Cancer is one of the leading health challenges for women, specifically breast and ovarian cancer. Early detection can help improve the survival rate through timely intervention and treatment. Traditional methods of detecting cancer involve manually examining mammograms, CT scans, ultrasounds, and other imaging types. However, this makes the process labor-intensive and requires the expertise of trained pathologists. Hence, making it both time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this paper, we introduce a novel vision transformer (ViT)-based method for detecting and classifying breast and ovarian cancer. We use a pre-trained ViT-Base-Patch16-224 model, which is fine-tuned for both binary and multi-class classification tasks using publicly available histopathological image datasets. Further, we use a preprocessing pipeline that converts raw histophological images into standardized PyTorch tensors, which are compatible with the ViT architecture and also help improve the model performance. We evaluated the performance of our model on two benchmark datasets: the BreakHis dataset for binary classification and the UBC-OCEAN dataset for five-class classification without any data augmentation. Our model surpasses existing CNN, ViT, and topological data analysis-based approaches in binary classification. For multi-class classification, it is evaluated against recent topological methods and demonstrates superior performance. Our study highlights the effectiveness of Vision Transformer-based transfer learning combined with efficient preprocessing in oncological diagnostics.

Learning from sparse labels is a challenge commonplace in the medical domain. This is due to numerous factors, such as annotation cost, and is especially true for newly introduced tasks. When dense pixel-level annotations are needed, this becomes even more unfeasible. However, being able to learn from just a few annotations at the pixel-level, while extremely difficult and underutilized, can drive progress in studies where perfect annotations are not immediately available. This work tackles the challenge of learning the dense prediction task of keypoint localization from a few point annotations in the context of 2d carcinosis keypoint localization from laparoscopic video frames for diagnostic planning of advanced ovarian cancer patients. To enable this, we formulate the problem as a sparse heatmap regression from a few point annotations per image and propose a new loss function, called Crag and Tail loss, for efficient learning. Our proposed loss function effectively leverages positive sparse labels while minimizing the impact of false negatives or missed annotations. Through an extensive ablation study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving accurate dense localization of carcinosis keypoints, highlighting its potential to advance research in scenarios where dense annotations are challenging to obtain.

Kurt Knutsson discusses some tips to keep you safe. BEWARE DEEPFAKE SCAMS: The FBI is issuing a warning that criminals are increasingly using generative AI technologies, particularly deepfakes, to exploit unsuspecting individuals. This alert serves as a reminder of the growing sophistication and accessibility of these technologies and the urgent need for vigilance in protecting ourselves from potential scams. ROBOTICS ERA: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the artificial intelligence revolution is on the verge of delivering breakthroughs in robotics at the annual Consumer Electronics Show conference in Las Vegas. AI technology is being used more and more by doctors.

For the nearly 20,000 women in the U.S. who receive an ovarian cancer diagnosis each year, artificial intelligence is emerging as a potentially life-saving tool. In a new study led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, AI models did a better job of detecting ovarian cancer than human doctors. The research, which was published in Nature Medicine, tested an AI model's ability to distinguish between benign and malignant lesions on the ovaries, according to a press release. The AI model was trained on more than 17,000 ultrasound images from 3,652 patients across 20 hospitals in eight countries, the release stated. "High-quality diagnostics can become more accessible, particularly in regions with limited access to experienced examiners," said a study author.

Feature selection can greatly improve performance and interpretability in machine learning problems. However, existing nonparametric feature selection methods either lack theoretical error control or fail to accurately control errors in practice. Many methods are also slow, especially in high dimensions. In this paper, we introduce a general feature selection method that applies integrated path stability selection to thresholding to control false positives and the false discovery rate. The method also estimates q-values, which are better suited to high-dimensional data than p-values. We focus on two special cases of the general method based on gradient boosting (IPSSGB) and random forests (IPSSRF). Extensive simulations with RNA sequencing data show that IPSSGB and IPSSRF have better error control, detect more true positives, and are faster than existing methods. We also use both methods to detect microRNAs and genes related to ovarian cancer, finding that they make better predictions with fewer features than other methods.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise in revolutionizing healthcare, especially in clinical applications. Simultaneously, Digital Twin technology, which models and simulates complex systems, has gained traction in enhancing patient care. However, despite the advances in experimental clinical settings, the potential of AI and digital twins to streamline clinical operations remains largely untapped. This paper introduces a novel digital twin framework specifically designed to enhance oncology clinical operations. We propose the integration of multiple specialized digital twins, such as the Medical Necessity Twin, Care Navigator Twin, and Clinical History Twin, to enhance workflow efficiency and personalize care for each patient based on their unique data. Furthermore, by synthesizing multiple data sources and aligning them with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines, we create a dynamic Cancer Care Path, a continuously evolving knowledge base that enables these digital twins to provide precise, tailored clinical recommendations.

Bevacizumab is a widely studied targeted therapeutic drug used in conjunction with standard chemotherapy for the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer. While its administration has shown to increase the progression-free survival (PFS) in patients with advanced stage ovarian cancer, the lack of identifiable biomarkers for predicting patient response has been a major roadblock in its effective adoption towards personalized medicine. In this work, we leverage the latest histopathology foundation models trained on large-scale whole slide image (WSI) datasets to extract ovarian tumor tissue features for predicting bevacizumab response from WSIs. Our extensive experiments across a combination of different histopathology foundation models and multiple instance learning (MIL) strategies demonstrate capability of these large models in predicting bevacizumab response in ovarian cancer patients with the best models achieving an AUC score of 0.86 and an accuracy score of 72.5%. Furthermore, our survival models are able to stratify high- and low-risk cases with statistical significance (p < 0.05) even among the patients with the aggressive subtype of high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma. This work highlights the utility of histopathology foundation models for the task of ovarian bevacizumab response prediction from WSIs. The high-attention regions of the WSIs highlighted by these models not only aid the model explainability but also serve as promising imaging biomarkers for treatment prognosis.

Computer vision models are increasingly capable of classifying ovarian epithelial cancer subtypes, but they differ from pathologists by processing small tissue patches at a single resolution. Multi-resolution graph models leverage the spatial relationships of patches at multiple magnifications, learning the context for each patch. In this study, we conduct the most thorough validation of a graph model for ovarian cancer subtyping to date. Seven models were tuned and trained using five-fold cross-validation on a set of 1864 whole slide images (WSIs) from 434 patients treated at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. The cross-validation models were ensembled and evaluated using a balanced hold-out test set of 100 WSIs from 30 patients, and an external validation set of 80 WSIs from 80 patients in the Transcanadian Study. The best-performing model, a graph model using 10x+20x magnification data, gave balanced accuracies of 73%, 88%, and 99% in cross-validation, hold-out testing, and external validation, respectively. However, this only exceeded the performance of attention-based multiple instance learning in external validation, with a 93% balanced accuracy. Graph models benefitted greatly from using the UNI foundation model rather than an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet50 for feature extraction, with this having a much greater effect on performance than changing the subsequent classification approach. The accuracy of the combined foundation model and multi-resolution graph network offers a step towards the clinical applicability of these models, with a new highest-reported performance for this task, though further validations are still required to ensure the robustness and usability of the models.

The emerging research shows that lncRNA has crucial research value in a series of complex human diseases. Therefore, the accurate identification of lncRNA-disease associations (LDAs) is very important for the warning and treatment of diseases. However, most of the existing methods have limitations in identifying nonlinear LDAs, and it remains a huge challenge to predict new LDAs. In this paper, a deep learning model based on a heterogeneous network and convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed for lncRNA-disease association prediction, named HCNNLDA. The heterogeneous network containing the lncRNA, disease, and miRNA nodes, is constructed firstly. The embedding matrix of a lncRNA-disease node pair is constructed according to various biological premises about lncRNAs, diseases, and miRNAs. Then, the low-dimensional feature representation is fully learned by the convolutional neural network. In the end, the XGBoot classifier model is trained to predict the potential LDAs. HCNNLDA obtains a high AUC value of 0.9752 and AUPR of 0.9740 under the 5-fold cross-validation. The experimental results show that the proposed model has better performance than that of several latest prediction models. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of HCNNLDA in identifying novel LDAs is further demonstrated by case studies of three diseases. To sum up, HCNNLDA is a feasible calculation model to predict LDAs.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has introduced a new paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs), aiding in the resolution of knowledge-intensive tasks. However, current RAG models position LLMs as passive knowledge receptors, thereby restricting their capacity for learning and comprehending external knowledge. In this paper, we present ActiveRAG, an innovative RAG framework that shifts from passive knowledge acquisition to an active learning mechanism. This approach utilizes the Knowledge Construction mechanism to develop a deeper understanding of external knowledge by associating it with previously acquired or memorized knowledge. Subsequently, it designs the Cognitive Nexus mechanism to incorporate the outcomes from both chains of thought and knowledge construction, thereby calibrating the intrinsic cognition of LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that ActiveRAG surpasses previous RAG models, achieving a 5% improvement on question-answering datasets. All data and codes are available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/ActiveRAG.