The choroid plexus (ChP) plays a pivotal role in inflammatory processes that occur in multiple sclerosis (MS). The enlargement of the ChP in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) is considered to be an indication of disease activity and has been associated with periventricular remyelination failure. This cross-sectional study aimed to identify the relationship between ChP and periventricular tissue damage which occurs in MS, and to elucidate the role of neuroinflammation in primary progressive multiple sclerosis (PPMS). ChP volume was assessed by a novel deep learning segmentation method based on structural MRI data acquired from two centers. In total, 141 RRMS and 64 PPMS patients were included, along with 75 healthy control subjects. In addition, T1w/FLAIR ratios were calculated within periventricular bands to quantify microstructural tissue damage and to assess its relationship to ChP volume. When compared to healthy controls, ChP volumes were significantly increased in RRMS, but not in patients with PPMS. T1w/FLAIR ratios in the normal appearing white matter (NAWM) showing periventricular gradients were decreased in patients with multiple sclerosis when compared to healthy control subjects and lower T1w/FLAIR ratios radiating out from the lateral ventricles were found in patients with PPMS. A relationship between ChP volume and T1w/FLAIR ratio in NAWM was found within the inner periventricular bands in RRMS patients. A longer duration of disease was associated with larger ChP volumes only in RRMS patients. Enlarged ChP volumes were also significantly associated with reduced cortex volumes and increased lesion volumes in RRMS. Our analysis confirmed that the ChP was significantly enlarged in patients with RRMS, which was related to brain lesion volumes and which suggested a dynamic development as it was associated with disease duration. Plexus enlargement was further associated with periventricular demyelination or tissue damage assessed by T1w/FLAIR ratios in RRMS. Furthermore, we did not find an enlargement of the ChP in patients with PPMS, possibly indicating the reduced involvement of inflammatory processes in the progressive phase of MS. The association between enlarged ChP volumes and cortical atrophy in RRMS highlighted the vulnerability of structures close to the CSF.

Phyllodes tumors (PTs) are rare breast tumors with high recurrence rates, current methods relying on post-resection pathology often delay detection and require further surgery. We propose a deep-learning-based Phyllodes Tumors Hierarchical Diagnosis Model (PTs-HDM) for preoperative identification and grading. Ultrasound images from five hospitals were retrospectively collected, with all patients having undergone surgical pathological confirmation of either PTs or fibroadenomas (FAs). PTs-HDM follows a two-stage classification: first distinguishing PTs from FAs, then grading PTs into benign or borderline/malignant. Model performance metrics including AUC and accuracy were quantitatively evaluated. A comparative analysis was conducted between the algorithm's diagnostic capabilities and those of radiologists with varying clinical experience within an external validation cohort. Through the provision of PTs-HDM's automated classification outputs and associated thermal activation mapping guidance, we systematically assessed the enhancement in radiologists' diagnostic concordance and classification accuracy. A total of 712 patients were included. On the external test set, PTs-HDM achieved an AUC of 0.883, accuracy of 87.3% for PT vs. FA classification. Subgroup analysis showed high accuracy for tumors < 2 cm (90.9%). In hierarchical classification, the model obtained an AUC of 0.856 and accuracy of 80.9%. Radiologists' performance improved with PTs-HDM assistance, with binary classification accuracy increasing from 82.7%, 67.7%, and 64.2-87.6%, 76.6%, and 82.1% for senior, attending, and resident radiologists, respectively. Their hierarchical classification AUCs improved from 0.566 to 0.827 to 0.725-0.837. PTs-HDM also enhanced inter-radiologist consistency, increasing Kappa values from - 0.05 to 0.41 to 0.12 to 0.65, and the intraclass correlation coefficient from 0.19 to 0.45. PTs-HDM shows strong diagnostic performance, especially for small lesions, and improves radiologists' accuracy across all experience levels, bridging diagnostic gaps and providing reliable support for PTs' hierarchical diagnosis.

Radiologists' eye movements during medical image interpretation reflect their perceptual-cognitive processes of diagnostic decisions. The eye movement data can be modeled to represent clinically relevant regions in a medical image and potentially integrated into an artificial intelligence (AI) system for automatic diagnosis in medical imaging. In this article, we first conduct a large-scale eye-tracking study involving 13 radiologists interpreting 191 chest X-ray (CXR) images, establishing a best-of-its-kind CXR visual saliency benchmark. We then perform analysis to quantify the reliability and clinical relevance of saliency maps (SMs) generated for CXR images. We develop CXR image saliency prediction method (CXRSalNet), a novel saliency prediction model that leverages radiologists' gaze information to optimize the use of unlabeled CXR images, enhancing training and mitigating data scarcity. We also demonstrate the application of our CXR saliency model in enhancing the performance of AI-powered diagnostic imaging systems.

Oculomics is the science of analyzing ocular data to identify, diagnose, and manage systemic disease. This article focuses on prescreening, its use with retinal images analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI), to identify ocular or systemic disease or potential disease in asymptomatic individuals. The implementation of prescreening in a coordinated care system, defined as Healthcare From the Eye prescreening, has the potential to improve access, affordability, equity, quality, and safety of health care on a global level. Stakeholders include physicians, payers, policymakers, regulators and representatives from industry, government, and data privacy sectors. The combination of AI analysis of ocular data with automated technologies that capture images during routine eye examinations enables prescreening of large populations for chronic disease. Retinal images can be acquired during either a routine eye examination or in settings outside of eye care with readily accessible, safe, quick, and noninvasive retinal imaging devices. The outcome of such an examination can then be digitally communicated across relevant stakeholders in a coordinated fashion to direct a patient to screening and monitoring services. Such an approach offers the opportunity to transform health care delivery and improve early disease detection, improve access to care, enhance equity especially in rural and underserved communities, and reduce costs. With effective implementation and collaboration among key stakeholders, this approach has the potential to contribute to an equitable and effective health care system.

The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Viz.ai software in stroke care, has emerged as a promising tool to enhance the detection of large vessel occlusion (LVO) and to improve stroke workflow metrics and patient outcomes. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to evaluate the impact of Viz.ai on stroke workflow efficiency in hospitals and on patients' outcomes. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a comprehensive search on electronic databases, including PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases, to obtain relevant studies until 25 October 2024. Our primary outcomes were door-to-groin puncture (DTG) time, CT scan-to-start of endovascular treatment (EVT) time, CT scan-to-recanalization time, and door-in-door-out time. Secondary outcomes included symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage (ICH), any ICH, mortality, mRS score < 2 at 90 days, and length of hospital stay. A total of 12 studies involving 15,595 patients were included in our analysis. The pooled analysis demonstrated that the implementation of the Viz.ai algorithm was associated with lesser CT scan to EVT time (SMD -0.71, 95% CI [-0.98, -0.44], p < 0.001) and DTG time (SMD -0.50, 95% CI [-0.66, -0.35], p < 0.001) as well as CT to recanalization time (SMD -0.55, 95% CI [-0.76, -0.33], p < 0.001). Additionally, patients in the post-AI group had significantly lower door-in door-out time than the pre-AI group (SMD -0.49, 95% CI [-0.71, -0.28], p < 0.001). Despite the workflow metrics improvement, our analysis did not reveal statistically significant differences in patient clinical outcomes (p > 0.05). Our results suggest that the integration of the Viz.ai platform in stroke care holds significant potential for reducing EVT delays in patients with LVO and optimizing stroke flow metrics in comprehensive stroke centers. Further studies are required to validate its efficacy in improving clinical outcomes in patients with LVO.

Gliomas are the most prevalent and aggressive neoplasms of the central nervous system, representing a major challenge for effective treatment and patient prognosis. This study identifies the proteasome subunit beta type-8 (PSMB8/LMP7) as a promising prognostic biomarker for glioma. Using a multiparametric radiomic model derived from preoperative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we accurately predicted PSMB8 expression levels. Notably, radiomic prediction of poor prognosis was highly consistent with elevated PSMB8 expression. Our findings demonstrate that PSMB8 depletion not only suppressed glioma cell proliferation and migration but also induced apoptosis via activation of the transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) signaling pathway. This was supported by downregulation of key receptors (TGFBR1 and TGFBR2). Furthermore, interference with PSMB8 expression impaired phosphorylation and nuclear translocation of SMAD2/3, critical mediators of TGF-β signaling. Consequently, these molecular alterations resulted in reduced tumor progression and enhanced sensitivity to temozolomide (TMZ), a standard chemotherapeutic agent. Overall, our findings highlight PSMB8's pivotal role in glioma pathophysiology and its potential as a prognostic marker. This study also demonstrates the clinical utility of MRI radiomics for preoperative risk stratification and pre-diagnosis. Targeted inhibition of PSMB8 may represent a therapeutic strategy to overcome TMZ resistance and improve glioma patient outcomes.

Diffusion models (DMs) excel in pixel-level and spatial tasks and are proven feature extractors for 2D image discriminative tasks when pretrained. However, their capabilities in 3D MRI discriminative tasks remain largely untapped. This study seeks to assess the effectiveness of DMs in this underexplored area. We use 59830 T1-weighted MR images (T1WIs) from the extensive, yet unlabeled, UK Biobank dataset. Additionally, we apply 369 T1WIs from the BraTS2020 dataset specifically for brain tumor classification, and 421 T1WIs from the ADNI1 dataset for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Firstly, a high-performing denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) with a U-Net backbone is pretrained on the UK Biobank, then fine-tuned on the BraTS2020 and ADNI1 datasets. Afterward, we assess its feature representation capabilities for discriminative tasks using linear probes. Finally, we accordingly introduce a novel fusion module, named CATS, that enhances the U-Net representations, thereby improving performance on discriminative tasks. Our DDPM produces synthetic images of high quality that match the distribution of the raw datasets. Subsequent analysis reveals that DDPM features extracted from middle blocks and smaller timesteps are of high quality. Leveraging these features, the CATS module, with just 1.7M additional parameters, achieved average classification scores of 0.7704 and 0.9217 on the BraTS2020 and ADNI1 datasets, demonstrating competitive performance with that of the representations extracted from the transferred DDPM model, as well as the 33.23M parameters ResNet18 trained from scratch. We have found that pretraining a DM on a large-scale dataset and then fine-tuning it on limited data from discriminative datasets is a viable approach for MRI data. With these well-performing DMs, we show that they excel not just in generation tasks but also as feature extractors when combined with our proposed CATS module.

Supracondylar humerus fractures in children are among the most common elbow fractures in pediatrics. However, their diagnosis can be particularly challenging due to the anatomical characteristics and imaging features of the pediatric skeleton. In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved notable success in medical image analysis, though their performance typically relies on large-scale, high-quality labeled datasets. Unfortunately, labeled samples for pediatric supracondylar fractures are scarce and difficult to obtain. To address this issue, this paper introduces a deep learning-based multi-scale patch residual network (MPR) for the automatic detection and localization of subtle pediatric supracondylar fractures. The MPR framework combines a CNN for automatic feature extraction with a multi-scale generative adversarial network to model skeletal integrity using healthy samples. By leveraging healthy images to learn the normal skeletal distribution, the approach reduces the dependency on labeled fracture data and effectively addresses the challenges posed by limited pediatric datasets. Datasets from two different hospitals were used, with data augmentation techniques applied during both training and validation. On an independent test set, the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 90.5%, with 89% sensitivity, 92% specificity, and an F1 score of 0.906-outperforming the diagnostic accuracy of emergency medicine physicians and approaching that of pediatric radiologists. Furthermore, the model demonstrates a fast inference speed of 1.1 s per sheet, underscoring its substantial potential for clinical application.

Early detection and accurate diagnosis are essential to improving patient outcomes. The use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for tumor detection has shown promise, but existing models often suffer from overparameterization, which limits their performance gains. In this study, fuzzy sigmoid convolution (FSC) is introduced along with two additional modules: top-of-the-funnel and middle-of-the-funnel. The proposed methodology significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters without compromising classification accuracy. A novel convolutional operator is central to this approach, effectively dilating the receptive field while preserving input data integrity. This enables efficient feature map reduction and enhances the model's tumor detection capability. In the FSC-based model, fuzzy sigmoid activation functions are incorporated within convolutional layers to improve feature extraction and classification. The inclusion of fuzzy logic into the architecture improves its adaptability and robustness. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of the proposed model. The FSC-based architecture achieved classification accuracies of 99.17%, 99.75%, and 99.89% on three different datasets. The model employs 100 times fewer parameters than large-scale transfer learning architectures, highlighting its computational efficiency and suitability for detecting brain tumors early. This research offers lightweight, high-performance deep-learning models for medical imaging applications.

Thoracolumbar stump ribs are one of the essential indicators of thoracolumbar transitional vertebrae or enumeration anomalies. While some studies manually assess these anomalies and describe the ribs qualitatively, this study aims to automate thoracolumbar stump rib detection and analyze their morphology quantitatively. To this end, we train a high-resolution deep-learning model for rib segmentation and show significant improvements compared to existing models (Dice score 0.997 vs. 0.779, p-value < 0.01). In addition, we use an iterative algorithm and piece-wise linear interpolation to assess the length of the ribs, showing a success rate of 98.2%. When analyzing morphological features, we show that stump ribs articulate more posteriorly at the vertebrae (-19.2 +- 3.8 vs -13.8 +- 2.5, p-value < 0.01), are thinner (260.6 +- 103.4 vs. 563.6 +- 127.1, p-value < 0.01), and are oriented more downwards and sideways within the first centimeters in contrast to full-length ribs. We show that with partially visible ribs, these features can achieve an F1-score of 0.84 in differentiating stump ribs from regular ones. We publish the model weights and masks for public use.