Medical image segmentation plays an important role in medical diagnosis and treatment. Most recent medical image segmentation methods are based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) or Transformer model. However, CNN-based methods are limited by locality, whereas Transformer-based methods are constrained by the quadratic complexity of attention computations. Alternatively, the state-space model-based Mamba architecture has garnered widespread attention owing to its linear computational complexity for global modeling. However, Mamba and its variants are still limited in their ability to extract local receptive field features. To address this limitation, we propose a novel residual spatial state-space (RSSS) block that enhances spatial feature extraction by integrating global and local representations. The RSSS block combines the Mamba module for capturing global dependencies with a receptive field attention convolution (RFAC) module to extract location-sensitive local patterns. Furthermore, we introduce a residual adjust strategy to dynamically fuse global and local information, improving spatial expressiveness. Based on the RSSS block, we design a U-shaped SA-UMamba segmentation framework that effectively captures multi-scale spatial context across different stages. Experiments conducted on the Synapse, ISIC17, ISIC18 and CVC-ClinicDB datasets validate the segmentation performance of our proposed SA-UMamba framework.

Lung cancer, one of the most lethal malignancies globally, often presents insidiously as pulmonary nodules. Its nonspecific clinical presentation and heterogeneous imaging characteristics hinder accurate differentiation between benign and malignant lesions, while biopsy's invasiveness and procedural constraints underscore the critical need for non-invasive early diagnostic approaches. In this retrospective study, we analyzed outpatient and inpatient records from the First Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital between 2011 and 2021, focusing on pulmonary nodules measuring 5-30mm on CT scans without overt signs of malignancy. Pathological examination served as the reference standard. Comparative experiments evaluated SVM, RF, XGBoost, FNN, and Atten_FNN using five-fold cross-validation to assess AUC, sensitivity, and specificity. The dataset was split 70%/30%, and stratified five-fold cross-validation was applied to the training set. The optimal model was interpreted with SHAP to identify the most influential predictive features. This study enrolled 3355 patients, including 1156 with benign and 2199 with malignant pulmonary nodules. The Atten_FNN model demonstrated superior performance in five-fold cross-validation, achieving an AUC of 0.82, accuracy of 0.75, sensitivity of 0.77, and F1 score of 0.80. SHAP analysis revealed key predictive factors: demographic variables (age, sex, BMI), CT-derived features (maximum nodule diameter, morphology, density, calcification, ground-glass opacity), and laboratory biomarkers (neuroendocrine markers, carcinoembryonic antigen). This study integrates electronic medical records and pathology data to predict pulmonary nodule malignancy using machine/deep learning models. SHAP-based interpretability analysis uncovered key clinical determinants. Acknowledging limitations in cross-center generalizability, we propose the development of a multimodal diagnostic systems that combines CT imaging and radiomics, to be validated in multi-center prospective cohorts to facilitate clinical translation. This framework establishes a novel paradigm for early precision diagnosis of lung cancer.

Machine learning (ML) classification of myocardial scarring in cardiac MRI is often hindered by limited explainability, particularly with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To address this, we developed One Match (OM), an algorithm that builds on template matching to improve on both the explainability and performance of ML myocardial scaring classification. By incorporating OM, we aim to foster trust in AI models for medical diagnostics and demonstrate that improved interpretability does not have to compromise classification accuracy. Using a cardiac MRI dataset from 279 patients, this study evaluates One Match, which classifies myocardial scarring in images by matching each image to a set of labeled template images. It uses the highest correlation score from these matches for classification and is compared to a traditional sequential CNN. Enhancements such as autodidactic enhancement (AE) and patient-level classifications (PLCs) were applied to improve the predictive accuracy of both methods. Results are reported as follows: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and F1-score. The highest classification performance was observed with the OM algorithm when enhanced by both AE and PLCs, 95.3% accuracy, 92.3% sensitivity, 96.7% specificity, 92.3% precision, and 92.3% F1-score, marking a significant improvement over the base configurations. AE alone had a positive impact on OM increasing accuracy from 89.0% to 93.2%, but decreased the accuracy of the CNN from 85.3% to 82.9%. In contrast, PLCs improved accuracy for both the CNN and OM, raising the CNN's accuracy by 4.2% and OM's by 7.4%. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of OM in classifying myocardial scars, particularly when enhanced with AE and PLCs. The interpretability of OM also enabled the examination of misclassifications, providing insights that could accelerate development and foster greater trust among clinical stakeholders.

<b>Background:</b> No robust biomarkers have been identified to predict the efficacy of programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) inhibitors in patients with locoregionally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma (LANPC). We aimed to develop radiomic models using pre-immunotherapy MRI to predict the response to PD-1 inhibitors and the patient prognosis. <b>Methods:</b> This study included 246 LANPC patients (training cohort, <i>n</i> = 117; external test cohort, <i>n</i> = 129) from 10 centers. The best-performing machine learning classifier was employed to create the radiomic models. A combined model was constructed by integrating clinical and radiomic data. A radiomic interpretability study was performed with whole slide images (WSIs) stained with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) and immunohistochemistry (IHC). A total of 150 patient-level nuclear morphological features (NMFs) and 12 cell spatial distribution features (CSDFs) were extracted from WSIs. The correlation between the radiomic and pathological features was assessed using Spearman correlation analysis. <b>Results:</b> The radiomic model outperformed the clinical and combined models in predicting treatment response (area under the curve: 0.760 vs. 0.559 vs. 0.652). For overall survival estimation, the combined model performed comparably to the radiomic model but outperformed the clinical model (concordance index: 0.858 vs. 0.812 vs. 0.664). Six treatment response-related radiomic features correlated with 50 H&E-derived (146 pairs, |<i>r</i>|= 0.31 to 0.46) and 2 to 26 IHC-derived NMF, particularly for CD45RO (69 pairs, |<i>r</i>|= 0.31 to 0.48), CD8 (84, |<i>r</i>|= 0.30 to 0.59), PD-L1 (73, |<i>r</i>|= 0.32 to 0.48), and CD163 (53, |<i>r</i>| = 0.32 to 0.59). Eight prognostic radiomic features correlated with 11 H&E-derived (16 pairs, |<i>r</i>|= 0.48 to 0.61) and 2 to 31 IHC-derived NMF, particularly for PD-L1 (80 pairs, |<i>r</i>|= 0.44 to 0.64), CD45RO (65, |<i>r</i>|= 0.42 to 0.67), CD19 (35, |<i>r</i>|= 0.44 to 0.58), CD66b (61, |<i>r</i>| = 0.42 to 0.67), and FOXP3 (21, |<i>r</i>| = 0.41 to 0.71). In contrast, fewer CSDFs exhibited correlations with specific radiomic features. <b>Conclusion:</b> The radiomic model and combined model are feasible in predicting immunotherapy response and outcomes in LANPC patients. The radiology-pathology correlation suggests a potential biological basis for the predictive models.

This study proposes a novel deep learning-based approach for aneurysm wall characteristics, including thin-walled (TW) and hyperplastic-remodeling (HR) regions. We analyzed fifty-two unruptured cerebral aneurysms employing 4D-computed tomography angiography (4D-CTA) and intraoperative recordings. The TW and HR regions were identified in intraoperative images. The 3D trajectories of observation points on aneurysm walls were processed to compute a time series of 3D speed, acceleration, and smoothness of motion, aiming to evaluate the aneurysm wall characteristics. To facilitate point-level risk evaluation using the time-series data, we developed a convolutional neural network (CNN)-long- short-term memory (LSTM)-based regression model enriched with attention layers. In order to accommodate patient heterogeneity, a patient-independent feature extraction mechanism was introduced. Furthermore, unlabeled data were incorporated to enhance the data-intensive deep model. The proposed method achieved an average diagnostic accuracy of 92%, significantly outperforming a simpler model lacking attention. These results underscore the significance of patient-independent feature extraction and the use of unlabeled data. This study demonstrates the efficacy of a fine-grained deep learning approach in predicting aneurysm wall characteristics using 4D-CTA. Notably, incorporating an attention-based network structure proved to be particularly effective, contributing to enhanced performance.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a promising and powerful technology with increasing use in orthopedics. The global morbidity of knee arthroplasty is expanding. This study investigated the use of AI algorithms to review radiographs of knee arthroplasty. The Ovid-Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, PubMed, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), WeiPu (VIP), WanFang, and China Biology Medicine (CBM) databases were systematically screened from inception to March 2024 (PROSPERO study protocol registration: CRD42024507549). The quality assessment of the diagnostic accuracy studies tool assessed the risk of bias. A total of 21 studies were included in the analysis. Of these, 10 studies identified and classified implant brands, 6 measured implant size and component alignment, 3 detected implant loosening, and 2 diagnosed prosthetic joint infections (PJI). For classifying and identifying implant brands, 5 studies demonstrated near-perfect prediction with an area under the curve (AUC) ranging from 0.98 to 1.0, and 10 achieved accuracy (ACC) between 96-100%. Regarding implant measurement, one study showed an AUC of 0.62, and two others exhibited over 80% ACC in determining component sizes. Moreover, Artificial intelligence showed good to excellent reliability across all angles in three separate studies (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient > 0.78). In predicting PJI, one study achieved an AUC of 0.91 with a corresponding ACC of 90.5%, while another reported a positive predictive value ranging from 75% to 85%. For detecting implant loosening, the AUC was found to be at least as high as 0.976 with ACC ranging from 85.8% to 97.5%. These studies show that AI is promising in recognizing implants in knee arthroplasty. Future research should follow a rigorous approach to AI development, with comprehensive and transparent reporting of methods and the creation of open-source software programs and commercial tools that can provide clinicians with objective clinical decisions.

Thoracic diseases, including pneumonia, tuberculosis, lung cancer, and others, pose significant health risks and require timely and accurate diagnosis to ensure proper treatment. Thus, in this research, a model for thorax disease classification using Chest X-rays is proposed by considering deep learning model. The input is pre-processed by resizing, normalizing pixel values, and applying data augmentation to address the issue of imbalanced datasets and improve model generalization. Significant features are extracted from the images using an Enhanced Auto-Encoder (EnAE) model, which combines a stacked auto-encoder architecture with an attention module to enhance feature representation and classification accuracy. To further improve feature selection, we utilize the Chaotic Whale Optimization (ChWO) Algorithm, which optimally selects the most relevant attributes from the extracted features. Finally, the disease classification is performed using the novel Improved Swin Transformer (IMSTrans) model, which is designed to efficiently process high-dimensional medical image data and achieve superior classification performance. The proposed EnAE + ChWO+IMSTrans model for thorax disease classification was evaluated using extensive Chest X-ray datasets and the Lung Disease Dataset. The proposed method demonstrates enhanced Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F-Score, MCC and MAE of 0.964, 0.977, 0.9845, 0.964, 0.9647, and 0.184 respectively indicating the reliable and efficient solution for thorax disease classification.

Interval breast cancers (IBCs) are detected between regular mammographic screenings after an initially negative result. Studies have shown that the prognosis of IBCs is similar to that of unscreened symptomatic cancers and is hence a surrogate used to assess the effectiveness of screening programs. This systematic review consolidates the current literature available on strategies to reduce the rates of IBC. Following PRISMA guidelines, three databases were searched from inception till October 29, 2023 to identify papers, which reported IBC rates. Key search terms included "interval breast cancer", "mammogram", "tomosynthesis" and "screening". A total of 32 articles were included. Fourteen studies discussed the use of digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) as an alternative screening modality to mammograms. Six studies discussed the use of artificial intelligence (AI) on mammograms, five studies discussed the use of supplemental modalities including ultrasonography (US) in addition to mammograms, five studies discussed varying screening intervals and two studies discussed tamoxifen use. The trajectory of IBCs can be altered by early detection when they are more amenable to treatment, through advanced screening techniques, adjusting inter-screening intervals and modifiable risk factors. The goal is to create a screening protocol that is economically effective and accessible to various populations.

Despite significant progress in applying large language models (LLMs) to the medical domain, several limitations still prevent them from practical applications. Among these are the constraints on model size and the lack of cohort-specific labeled datasets. In this work, we investigated the potential of improving a lightweight LLM, such as Llama 3.1-8B, through fine-tuning with datasets using synthetic labels. Two tasks are jointly trained by combining their respective instruction datasets. When the quality of the task-specific synthetic labels is relatively high (e.g., generated by GPT4-o), Llama 3.1-8B achieves satisfactory performance on the open-ended disease detection task, with a micro F1 score of 0.91. Conversely, when the quality of the task-relevant synthetic labels is relatively low (e.g., from the MIMIC-CXR dataset), fine-tuned Llama 3.1-8B is able to surpass its noisy teacher labels (micro F1 score of 0.67 v.s. 0.63) when calibrated against curated labels, indicating the strong inherent underlying capability of the model. These findings demonstrate the potential offine-tuning LLMs with synthetic labels, offering a promising direction for future research on LLM specialization in the medical domain.

This work aims to promote early and accurate diagnosis of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) by developing state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, with the goal of minimizing the consequences of epilepsy on individuals and society. Current approaches for TLE detection have drawbacks, including applicability to particular MRI sequences, moderate ability to determine the side of the onset zones, and weak cross-validation with different patient groups, which hampers their practical use. To overcome these difficulties, a new Hybrid Attention-Enhanced Transformer Network (HAETN) is introduced for early TLE diagnosis. This approach uses newly developed Fuzzy-AAL Segmentation Framework (FASF) which is a combination of Fuzzy Possibilistic C-Means (FPCM) algorithm for segmentation of tissue and AAL labelling for labelling of tissues. Furthermore, an effective feature selection method is proposed using the Dipper- grey wolf optimization (DGWO) algorithm to improve the performance of the proposed model. The performance of the proposed method is thoroughly assessed by accuracy, sensitivity, and F1-score. The performance of the suggested approach is evaluated on the Temporal Lobe Epilepsy-UNAM MRI Dataset, where it attains an accuracy of 98.61%, a sensitivity of 99.83%, and F1-score of 99.82%, indicating its efficiency and applicability in clinical practice.