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A Probabilistic U-Net for Segmentation of Ambiguous Images

Simon Kohl, Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Clemens Meyer, Jeffrey De Fauw, Joseph R. Ledsam, Klaus Maier-Hein, S. M. Ali Eslami, Danilo Jimenez Rezende, Olaf Ronneberger

Neural Information Processing Systems

Many real-world vision problems suffer from inherent ambiguities. In clinical applications for example, itmight not be clear from aCT scan alone which particular region is cancer tissue. Therefore a group of graders typically produces a set of diverse but plausible segmentations.


Transformer Classification of Breast Lesions: The BreastDCEDL_AMBL Benchmark Dataset and 0.92 AUC Baseline

Fridman, Naomi, Goldstein, Anat

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Breast magnetic resonance imaging is a critical tool for cancer detection and treatment planning, but its clinical utility is hindered by poor specificity, leading to high false-positive rates and unnecessary biopsies. This study introduces a transformer-based framework for automated classification of breast lesions in dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI, addressing the challenge of distinguishing benign from malignant findings. We implemented a SegFormer architecture that achieved an AUC of 0.92 for lesion-level classification, with 100% sensitivity and 67% specificity at the patient level - potentially eliminating one-third of unnecessary biopsies without missing malignancies. The model quantifies malignant pixel distribution via semantic segmentation, producing interpretable spatial predictions that support clinical decision-making. To establish reproducible benchmarks, we curated BreastDCEDL_AMBL by transforming The Cancer Imaging Archive's AMBL collection into a standardized deep learning dataset with 88 patients and 133 annotated lesions (89 benign, 44 malignant). This resource addresses a key infrastructure gap, as existing public datasets lack benign lesion annotations, limiting benign-malignant classification research. Training incorporated an expanded cohort of over 1,200 patients through integration with BreastDCEDL datasets, validating transfer learning approaches despite primary tumor-only annotations. Public release of the dataset, models, and evaluation protocols provides the first standardized benchmark for DCE-MRI lesion classification, enabling methodological advancement toward clinical deployment.


Robust Semi-Supervised CT Radiomics for Lung Cancer Prognosis: Cost-Effective Learning with Limited Labels and SHAP Interpretation

Salmanpour, Mohammad R., Pouria, Amir Hossein, Falahati, Sonia, Taeb, Shahram, Mehrnia, Somayeh Sadat, Maghsudi, Mehdi, Jouzdani, Ali Fathi, Oveisi, Mehrdad, Hacihaliloglu, Ilker, Rahmim, Arman

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Background: CT imaging is vital for lung cancer management, offering detailed visualization for AI-based prognosis. However, supervised learning SL models require large labeled datasets, limiting their real-world application in settings with scarce annotations. Methods: We analyzed CT scans from 977 patients across 12 datasets extracting 1218 radiomics features using Laplacian of Gaussian and wavelet filters via PyRadiomics Dimensionality reduction was applied with 56 feature selection and extraction algorithms and 27 classifiers were benchmarked A semi supervised learning SSL framework with pseudo labeling utilized 478 unlabeled and 499 labeled cases Model sensitivity was tested in three scenarios varying labeled data in SL increasing unlabeled data in SSL and scaling both from 10 percent to 100 percent SHAP analysis was used to interpret predictions Cross validation and external testing in two cohorts were performed. Results: SSL outperformed SL, improving overall survival prediction by up to 17 percent. The top SSL model, Random Forest plus XGBoost classifier, achieved 0.90 accuracy in cross-validation and 0.88 externally. SHAP analysis revealed enhanced feature discriminability in both SSL and SL, especially for Class 1 survival greater than 4 years. SSL showed strong performance with only 10 percent labeled data, with more stable results compared to SL and lower variance across external testing, highlighting SSL's robustness and cost effectiveness. Conclusion: We introduced a cost-effective, stable, and interpretable SSL framework for CT-based survival prediction in lung cancer, improving performance, generalizability, and clinical readiness by integrating SHAP explainability and leveraging unlabeled data.


RadiomicsRetrieval: A Customizable Framework for Medical Image Retrieval Using Radiomics Features

Na, Inye, Rue, Nejung, Chung, Jiwon, Park, Hyunjin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Medical image retrieval is a valuable field for supporting clinical decision-making, yet current methods primarily support 2D images and require fully annotated queries, limiting clinical flexibility. To address this, we propose RadiomicsRetrieval, a 3D content-based retrieval framework bridging handcrafted radiomics descriptors with deep learning-based embeddings at the tumor level . Unlike existing 2D approaches, RadiomicsRetrieval fully exploits volumetric data to leverage richer spatial context in medical images. We employ a promptable segmentation model (e.g., SAM) to derive tumor-specific image embeddings, which are aligned with radiomics features extracted from the same tumor via contrastive learning. These representations are further enriched by anatomical positional embedding (APE). As a result, RadiomicsRe-trieval enables flexible querying based on shape, location, or partial feature sets. Extensive experiments on both lung CT and brain MRI public datasets demonstrate that radiomics features significantly enhance retrieval specificity, while APE provides global anatomical context essential for location-based searches. Notably, our framework requires only minimal user prompts (e.g., a single point), minimizing segmentation overhead and supporting diverse clinical scenarios. The capability to query using either image embeddings or selected radiomics attributes highlights its adaptability, potentially benefiting diagnosis, treatment planning, and research on large-scale medical imaging repositories.


Triad: Vision Foundation Model for 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Wang, Shansong, Safari, Mojtaba, Li, Qiang, Chang, Chih-Wei, Qiu, Richard LJ, Roper, Justin, Yu, David S., Yang, Xiaofeng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vision foundation models (VFMs) are pre-trained on extensive image datasets to learn general representations for diverse types of data. These models can subsequently be fine-tuned for specific downstream tasks, significantly boosting performance across a broad range of applications. However, existing vision foundation models that claim to be applicable to various clinical tasks are mostly pre-trained on 3D computed tomography (CT), which benefits from the availability of extensive 3D CT databases. Significant differences between CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in imaging principles, signal characteristics, and data distribution may hinder their practical performance and versatility in MRI-specific applications. Here, we propose Triad, a vision foundation model for 3D MRI. Triad adopts a widely used autoencoder architecture to learn robust representations from 131,170 3D MRI volumes and uses organ-independent imaging descriptions to constrain the semantic distribution of the visual modality. The above pre-training dataset is called Triad-131K, which is currently the largest 3D MRI pre-training dataset. We evaluate Triad across three tasks, namely, organ/tumor segmentation, organ/cancer classification, and medical image registration, in two data modalities (within-domain and out-of-domain) settings using 25 downstream datasets. By initializing models with Triad's pre-trained weights, nnUNet-Triad improves segmentation performance by 2.51% compared to nnUNet-Scratch across 17 datasets. Swin-B-Triad achieves a 3.97% improvement over Swin-B-Scratch in classification tasks across five datasets. SwinUNETR-Triad improves by 4.00% compared to SwinUNETR-Scratch in registration tasks across two datasets. Our study demonstrates that pre-training can improve performance when the data modalities and organs of upstream and downstream tasks are consistent.


RadCLIP: Enhancing Radiologic Image Analysis through Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training

Lu, Zhixiu, Li, Hailong, He, Lili

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with radiology has marked a transformative era in medical diagnostics. Vision foundation models have been adopted to enhance radiologic imaging analysis. However, the distinct complexities of radiological imaging, including the interpretation of 2D and 3D radiological data, pose unique challenges that existing models, trained on general non-medical images, fail to address adequately. To bridge this gap and capitalize on the diagnostic precision required in medical imaging, we introduce RadCLIP: a pioneering cross-modal foundational model that harnesses Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to refine radiologic image analysis. RadCLIP incorporates a novel 3D slice pooling mechanism tailored for volumetric image analysis and is trained using a comprehensive and diverse dataset of radiologic image-text pairs. Our evaluations demonstrate that RadCLIP effectively aligns radiological images with their corresponding textual annotations, and in the meantime, offers a robust vision backbone for radiologic imagery with significant promise.


MedYOLO: A Medical Image Object Detection Framework

Sobek, Joseph, Inojosa, Jose R. Medina, Inojosa, Betsy J. Medina, Rassoulinejad-Mousavi, S. M., Conte, Gian Marco, Lopez-Jimenez, Francisco, Erickson, Bradley J.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence-enhanced identification of organs, lesions, and other structures in medical imaging is typically done using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) designed to make voxel-accurate segmentations of the region of interest. However, the labels required to train these CNNs are time-consuming to generate and require attention from subject matter experts to ensure quality. For tasks where voxel-level precision is not required, object detection models offer a viable alternative that can reduce annotation effort. Despite this potential application, there are few options for general purpose object detection frameworks available for 3-D medical imaging. We report on MedYOLO, a 3-D object detection framework using the one-shot detection method of the YOLO family of models and designed for use with medical imaging. We tested this model on four different datasets: BRaTS, LIDC, an abdominal organ Computed Tomography (CT) dataset, and an ECG-gated heart CT dataset. We found our models achieve high performance on commonly present medium and large-sized structures such as the heart, liver, and pancreas even without hyperparameter tuning. However, the models struggle with very small or rarely present structures.


Data diversity and virtual imaging in AI-based diagnosis: A case study based on COVID-19

Tushar, Fakrul Islam, Dahal, Lavsen, Sotoudeh-Paima, Saman, Abadi, Ehsan, Segars, W. Paul, Samei, Ehsan, Lo, Joseph Y.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Many studies have investigated deep-learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) models for medical imaging diagnosis of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), with many reports of near-perfect performance. However, variability in performance and underlying data biases raise concerns about clinical generalizability. This retrospective study involved the development and evaluation of artificial intelligence (AI) models for COVID-19 diagnosis using both diverse clinical and virtually generated medical images. In addition, we conducted a virtual imaging trial to assess how AI performance is affected by several patient- and physics-based factors, including the extent of disease, radiation dose, and imaging modality of computed tomography (CT) and chest radiography (CXR). AI performance was strongly influenced by dataset characteristics including quantity, diversity, and prevalence, leading to poor generalization with up to 20% drop in receiver operating characteristic area under the curve. Model performance on virtual CT and CXR images was comparable to overall results on clinical data. Imaging dose proved to have negligible influence on the results, but the extent of the disease had a marked affect. CT results were consistently superior to those from CXR. Overall, the study highlighted the significant impact of dataset characteristics and disease extent on COVID assessment, and the relevance and potential role of virtual imaging trial techniques on developing effective evaluation of AI algorithms and facilitating translation into diagnostic practice.


Classification of Luminal Subtypes in Full Mammogram Images Using Transfer Learning

Panambur, Adarsh Bhandary, Madhu, Prathmesh, Maier, Andreas

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automatic identification of patients with luminal and non-luminal subtypes during a routine mammography screening can support clinicians in streamlining breast cancer therapy planning. Recent machine learning techniques have shown promising results in molecular subtype classification in mammography; however, they are highly dependent on pixel-level annotations, handcrafted, and radiomic features. In this work, we provide initial insights into the luminal subtype classification in full mammogram images trained using only image-level labels. Transfer learning is applied from a breast abnormality classification task, to finetune a ResNet-18-based luminal versus non-luminal subtype classification task. We present and compare our results on the publicly available CMMD dataset and show that our approach significantly outperforms the baseline classifier by achieving a mean AUC score of 0.6688 and a mean F1 score of 0.6693 on the test dataset. The improvement over baseline is statistically significant, with a p-value of p<0.0001.


Breast Cancer Screening – Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (BCS-DBT) - The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) Public Access - Cancer Imaging Archive Wiki

#artificialintelligence

Breast cancer is among the most common cancers and a common cause of death among women. Over 39 million breast cancer screening exams are performed every year and are among the most common radiological tests. This creates a high need for accurate image interpretation. Machine learning has shown promise in interpretation of medical images. However, limited data for training and validation remains an issue.