transforming continuous feature vectors into binary sequences and capturing trend information. However, the performance of this method is highly dependent on the ordering of the input features, leading to a significant combinatorial challenge. This research addresses this problem by optimizing feature sequences based on retrieval performance metrics. Our approach identifies optimal feature orderings, leading to substantial improvements in retrieval effectiveness compared to arbitrary or default orderings. We assess the performance of the proposed approach in various medical and non-medical image retrieval tasks. This evaluation includes medical images from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), a comprehensive publicly available dataset, as well as COVID-19 Chest X-rays dataset. In addition, we evaluate the proposed approach on non-medical benchmark image datasets, such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Fashion-MNIST. Our findings demonstrate the importance of optimizing binary barcode representation to significantly enhance accuracy for fast image retrieval across a wide range of applications, highlighting the applicability and potential of barcodes in various domains.

Reliable uncertainty quantification is crucial for trustworthy decision-making and the deployment of AI models in medical imaging. While prior work has explored the ability of neural networks to quantify predictive, epistemic, and aleatoric uncertainties using an information-theoretical approach in synthetic or well defined data settings like natural image classification, its applicability to real life medical diagnosis tasks remains underexplored. In this study, we provide an extensive uncertainty quantification benchmark for multi-label chest X-ray classification using the MIMIC-CXR-JPG dataset. We evaluate 13 uncertainty quantification methods for convolutional (ResNet) and transformer-based (Vision Transformer) architectures across a wide range of tasks. Additionally, we extend Evidential Deep Learning, HetClass NNs, and Deep Deterministic Uncertainty to the multi-label setting. Our analysis provides insights into uncertainty estimation effectiveness and the ability to disentangle epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties, revealing method- and architecture-specific strengths and limitations.

Chest X-Ray (CXR) imaging for pulmonary diagnosis raises significant challenges, primarily because bone structures can obscure critical details necessary for accurate diagnosis. Recent advances in deep learning, particularly with diffusion models, offer significant promise for effectively minimizing the visibility of bone structures in CXR images, thereby improving clarity and diagnostic accuracy. Nevertheless, existing diffusion-based methods for bone suppression in CXR imaging struggle to balance the complete suppression of bones with preserving local texture details. Additionally, their high computational demand and extended processing time hinder their practical use in clinical settings. To address these limitations, we introduce a Global-Local Latent Consistency Model (GL-LCM) architecture. This model combines lung segmentation, dual-path sampling, and global-local fusion, enabling fast high-resolution bone suppression in CXR images. To tackle potential boundary artifacts and detail blurring in local-path sampling, we further propose Local-Enhanced Guidance, which addresses these issues without additional training. Comprehensive experiments on a self-collected dataset SZCH-X-Rays, and the public dataset JSRT, reveal that our GL-LCM delivers superior bone suppression and remarkable computational efficiency, significantly outperforming several competitive methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/diaoquesang/GL-LCM.