However, most existing UDA methods are limited to one-to-one domain adaptation, which tends to be inefficient and resource-intensive when faced with multi-target domain transfer tasks.

The accurate delineation of tumours in radiological images like Computed Tomography is a very specialised and time-consuming task, and currently a bottleneck preventing quantitative analyses to be performed routinely in the clinical setting. For this reason, developing methods for the automated segmentation of tumours in medical imaging is of the utmost importance and has driven significant efforts in recent years. However, challenges regarding the impracticality of 3D scans, given the large amount of voxels to be analysed, usually requires the downsampling of such images or using patches thereof when applying traditional convolutional neural networks. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a new methodology that uses, divided into two stages, voxel sparsification and submanifold sparse convolutional networks. This method allows segmentations to be performed with high-resolution inputs and a native 3D model architecture, obtaining state-of-the-art accuracies while significantly reducing the computational resources needed in terms of GPU memory and time. We studied the deployment of this methodology in the context of Computed Tomography images of renal cancer patients from the KiTS23 challenge, and our method achieved results competitive with the challenge winners, with Dice similarity coefficients of 95.8% for kidneys + masses, 85.7% for tumours + cysts, and 80.3% for tumours alone. Crucially, our method also offers significant computational improvements, achieving up to a 60% reduction in inference time and up to a 75\% reduction in VRAM usage compared to an equivalent dense architecture, across both CPU and various GPU cards tested.

Objective Renal cancer is a common malignancy and a major cause of cancer-related deaths. Computed tomography (CT) is central to early detection, staging, and treatment planning. However, the growing CT workload increases radiologists' burden and risks incomplete documentation. Automatically generating accurate reports remains challenging because it requires integrating visual interpretation with clinical reasoning. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI), especially large language and vision-language models, offer potential to reduce workload and enhance diagnostic quality. Methods We propose a clinically informed, two-stage framework for automatic renal CT report generation. In Stage 1, a multi-task learning model detects structured clinical features from each 2D image. In Stage 2, a vision-language model generates free-text reports conditioned on the image and the detected features. To evaluate clinical fidelity, generated clinical features are extracted from the reports and compared with expert-annotated ground truth. Results Experiments on an expert-labeled dataset show that incorporating detected features improves both report quality and clinical accuracy. The model achieved an average AUC of 0.75 for key imaging features and a METEOR score of 0.33, demonstrating higher clinical consistency and fewer template-driven errors. Conclusion Linking structured feature detection with conditioned report generation provides a clinically grounded approach to integrate structured prediction and narrative drafting for renal CT reporting. This method enhances interpretability and clinical faithfulness, underscoring the value of domain-relevant evaluation metrics for medical AI development.

To evaluate the translational capabilities of foundation models, we develop a pathological concept learning approach focused on kidney cancer. By leveraging TNM staging guidelines and pathology reports, we build comprehensive pathological concepts for kidney cancer. Then, we extract deep features from whole slide images using foundation models, construct pathological graphs to capture spatial correlations, and trained graph neural networks to identify these concepts. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in kidney cancer survival analysis, highlighting its explainability and fairness in identifying low- and high-risk patients. The source code has been released by https://github.com/shangqigao/RadioPath.

The non-invasive assessment of increasingly incidentally discovered renal masses is a critical challenge in urologic oncology, where diagnostic uncertainty frequently leads to the overtreatment of benign or indolent tumors. In this study, we developed and validated RenalCLIP using a dataset of 27,866 CT scans from 8,809 patients across nine Chinese medical centers and the public TCIA cohort, a visual-language foundation model for characterization, diagnosis and prognosis of renal mass. The model was developed via a two-stage pre-training strategy that first enhances the image and text encoders with domain-specific knowledge before aligning them through a contrastive learning objective, to create robust representations for superior generalization and diagnostic precision. RenalCLIP achieved better performance and superior generalizability across 10 core tasks spanning the full clinical workflow of kidney cancer, including anatomical assessment, diagnostic classification, and survival prediction, compared with other state-of-the-art general-purpose CT foundation models. Especially, for complicated task like recurrence-free survival prediction in the TCIA cohort, RenalCLIP achieved a C-index of 0.726, representing a substantial improvement of approximately 20% over the leading baselines. Furthermore, RenalCLIP's pre-training imparted remarkable data efficiency; in the diagnostic classification task, it only needs 20% training data to achieve the peak performance of all baseline models even after they were fully fine-tuned on 100% of the data. Additionally, it achieved superior performance in report generation, image-text retrieval and zero-shot diagnosis tasks. Our findings establish that RenalCLIP provides a robust tool with the potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy, refine prognostic stratification, and personalize the management of patients with kidney cancer.

Kidney abnormality segmentation has important potential to enhance the clinical workflow, especially in settings requiring quantitative assessments. Kidney volume could serve as an important biomarker for renal diseases, with changes in volume correlating directly with kidney function. Currently, clinical practice often relies on subjective visual assessment for evaluating kidney size and abnormalities, including tumors and cysts, which are typically staged based on diameter, volume, and anatomical location. To support a more objective and reproducible approach, this research aims to develop a robust, thoroughly validated kidney abnormality segmentation algorithm, made publicly available for clinical and research use. Validation is conducted using both proprietary and public test datasets, with segmentation performance quantified by Dice coefficient and the 95th percentile Hausdorff distance. Furthermore, we analyze robustness across subgroups based on patient sex, age, CT contrast phases, and tumor histologic subtypes. Our findings demonstrate that our segmentation algorithm, trained exclusively on publicly available data, generalizes effectively to external test sets and outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across all tested datasets. Subgroup analyses reveal consistent high performance, indicating strong robustness and reliability. The developed algorithm and associated code are publicly accessible at https://github. Introduction Kidney cancer has a global incidence rate of approximately 400,000 new cases annually, leading to 175,000 deaths [1]. It is often detected incidentally during imaging performed for unrelated medical reasons, most often in computed tomography (CT). Treatment options for suspected malignant kidney masses include radical and partial nephrectomy [2].

The histopathological images contain a huge amount of information, which can make diagnosis an extremely timeconsuming and tedious task. In this study, we developed a completely automated system to detect regions of interest (ROIs) in whole slide images (WSI) of renal cell carcinoma (RCC), to reduce time analysis and assist pathologists in making more accurate decisions. The proposed approach is based on an efficient texture descriptor named dominant rotated local binary pattern (DRLBP) and color transformation to reveal and exploit the immense texture variability at the microscopic high magnifications level. Thereby, the DRLBPs retain the structural information and utilize the magnitude values in a local neighborhood for more discriminative power. For the classification of the relevant ROIs, feature extraction of WSIs patches was performed on the color channels separately to form the histograms. Next, we used the most frequently occurring patterns as a feature selection step to discard non-informative features. The performances of different classifiers on a set of 1800 kidney cancer patches originating from 12 whole slide images were compared and evaluated. Furthermore, the small size of the image dataset allows to investigate deep learning approach based on transfer learning for image patches classification by using deep features and fine-tuning methods. High recognition accuracy was obtained and the classifiers are efficient, the best precision result was 99.17% achieved with SVM. Moreover, transfer learning models perform well with comparable performance, and the highest precision using ResNet-50 reached 98.50%. The proposed approach results revealed a very efficient image classification and demonstrated efficacy in identifying ROIs. This study presents an automatic system to detect regions of interest relevant to the diagnosis of kidney cancer in whole slide histopathology images.

Autonomous robotic systems hold potential for improving renal tumor resection accuracy and patient outcomes. We present a fluorescence-guided robotic system capable of planning and executing incision paths around exophytic renal tumors with a clinically relevant resection margin. Leveraging point cloud observations, the system handles irregular tumor shapes and distinguishes healthy from tumorous tissue based on near-infrared imaging, akin to indocyanine green staining in partial nephrectomy. Tissue-mimicking phantoms are crucial for the development of autonomous robotic surgical systems for interventions where acquiring ex-vivo animal tissue is infeasible, such as cancer of the kidney and renal pelvis. To this end, we propose novel hydrogel-based kidney phantoms with exophytic tumors that mimic the physical and visual behavior of tissue, and are compatible with electrosurgical instruments, a common limitation of silicone-based phantoms. In contrast to previous hydrogel phantoms, we mix the material with near-infrared dye to enable fluorescence-guided tumor segmentation. Autonomous real-world robotic experiments validate our system and phantoms, achieving an average margin accuracy of 1.44 mm in a completion time of 69 sec.

-- T o track tumors during surgery, information from preoperative CT scans is used to determine their position. However, as the surgeon operates, the tumor may be deformed which presents a major hurdle for accurately resecting the tumor, and can lead to surgical inaccuracy, increased operation time, and excessive margins. This issue is particularly pronounced in robot-assisted partial nephrectomy (RAPN), where the kidney undergoes significant deformations during operation. T oward addressing this, we introduce a occupancy network-based method for the localization of tumors within kidney phantoms undergoing deformations at interactive speeds. We validate our method by introducing a 3D hydrogel kidney phantom embedded with exophytic and endophytic renal tumors. It closely mimics real tissue mechanics to simulate kidney deformation during in vivo surgery, providing excellent contrast and clear delineation of tumor margins to enable automatic threshold-based segmentation. Our findings indicate that the proposed method can localize tumors in moderately deforming kidneys with a margin of 6mm to 10mm, while providing essential volumetric 3D information at over 60Hz. This capability directly enables downstream tasks such as robotic resection. Kidney cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer in the US, with over 65,000 new patients being diagnosed every year, leading to over 15,000 deaths [1]. The standard treatment for localized small renal masses has shifted from radical nephrectomy (complete kidney removal) toward the more minimally invasive approach of partial nephrectomy (removal of the tumor, retaining partial kidney function). One of the main challenges during tumor removal is ensuring the resection of adequate tumor margins. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication.

Renal tumors, especially renal cell carcinoma (RCC), show significant heterogeneity, posing challenges for diagnosis using radiology images such as MRI, echocardiograms, and CT scans. U-Net based deep learning techniques are emerging as a promising approach for automated medical image segmentation for minimally invasive diagnosis of renal tumors. However, current techniques need further improvements in accuracy to become clinically useful to radiologists. In this study, we present an improved U-Net based model for end-to-end automated semantic segmentation of CT scan images to identify renal tumors. The model uses residual connections across convolution layers, integrates a multi-layer feature fusion (MFF) and cross-channel attention (CCA) within encoder blocks, and incorporates skip connections augmented with additional information derived using MFF and CCA. We evaluated our model on the KiTS19 dataset, which contains data from 210 patients. For kidney segmentation, our model achieves a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 0.97 and a Jaccard index (JI) of 0.95. For renal tumor segmentation, our model achieves a DSC of 0.96 and a JI of 0.91. Based on a comparison of available DSC scores, our model outperforms the current leading models.