The detection of anomalous tissue regions (ATRs) within affected tissues is crucial in clinical diagnosis and pathological studies. Conventional automated ATR detection methods, primarily based on histology images alone, falter in cases where ATRs and normal tissues have subtle visual differences. The recent spatial transcriptomics (ST) technology profiles gene expressions across tissue regions, offering a molecular perspective for detecting ATRs. However, there is a dearth of ATR detection methods that effectively harness complementary information from both histology images and ST. To address this gap, we propose MEATRD, a novel ATR detection method that integrates histology image and ST data. MEATRD is trained to reconstruct image patches and gene expression profiles of normal tissue spots (inliers) from their multimodal embeddings, followed by learning a one-class classification AD model based on latent multimodal reconstruction errors. This strategy harmonizes the strengths of reconstruction-based and one-class classification approaches. At the heart of MEATRD is an innovative masked graph dual-attention transformer (MGDAT) network, which not only facilitates cross-modality and cross-node information sharing but also addresses the model over-generalization issue commonly seen in reconstruction-based AD methods. Additionally, we demonstrate that modality-specific, task-relevant information is collated and condensed in multimodal bottleneck encoding generated in MGDAT, marking the first theoretical analysis of the informational properties of multimodal bottleneck encoding. Extensive evaluations across eight real ST datasets reveal MEATRD's superior performance in ATR detection, surpassing various state-of-the-art AD methods. Remarkably, MEATRD also proves adept at discerning ATRs that only show slight visual deviations from normal tissues.

DNA microarray gene-expression data has been widely used to identify cancerous gene signatures. Microarray can increase the accuracy of cancer diagnosis and prognosis. However, analyzing the large amount of gene expression data from microarray chips pose a challenge for current machine learning researches. One of the challenges lie within classification of healthy and cancerous tissues is high dimensionality of gene expressions. High dimensionality decreases the accuracy of the classification. This research aims to apply a hybrid model of Genetic Algorithm and Neural Network to overcome the problem during subset selection of informative genes. Whereby, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) reduced dimensionality during feature selection and then a Multi-Layer perceptron Neural Network (MLP) is applied to classify selected genes. The performance evaluated by considering to the accuracy and the number of selected genes. Experimental results show the proposed method suggested high accuracy and minimum number of selected genes in comparison with other machine learning algorithms.

Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) refers to focusing high-energy rays in three-dimensional space on the tumor lesion area, reducing the dose received by surrounding normal tissues, which can effectively improve the local control rate of the tumor and reduce the probability of complications. With the comprehensive development of medical imaging, radiation biology and other disciplines, this less-fractional, high-dose radiotherapy method has been increasingly developed and applied in clinical practice. The background, radio-biological basis, key technologies and main equipment of SBRT are discussed, and its future development direction is prospected.

Machine learning (ML) has been increasingly used to quantify chemical exchange saturation transfer (CEST) effect. ML models are typically trained using either measured data or fully simulated data. However, training with measured data often lacks sufficient training data, while training with fully simulated data may introduce bias due to limited simulations pools. This study introduces a new platform that combines simulated and measured components to generate partially synthetic CEST data, and to evaluate its feasibility for training ML models to predict amide proton transfer (APT) effect. Partially synthetic CEST signals were created using an inverse summation of APT effects from simulations and the other components from measurements. Training data were generated by varying APT simulation parameters and applying scaling factors to adjust the measured components, achieving a balance between simulation flexibility and fidelity. First, tissue-mimicking CEST signals along with ground truth information were created using multiple-pool model simulations to validate this method. Second, an ML model was trained individually on partially synthetic data, in vivo data, and fully simulated data, to predict APT effect in rat brains bearing 9L tumors. Experiments on tissue-mimicking data suggest that the ML method using the partially synthetic data is accurate in predicting APT. In vivo experiments suggest that our method provides more accurate and robust prediction than the training using in vivo data and fully synthetic data. Partially synthetic CEST data can address the challenges in conventional ML methods.

In this study, a radiomics approach was extended to optical fluorescence molecular imaging data for tissue classification, termed 'optomics'. Fluorescence molecular imaging is emerging for precise surgical guidance during head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) resection. However, the tumor-to-normal tissue contrast is confounded by intrinsic physiological limitations of heterogeneous expression of the target molecule, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). Optomics seek to improve tumor identification by probing textural pattern differences in EGFR expression conveyed by fluorescence. A total of 1,472 standardized optomic features were extracted from fluorescence image samples. A supervised machine learning pipeline involving a support vector machine classifier was trained with 25 top-ranked features selected by minimum redundancy maximum relevance criterion. Model predictive performance was compared to fluorescence intensity thresholding method by classifying testing set image patches of resected tissue with histologically confirmed malignancy status. The optomics approach provided consistent improvement in prediction accuracy on all test set samples, irrespective of dose, compared to fluorescence intensity thresholding method (mean accuracies of 89% vs. 81%; P = 0.0072). The improved performance demonstrates that extending the radiomics approach to fluorescence molecular imaging data offers a promising image analysis technique for cancer detection in fluorescence-guided surgery.

We consider the problem of extracting joint and individual signals from multi-view data, that is data collected from different sources on matched samples. While existing methods for multi-view data decomposition explore single matching of data by samples, we focus on double-matched multi-view data (matched by both samples and source features). Our motivating example is the miRNA data collected from both primary tumor and normal tissues of the same subjects; the measurements from two tissues are thus matched both by subjects and by miRNAs. Our proposed double-matched matrix decomposition allows to simultaneously extract joint and individual signals across subjects, as well as joint and individual signals across miRNAs. Our estimation approach takes advantage of double-matching by formulating a new type of optimization problem with explicit row space and column space constraints, for which we develop an efficient iterative algorithm. Numerical studies indicate that taking advantage of double-matching leads to superior signal estimation performance compared to existing multi-view data decomposition based on single-matching. We apply our method to miRNA data as well as data from the English Premier League soccer matches, and find joint and individual multi-view signals that align with domain specific knowledge.

This course on Artificial Intelligence for Imaging is a unique opportunity to join a community of leading edge practitioners in the field of Quantitative Medical Imaging. During this 4-days immersive course, you will be able to attend lectures and workshops from world-class experts in Radiomics, Deep Learning, Synthetic Data, and Distributed Learning. You can also bring your own curated dataset with you for the hackathon (labelled, sorted by outcome, open source or fully anonymised, and cleared by ethics). If requested ahead of time, we will perform "data matching" for attendees to facilitate external cross validation. There will be ample opportunity to network with faculty members, other participants and companies.