Daily Papers

Background: Thyroid ultrasound is commonly performed using a combination of static images and cine clips (video recordings). However, the exact utility and impact of cine images remains unknown. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of cine imaging on accuracy and consistency of thyroid nodule assessment, using the American College of Radiology Thyroid Reporting and Data System (ACR TI-RADS). Methods: 50 benign and 50 malignant thyroid nodules with cytopathology results were included. A reader study with 4 specialty-trained radiologists was then conducted over 3 rounds, assessing only static images in the first two rounds and both static and cine images in the third round. TI-RADS scores and the consequent management recommendations were then evaluated by comparing them to the malignancy status of the nodules. Results: Mean sensitivity for malignancy detection was 0.65 for static images and 0.67 with both static and cine images (p>0.5). Specificity was 0.20 for static images and 0.22 with both static and cine images (p>0.5). Management recommendations were similar with and without cine images. Intrareader agreement on feature assignments remained consistent across all rounds, though TI-RADS point totals were slightly higher with cine images. Conclusion: The inclusion of cine imaging for thyroid nodule assessment on ultrasound did not significantly change diagnostic performance. Current practice guidelines, which do not mandate cine imaging, are sufficient for accurate diagnosis.

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) provides information on protein expression in tissue sections and is commonly used to support pathology diagnosis and disease triage. While AI models for H\&E-stained slides show promise, their applicability to IHC is limited due to domain-specific variations. Here we introduce HPA10M, a dataset that contains 10,495,672 IHC images from the Human Protein Atlas with comprehensive metadata included, and encompasses 45 normal tissue types and 20 major cancer types. Based on HPA10M, we trained iSight, a multi-task learning framework for automated IHC staining assessment. iSight combines visual features from whole-slide images with tissue metadata through a token-level attention mechanism, simultaneously predicting staining intensity, location, quantity, tissue type, and malignancy status. On held-out data, iSight achieved 85.5\% accuracy for location, 76.6\% for intensity, and 75.7\% for quantity, outperforming fine-tuned foundation models (PLIP, CONCH) by 2.5--10.2\%. In addition, iSight demonstrates well-calibrated predictions with expected calibration errors of 0.0150-0.0408. Furthermore, in a user study with eight pathologists evaluating 200 images from two datasets, iSight outperformed initial pathologist assessments on the held-out HPA dataset (79\% vs 68\% for location, 70\% vs 57\% for intensity, 68\% vs 52\% for quantity). Inter-pathologist agreement also improved after AI assistance in both held-out HPA (Cohen's κ increased from 0.63 to 0.70) and Stanford TMAD datasets (from 0.74 to 0.76), suggesting expert--AI co-assessment can improve IHC interpretation. This work establishes a foundation for AI systems that can improve IHC diagnostic accuracy and highlights the potential for integrating iSight into clinical workflows to enhance the consistency and reliability of IHC assessment.

Breast Cancer is a major public health problem and the most common diagnosed malignancy in woman. There have been significant developments in clinical approaches and theoretical experimental to understand the interactions of cancer cells dynamics with the immune system, also developments on analytical and computational models to help provide insights into clinical observations for a better understanding of cancer cells, but more are needed, especially at the genetic and molecular levels mathematically. Treatments such as immunotherapy, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, radiotherapy, and gene therapy are the main strategies in the fight against breast cancer. The present study aims at investigating the effects of estrogen derived from recent models, but this time combined with immunotherapy as a way to treat or inhibit the cancer growth by a mathematical model of breast cancer in situ, governed by a simplified model of nonlinear-coupled ordinary differential equations, that combines important interactions between natural cells, tumor cells, immune cells, ketogenic diet in the presence of an anticancer drug. Another contribution was to introduce the inhibition effect epsilon for new results and conclusions, A qualitative study was performed and biological interpretations were included to understand the conditions of stability in a realistic way.

Cancer is the uncontrollable cell division of abnormal cells inside the human body, which can spread to other body organs. It is one of the non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and NCDs accounts for 71% of total deaths worldwide whereas lung cancer is the second most diagnosed cancer after female breast cancer. Cancer survival rate of lung cancer is only 19%. There are various methods for the diagnosis of lung cancer, such as X-ray, CT scan, PET-CT scan, bronchoscopy and biopsy. However, to know the subtype of lung cancer based on the tissue type H and E staining is widely used, where the staining is done on the tissue aspirated from a biopsy. Studies have reported that the type of histology is associated with prognosis and treatment in lung cancer. Therefore, early and accurate detection of lung cancer histology is an urgent need and as its treatment is dependent on the type of histology, molecular profile and stage of the disease, it is most essential to analyse the histopathology images of lung cancer. Hence, to speed up the vital process of diagnosis of lung cancer and reduce the burden on pathologists, Deep learning techniques are used. These techniques have shown improved efficacy in the analysis of histopathology slides of cancer. Several studies reported the importance of convolution neural networks (CNN) in the classification of histopathological pictures of various cancer types such as brain, skin, breast, lung, colorectal cancer. In this study tri-category classification of lung cancer images (normal, adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma) are carried out by using ResNet 50, VGG-19, Inception_ResNet_V2 and DenseNet for the feature extraction and triplet loss to guide the CNN such that it increases inter-cluster distance and reduces intra-cluster distance.

Cardiotoxicity induced by the breast cancer treatments (i.e., chemotherapy, targeted therapy and radiation therapy) is a significant problem for breast cancer patients. The cardiotoxicity risk for breast cancer patients receiving different treatments remains unclear. We developed and evaluated risk predictive models for cardiotoxicity in breast cancer patients using EHR data. The AUC scores to predict the CHF, CAD, CM and MI are 0.846, 0.857, 0.858 and 0.804 respectively. After adjusting for baseline differences in cardiovascular health, patients who received chemotherapy or targeted therapy appeared to have higher risk of cardiotoxicity than patients who received radiation therapy. Due to differences in baseline cardiac health across the different breast cancer treatment groups, caution is recommended in interpreting the cardiotoxic effect of these treatments.

Colon Cancer is one of the most common types of cancer. The treatment is planned to depend on the grade or stage of cancer. One of the preconditions for grading of colon cancer is to segment the glandular structures of tissues. Manual segmentation method is very time-consuming, and it leads to life risk for the patients. The principal objective of this project is to assist the pathologist to accurate detection of colon cancer. In this paper, the authors have proposed an algorithm for an automatic segmentation of glands in colon histology using local intensity and texture features. Here the dataset images are cropped into patches with different window sizes and taken the intensity of those patches, and also calculated texture-based features. Random forest classifier has been used to classify this patch into different labels. A multilevel random forest technique in a hierarchical way is proposed. This solution is fast, accurate and it is very much applicable in a clinical setup.

A principal component analysis of the TCGA data for 15 cancer localizations unveils the following qualitative facts about tumors: 1) The state of a tissue in gene expression space may be described by a few variables. In particular, there is a single variable describing the progression from a normal tissue to a tumor. 2) Each cancer localization is characterized by a gene expression profile, in which genes have specific weights in the definition of the cancer state. There are no less than 2500 differentially-expressed genes, which lead to power-like tails in the expression distribution functions. 3) Tumors in different localizations share hundreds or even thousands of differentially expressed genes. There are 6 genes common to the 15 studied tumor localizations. 4) The tumor region is a kind of attractor. Tumors in advanced stages converge to this region independently of patient age or genetic variability. 5) There is a landscape of cancer in gene expression space with an approximate border separating normal tissues from tumors.

To investigate whether the pleurae, airways and vessels surrounding a nodule on non-contrast computed tomography (CT) can discriminate benign and malignant pulmonary nodules. The LIDC-IDRI dataset, one of the largest publicly available CT database, was exploited for study. A total of 1556 nodules from 694 patients were involved in statistical analysis, where nodules with average scorings <3 and >3 were respectively denoted as benign and malignant. Besides, 339 nodules from 113 patients with diagnosis ground-truth were independently evaluated. Computer algorithms were developed to segment pulmonary structures and quantify the distances to pleural surface, airways and vessels, as well as the counting number and normalized volume of airways and vessels near a nodule. Odds ratio (OR) and Chi-square (\chi^2) testing were performed to demonstrate the correlation between features of surrounding structures and nodule malignancy. A non-parametric receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was conducted in logistic regression to evaluate discrimination ability of each structure. For benign and malignant groups, the average distances from nodules to pleural surface, airways and vessels are respectively (6.56, 5.19), (37.08, 26.43) and (1.42, 1.07) mm. The correlation between nodules and the counting number of airways and vessels that contact or project towards nodules are respectively (OR=22.96, \chi^2=105.04) and (OR=7.06, \chi^2=290.11). The correlation between nodules and the volume of airways and vessels are (OR=9.19, \chi^2=159.02) and (OR=2.29, \chi^2=55.89). The areas-under-curves (AUCs) for pleurae, airways and vessels are respectively 0.5202, 0.6943 and 0.6529. Our results show that malignant nodules are often surrounded by more pulmonary structures compared with benign ones, suggesting that features of these structures could be viewed as lung cancer biomarkers.

Breast cancer is a prevalent form of cancer among women, with over 1.5 million women being diagnosed each year. Unfortunately, the survival rates for breast cancer patients in certain third-world countries, like South Africa, are alarmingly low, with only 40% of diagnosed patients surviving beyond five years. The inadequate availability of resources, including qualified pathologists, delayed diagnoses, and ineffective therapy planning, contribute to this low survival rate. To address this pressing issue, medical specialists and researchers have turned to domain-specific AI approaches, specifically deep learning models, to develop end-to-end solutions that can be integrated into computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. By improving the workflow of pathologists, these AI models have the potential to enhance the detection and diagnosis of breast cancer. This research focuses on evaluating the performance of various cutting-edge convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures in comparison to a relatively new model called the Vision Trans-former (ViT). The objective is to determine the superiority of these models in terms of their accuracy and effectiveness. The experimental results reveal that the ViT models outperform the other selected state-of-the-art CNN architectures, achieving an impressive accuracy rate of 95.15%. This study signifies a significant advancement in the field, as it explores the utilization of data augmentation and other relevant preprocessing techniques in conjunction with deep learning models for the detection and diagnosis of breast cancer using datasets of Breast Cancer Histopathological Image Classification.

Purpose. Patients with advanced cancer may undergo multiple lines of treatment, switching therapies as their disease progresses. Motivated by a study of metastatic prostate cancer, we develop a microsimulation framework to study therapy sequence. Methods. We propose a discrete-time state transition model to study two lines of anti-cancer therapy. Based on digitized published progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) curves, we infer event types (progression or death), and estimate transition probabilities using cumulative incidence functions with competing risks. Our model incorporates within-patient dependence over time, such that response to first-line therapy informs subsequent event probabilities. Parameters governing the degree of within-patient dependence can be used to calibrate the model-based results to those of a target trial. We demonstrate these methods in a study of two therapy sequences for metastatic prostate cancer, where Docetaxel (DCT) and Abiraterone Acetate (AA) are both appropriate for use in either first or second line treatment. We assess costs, Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) and Incremental Cost Effectiveness Ratio (ICER) for two treatment strategies: DCT then AA vs AA then DCT. Results. Using digitized survival curves from relevant clinical trials, we identified 8.6-13.9% of PFS times that should be categorized as deaths, allowing for estimation of cumulative incidence functions. Models assuming within-patient independence overestimated OS time, corrected with our calibration approach. Correction resulted in meaningful changes in the difference in QALYs between treatment strategies (0.07 vs 0.15) and the ICER (-\76,836/QALY vs -21,030/QALY). Conclusions. Microsimulation models can be successfully used to study cost-effectiveness of therapy sequences, taking care to account correctly for within-patient dependence.

With an estimated 160,000 deaths in 2018, lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death in the United States. Lung cancer CT screening has been shown to reduce mortality by up to 40% and is now included in US screening guidelines. Reducing the high error rates in lung cancer screening is imperative because of the high clinical and financial costs caused by diagnosis mistakes. Despite the use of standards for radiological diagnosis, persistent inter-grader variability and incomplete characterization of comprehensive imaging findings remain as limitations of current methods. These limitations suggest opportunities for more sophisticated systems to improve performance and inter-reader consistency. In this report, we reproduce a state-of-the-art deep learning algorithm for lung cancer risk prediction. Our model predicts malignancy probability and risk bucket classification from lung CT studies. This allows for risk categorization of patients being screened and suggests the most appropriate surveillance and management. Combining our solution high accuracy, consistency and fully automated nature, our approach may enable highly efficient screening procedures and accelerate the adoption of lung cancer screening.

Lung cancer is the deadliest type of cancer worldwide and late detection is the major factor for the low survival rate of patients. Low dose computed tomography has been suggested as a potential screening tool but manual screening is costly, time-consuming and prone to variability. This has fueled the development of automatic methods for the detection, segmentation and characterisation of pulmonary nodules but its application to clinical routine is challenging. In this study, a new database for the development and testing of pulmonary nodule computer-aided strategies is presented which intends to complement current databases by giving additional focus to radiologist variability and local clinical reality. State-of-the-art nodule detection, segmentation and characterization methods are tested and compared to manual annotations as well as collaborative strategies combining multiple radiologists and radiologists and computer-aided systems. It is shown that state-of-the-art methodologies can determine a patient's follow-up recommendation as accurately as a radiologist, though the nodule detection method used shows decreased performance in this database.

Survival risk stratification is an important step in clinical decision making for breast cancer management. We propose a novel deep learning approach for this purpose by integrating histopathological imaging, genetic and clinical data. It employs vision transformers, specifically the MaxViT model, for image feature extraction, and self-attention to capture intricate image relationships at the patient level. A dual cross-attention mechanism fuses these features with genetic data, while clinical data is incorporated at the final layer to enhance predictive accuracy. Experiments on the public TCGA-BRCA dataset show that our model, trained using the negative log likelihood loss function, can achieve superior performance with a mean C-index of 0.64, surpassing existing methods. This advancement facilitates tailored treatment strategies, potentially leading to improved patient outcomes.

Tumor protein P53 is believed to be involved in over half of human cancers cases, the prediction of malignancies plays essential roles not only in advance detection for cancer, but also in discovering effective prevention and treatment of cancer, till now there isn't approach be able in prediction the mutated in tumor protein P53 which is caused high ratio of human cancers like breast, Blood, skin, liver, lung, bladder etc. This research proposed a new approach for prediction pre-cancer via detection malignant mutations in tumor protein P53 using bioinformatics tools like FASTA, BLAST, CLUSTALW and TP53 databases worldwide. Implement and apply this new approach of prediction pre-cancer through mutations at tumor protein P53 shows an effective result when used more specific parameters/features to extract the prediction result that means when the user increase the number of filters of the results which obtained from the database gives more specific diagnosis and classify, addition that the detecting pre-cancer via prediction mutated tumor protein P53 will reduces a person's cancers in the future by avoiding exposure to toxins, radiation or monitoring themselves at older ages by change their food, environment, even the pace of living. Also that new approach of prediction pre-cancer will help if there is any treatment can give for that person to therapy the mutated tumor protein P53. Index Terms (Normal Homology TP53 gene, Tumor Protein P53, Oncogene Labs, GC and AT content, FASTA, BLAST, ClustalW)

Background: Cancer remains one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Comprehensive datasets that combine histopathological images with genetic and survival data across various tumour sites are essential for advancing computational pathology and personalised medicine. Results: We present SurGen, a dataset comprising 1,020 H&E-stained whole slide images (WSIs) from 843 colorectal cancer cases. The dataset includes detailed annotations for key genetic mutations (KRAS, NRAS, BRAF) and mismatch repair status, as well as survival data for 426 cases. To demonstrate SurGen's practical utility, we conducted a proof-of-concept machine learning experiment predicting mismatch repair status from the WSIs, achieving a test AUROC of 0.8316. These preliminary results underscore the dataset's potential to facilitate research in biomarker discovery, prognostic modelling, and advanced machine learning applications in colorectal cancer. Conclusions: SurGen offers a valuable resource for the scientific community, enabling studies that require high-quality WSIs linked with comprehensive clinical and genetic information on colorectal cancer. Our initial findings affirm the dataset's capacity to advance diagnostic precision and foster the development of personalised treatment strategies in colorectal oncology. Data available online at https://doi.org/10.6019/S-BIAD1285.

Recently, there has been great interest in developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled computer-aided diagnostics solutions for the diagnosis of skin cancer. With the increasing incidence of skin cancers, low awareness among a growing population, and a lack of adequate clinical expertise and services, there is an immediate need for AI systems to assist clinicians in this domain. A large number of skin lesion datasets are available publicly, and researchers have developed AI-based image classification solutions, particularly deep learning algorithms, to distinguish malignant skin lesions from benign lesions in different image modalities such as dermoscopic, clinical, and histopathology images. Despite the various claims of AI systems achieving higher accuracy than dermatologists in the classification of different skin lesions, these AI systems are still in the very early stages of clinical application in terms of being ready to aid clinicians in the diagnosis of skin cancers. In this review, we discuss advancements in the digital image-based AI solutions for the diagnosis of skin cancer, along with some challenges and future opportunities to improve these AI systems to support dermatologists and enhance their ability to diagnose skin cancer.

Skin cancer is a widespread, global, and potentially deadly disease, which over the last three decades has afflicted more lives in the USA than all other forms of cancer combined. There have been a lot of promising recent works utilizing deep network architectures, such as FCNs, U-Nets, and ResNets, for developing automated skin lesion segmentation. This paper investigates various pre- and post-processing techniques for improving the performance of U-Nets as measured by the Jaccard Index. The dataset provided as part of the "2017 ISBI Challenges on Skin Lesion Analysis Towards Melanoma Detection" was used for this evaluation and the performance of the finalist competitors was the standard for comparison. The pre-processing techniques employed in the proposed system included contrast enhancement, artifact removal, and vignette correction. More advanced image transformations, such as local binary patterns and wavelet decomposition, were also employed to augment the raw grayscale images used as network input features. While the performance of the proposed system fell short of the winners of the challenge, it was determined that using wavelet decomposition as an early transformation step improved the overall performance of the system over pre- and post-processing steps alone.

Histology review is often used as the `gold standard' for disease diagnosis. Computer aided diagnosis tools can potentially help improve current pathology workflows by reducing examination time and interobserver variability. Previous work in cancer grading has focused mainly on classifying pre-defined regions of interest (ROIs), or relied on large amounts of fine-grained labels. In this paper, we propose a two-stage attention-based multiple instance learning model for slide-level cancer grading and weakly-supervised ROI detection and demonstrate its use in prostate cancer. Compared with existing Gleason classification models, our model goes a step further by utilizing visualized saliency maps to select informative tiles for fine-grained grade classification. The model was primarily developed on a large-scale whole slide dataset consisting of 3,521 prostate biopsy slides with only slide-level labels from 718 patients. The model achieved state-of-the-art performance for prostate cancer grading with an accuracy of 85.11\% for classifying benign, low-grade (Gleason grade 3+3 or 3+4), and high-grade (Gleason grade 4+3 or higher) slides on an independent test set.

Glioblastomas are the most aggressive type of glioma, having a 5-year survival rate of 6.9%. Treatment typically involves surgery, followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and frequent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to monitor disease progression. To assess treatment response, radiologists use the Response Assessment in Neuro-Oncology (RANO) criteria to categorize the tumor into one of four labels based on imaging and clinical features: complete response, partial response, stable disease, and progressive disease. This assessment is very complex and time-consuming. Since deep learning (DL) has been widely used to tackle classification problems, this work aimed to implement the first DL pipeline for the classification of RANO criteria based on two consecutive MRI acquisitions. The models were trained and tested on the open dataset LUMIERE. Five approaches were tested: 1) subtraction of input images, 2) different combinations of modalities, 3) different model architectures, 4) different pretraining tasks, and 5) adding clinical data. The pipeline that achieved the best performance used a Densenet264 considering only T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) images as input without any pretraining. A median Balanced Accuracy of 50.96% was achieved. Additionally, explainability methods were applied. Using Saliency Maps, the tumor region was often successfully highlighted. In contrast, Grad-CAM typically failed to highlight the tumor region, with some exceptions observed in the Complete Response and Progressive Disease classes, where it effectively identified the tumor region. These results set a benchmark for future studies on glioblastoma treatment response assessment based on the RANO criteria while emphasizing the heterogeneity of factors that might play a role when assessing the tumor's response to treatment.

Breast cancer is one of the most threatening diseases in women's life; thus, the early and accurate diagnosis plays a key role in reducing the risk of death in a patient's life. Mammography stands as the reference technique for breast cancer screening; nevertheless, many countries still lack access to mammograms due to economic, social, and cultural issues. Latest advances in computational tools, infrared cameras and devices for bio-impedance quantification, have given a chance to emerge other reference techniques like thermography, infrared thermography, electrical impedance tomography and biomarkers found in blood tests, therefore being faster, reliable and cheaper than other methods. In the last two decades, the techniques mentioned above have been considered as parallel and extended approaches for breast cancer diagnosis, as well many authors concluded that false positives and false negatives rates are significantly reduced. Moreover, when a screening method works together with a computational technique, it generates a "computer-aided diagnosis" system. The present work aims to review the last breakthroughs about the three techniques mentioned earlier, suggested machine learning techniques to breast cancer diagnosis, thus, describing the benefits of some methods in relation with other ones, such as, logistic regression, decision trees, random forest, deep and convolutional neural networks. With this, we studied several hyperparameters optimization approaches with parzen tree optimizers to improve the performance of baseline models. An exploratory data analysis for each database and a benchmark of convolutional neural networks for the database of thermal images are presented. The benchmark process, reviews image classification techniques with convolutional neural networks, like, Resnet50, NasNetmobile, InceptionResnet and Xception.

Rare cancers comprise 20-25% of all malignancies but face major diagnostic challenges due to limited expert availability-especially in pediatric oncology, where they represent over 70% of cases. While pathology vision-language (VL) foundation models show promising zero-shot capabilities for common cancer subtyping, their clinical performance for rare cancers remains limited. Existing multi-instance learning (MIL) methods rely only on visual features, overlooking cross-modal knowledge and compromising interpretability critical for rare cancer diagnosis. To address this limitation, we propose PathPT, a novel framework that fully exploits the potential of vision-language pathology foundation models through spatially-aware visual aggregation and task-specific prompt tuning. Unlike conventional MIL, PathPT converts WSI-level supervision into fine-grained tile-level guidance by leveraging the zero-shot capabilities of VL models, thereby preserving localization on cancerous regions and enabling cross-modal reasoning through prompts aligned with histopathological semantics. We benchmark PathPT on eight rare cancer datasets(four adult and four pediatric) spanning 56 subtypes and 2,910 WSIs, as well as three common cancer datasets, evaluating four state-of-the-art VL models and four MIL frameworks under three few-shot settings. Results show that PathPT consistently delivers superior performance, achieving substantial gains in subtyping accuracy and cancerous region grounding ability. This work advances AI-assisted diagnosis for rare cancers, offering a scalable solution for improving subtyping accuracy in settings with limited access to specialized expertise.

Background: This study aimed to evaluate and compare the performance of classical machine learning models (CMLs) and large language models (LLMs) in predicting mortality associated with COVID-19 by utilizing a high-dimensional tabular dataset. Materials and Methods: We analyzed data from 9,134 COVID-19 patients collected across four hospitals. Seven CML models, including XGBoost and random forest (RF), were trained and evaluated. The structured data was converted into text for zero-shot classification by eight LLMs, including GPT-4 and Mistral-7b. Additionally, Mistral-7b was fine-tuned using the QLoRA approach to enhance its predictive capabilities. Results: Among the CML models, XGBoost and RF achieved the highest accuracy, with F1 scores of 0.87 for internal validation and 0.83 for external validation. In the LLM category, GPT-4 was the top performer with an F1 score of 0.43. Fine-tuning Mistral-7b significantly improved its recall from 1% to 79%, resulting in an F1 score of 0.74, which was stable during external validation. Conclusion: While LLMs show moderate performance in zero-shot classification, fine-tuning can significantly enhance their effectiveness, potentially aligning them closer to CML models. However, CMLs still outperform LLMs in high-dimensional tabular data tasks.

Accurate prognosis for an individual patient is a key component of precision oncology. Recent advances in machine learning have enabled the development of models using a wider range of data, including imaging. Radiomics aims to extract quantitative predictive and prognostic biomarkers from routine medical imaging, but evidence for computed tomography radiomics for prognosis remains inconclusive. We have conducted an institutional machine learning challenge to develop an accurate model for overall survival prediction in head and neck cancer using clinical data etxracted from electronic medical records and pre-treatment radiological images, as well as to evaluate the true added benefit of radiomics for head and neck cancer prognosis. Using a large, retrospective dataset of 2,552 patients and a rigorous evaluation framework, we compared 12 different submissions using imaging and clinical data, separately or in combination. The winning approach used non-linear, multitask learning on clinical data and tumour volume, achieving high prognostic accuracy for 2-year and lifetime survival prediction and outperforming models relying on clinical data only, engineered radiomics and deep learning. Combining all submissions in an ensemble model resulted in improved accuracy, with the highest gain from a image-based deep learning model. Our results show the potential of machine learning and simple, informative prognostic factors in combination with large datasets as a tool to guide personalized cancer care.

Recently, bladder cancer has been significantly increased in terms of incidence and mortality. Currently, two subtypes are known based on tumour growth: non-muscle invasive (NMIBC) and muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC). In this work, we focus on the MIBC subtype because it is of the worst prognosis and can spread to adjacent organs. We present a self-learning framework to grade bladder cancer from histological images stained via immunohistochemical techniques. Specifically, we propose a novel Deep Convolutional Embedded Attention Clustering (DCEAC) which allows classifying histological patches into different severity levels of the disease, according to the patterns established in the literature. The proposed DCEAC model follows a two-step fully unsupervised learning methodology to discern between non-tumour, mild and infiltrative patterns from high-resolution samples of 512x512 pixels. Our system outperforms previous clustering-based methods by including a convolutional attention module, which allows refining the features of the latent space before the classification stage. The proposed network exceeds state-of-the-art approaches by 2-3% across different metrics, achieving a final average accuracy of 0.9034 in a multi-class scenario. Furthermore, the reported class activation maps evidence that our model is able to learn by itself the same patterns that clinicians consider relevant, without incurring prior annotation steps. This fact supposes a breakthrough in muscle-invasive bladder cancer grading which bridges the gap with respect to train the model on labelled data.

In oncology, treating cancer with a beam of photons is a well established therapeutic technique, developed over 100 years, and today over 50% of cancer patients will undergo traditional X-ray radiotherapy. However, ionizing radiation therapy is not the only option, as the high-energy photons delivering their cell-killing radiation energy into cancerous tumor can lead to significant damage to healthy tissues surrounding the tumor, located throughout the beam's path. Therefore, in nowadays, advances in ionizing radiation therapy are competitive to non-ionizing ones, as for example the laser light based therapy, resulting in a synergism that has revolutionized medicine. The use of non-invasive or minimally invasive (e.g. through flexible endoscopes) therapeutic procedures in the management of patients represents a very interesting treatment option. Moreover, as the major breakthrough in cancer management is the individualized patient treatment, new biophotonic techniques, e.g. photo-activated drug carriers, help the improvement of treatment efficacy and/or normal tissue toxicity. Additionally, recent studies support that laser technology progresses could revolutionize cancer proton therapy, by reducing the cost of the needed installations. The aim of this review is to present some laser-based future objectives for cancer radiation therapy, aiming to address the relevant advances in the ionizing and non-ionizing radiation therapy, i.e. protons and heavy ions therapy, as well as photodynamic targeted and molecular therapies.

We investigate a new dynamical system that describes tumor-host interaction. The equation that describes the untreated tumor growth is based on non-extensive statistical mechanics. Recently, this model has been shown to fit successfully exponential, Gompertz, logistic, and power-law tumor growths. We have been able to include as many hallmarks of cancer as possible. We study also the dynamic response of cancer under therapy. Using our model, we can make predictions about the different outcomes when we change the parameters, and/or the initial conditions. We can determine the importance of different factors to influence tumor growth. We discover synergistic therapeutic effects of different treatments and drugs. Cancer is generally untreatable using conventional monotherapy. We consider conventional therapies, oncogene-targeted therapies, tumor-suppressors gene-targeted therapies, immunotherapies, anti-angiogenesis therapies, virotherapy, among others. We need therapies with the potential to target both tumor cells and the tumors' microenvironment. Drugs that target oncogenes and tumor-suppressor genes can be effective in the treatment of some cancers. However, most tumors do reoccur. We have found that the success of the new therapeutic agents can be seen when used in combination with other cancer-cell-killing therapies. Our results have allowed us to design a combinational therapy that can lead to the complete eradication of cancer.

Timely and accurate lymphoma diagnosis is essential for guiding cancer treatment. Standard diagnostic practice combines hematoxylin and eosin (HE)-stained whole slide images with immunohistochemistry, flow cytometry, and molecular genetic tests to determine lymphoma subtypes, a process requiring costly equipment, skilled personnel, and causing treatment delays. Deep learning methods could assist pathologists by extracting diagnostic information from routinely available HE-stained slides, yet comprehensive benchmarks for lymphoma subtyping on multicenter data are lacking. In this work, we present the first multicenter lymphoma benchmarking dataset covering four common lymphoma subtypes and healthy control tissue. We systematically evaluate five publicly available pathology foundation models (H-optimus-1, H0-mini, Virchow2, UNI2, Titan) combined with attention-based (AB-MIL) and transformer-based (TransMIL) multiple instance learning aggregators across three magnifications (10x, 20x, 40x). On in-distribution test sets, models achieve multiclass balanced accuracies exceeding 80% across all magnifications, with all foundation models performing similarly and both aggregation methods showing comparable results. The magnification study reveals that 40x resolution is sufficient, with no performance gains from higher resolutions or cross-magnification aggregation. However, on out-of-distribution test sets, performance drops substantially to around 60%, highlighting significant generalization challenges. To advance the field, larger multicenter studies covering additional rare lymphoma subtypes are needed. We provide an automated benchmarking pipeline to facilitate such future research.

Background: AI-based classification models are essential for improving lung cancer diagnosis. However, the relative performance of lesion-level versus chest-region models in internal and external datasets remains unclear. Purpose: This study evaluates the performance of lesion-level and chest-region models for lung cancer classification, comparing their effectiveness across internal Duke Lung Nodule Dataset 2024 (DLND24) and external (LUNA16, NLST) datasets, with a focus on subgroup analyses by demographics, histology, and imaging characteristics. Materials and Methods: Two AI models were trained: one using lesion-centric patches (64,64,64) and the other using chest-region patches (512,512,8). Internal validation was conducted on DLND24, while external validation utilized LUNA16 and NLST datasets. The models performances were assessed using AUC-ROC, with subgroup analyses for demographic, clinical, and imaging factors. Statistical comparisons were performed using DeLongs test. Gradient-based visualizations and probability distribution were further used for analysis. Results: The lesion-level model consistently outperformed the chest-region model across datasets. In internal validation, the lesion-level model achieved an AUC of 0.71(CI: 0.61-0.81), compared to 0.68(0.57-0.77) for the chest-region model. External validation showed similar trends, with AUCs of 0.90(0.87-0.92) and 0.81(0.79-0.82) on LUNA16 and NLST, respectively. Subgroup analyses revealed significant advantages for lesion-level models in certain histological subtypes (adenocarcinoma) and imaging conditions (CT manufacturers). Conclusion: Lesion-level models demonstrate superior classification performance, especially for external datasets and challenging subgroups, suggesting their clinical utility for precision lung cancer diagnostics.

Colorectal Cancer(CRC) poses a great risk to public health. It is the third most common cause of cancer in the US. Development of colorectal polyps is one of the earliest signs of cancer. Early detection and resection of polyps can greatly increase survival rate to 90%. Manual inspection can cause misdetections because polyps vary in color, shape, size and appearance. To this end, Computer-Aided Diagnosis systems(CADx) has been proposed that detect polyps by processing the colonoscopic videos. The system acts a secondary check to help clinicians reduce misdetections so that polyps may be resected before they transform to cancer. Polyps vary in color, shape, size, texture and appearance. As a result, the miss rate of polyps is between 6% and 27% despite the prominence of CADx solutions. Furthermore, sessile and flat polyps which have diameter less than 10 mm are more likely to be undetected. Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN) have shown promising results in polyp segmentation. However, all of these works have a supervised approach and are limited by the size of the dataset. It was observed that smaller datasets reduce the segmentation accuracy of ResUNet++. We train a U-Net to inpaint randomly dropped out pixels in the image as a proxy task. The dataset we use for pre-training is Kvasir-SEG dataset. This is followed by a supervised training on the limited Kvasir-Sessile dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that with limited annotated dataset and a larger unlabeled dataset, self-supervised approach is a better alternative than fully supervised approach. Specifically, our self-supervised U-Net performs better than five segmentation models which were trained in supervised manner on the Kvasir-Sessile dataset.

Detecting breast cancer early is of the utmost importance to effectively treat the millions of women afflicted by breast cancer worldwide every year. Although mammography is the primary imaging modality for screening breast cancer, there is an increasing interest in adding magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to screening programmes, particularly for women at high risk. Recent guidelines by the European Society of Breast Imaging (EUSOBI) recommended breast MRI as a supplemental screening tool for women with dense breast tissue. However, acquiring and reading MRI scans requires significantly more time from expert radiologists. This highlights the need to develop new automated methods to detect cancer accurately using MRI and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which have the potential to support radiologists in breast MRI interpretation and classification and help detect cancer earlier. For this reason, the ODELIA consortium has made this multi-centre dataset publicly available to assist in developing AI tools for the detection of breast cancer on MRI.

Whole-Slide Image (WSI) is an important tool for evaluating the prognosis of cancer patients. Present WSI-based prognosis studies generally follow a conventional paradigm -- cancer-specific model development -- where one cancer disease corresponds to one model and this model cannot make use of the prognostic knowledge from others. Despite its notable success in recent years, this paradigm has inherent limitations and has always been struggling with practical requirements: (i) scaling to the rare tumor diseases with very limited samples and (ii) benefiting from the generalizable prognostic knowledge in other cancers. To this end, this paper presents the first systematic study on Prognostic Knowledge Transfer in Pathology, called Path-PKT. It comprises three main parts. (1) We curate a large dataset (UNI2-h-DSS) with 13 cancers and use it to evaluate the transferability of prognostic knowledge between different cancers computationally. (2) We design experiments to understand what factors affect knowledge transfer and what causes positive transfers. (3) Motivated by empirical findings, we propose a new baseline approach (MoE-PKT) with a routing mechanism to utilize the generalizable prognostic knowledge in other cancers. Finally, we show the transferability of source models to rare tumor diseases. This study could lay solid foundations for the study of knowledge transfer in WSI-based cancer prognosis. Source code is available at https://github.com/liupei101/Path-PKT.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death. Accurate detection, segmentation, and differential diagnosis of the full taxonomy of pancreatic lesions, i.e., normal, seven major types of lesions, and other lesions, is critical to aid the clinical decision-making of patient management and treatment. However, existing works focus on segmentation and classification for very specific lesion types (PDAC) or groups. Moreover, none of the previous work considers using lesion prevalence-related non-imaging patient information to assist the differential diagnosis. To this end, we develop a meta-information-aware dual-path transformer and exploit the feasibility of classification and segmentation of the full taxonomy of pancreatic lesions. Specifically, the proposed method consists of a CNN-based segmentation path (S-path) and a transformer-based classification path (C-path). The S-path focuses on initial feature extraction by semantic segmentation using a UNet-based network. The C-path utilizes both the extracted features and meta-information for patient-level classification based on stacks of dual-path transformer blocks that enhance the modeling of global contextual information. A large-scale multi-phase CT dataset of 3,096 patients with pathology-confirmed pancreatic lesion class labels, voxel-wise manual annotations of lesions from radiologists, and patient meta-information, was collected for training and evaluations. Our results show that our method can enable accurate classification and segmentation of the full taxonomy of pancreatic lesions, approaching the accuracy of the radiologist's report and significantly outperforming previous baselines. Results also show that adding the common meta-information, i.e., gender and age, can boost the model's performance, thus demonstrating the importance of meta-information for aiding pancreatic disease diagnosis.

Lung cancer patients frequently experience breakthrough pain episodes, with up to 91% requiring timely intervention. To enable proactive pain management, we propose a hybrid machine learning and large language model pipeline that predicts pain episodes within 48 and 72 hours of hospitalization using both structured and unstructured electronic health record data. A retrospective cohort of 266 inpatients was analyzed, with features including demographics, tumor stage, vital signs, and WHO-tiered analgesic use. The machine learning module captured temporal medication trends, while the large language model interpreted ambiguous dosing records and free-text clinical notes. Integrating these modalities improved sensitivity and interpretability. Our framework achieved an accuracy of 0.874 (48h) and 0.917 (72h), with an improvement in sensitivity of 8.6% and 10.4% due to the augmentation of large language model. This hybrid approach offers a clinically interpretable and scalable tool for early pain episode forecasting, with potential to enhance treatment precision and optimize resource allocation in oncology care.

Multi-omics research has enhanced our understanding of cancer heterogeneity and progression. Investigating molecular data through multi-omics approaches is crucial for unraveling the complex biological mechanisms underlying cancer, thereby enabling effective diagnosis, treatment, and prevention strategies. However, predicting patient outcomes through integration of all available multi-omics data is an under-study research direction. Here, we present SeNMo (Self-normalizing Network for Multi-omics), a deep neural network trained on multi-omics data across 33 cancer types. SeNMo is efficient in handling multi-omics data characterized by high-width (many features) and low-length (fewer samples) attributes. We trained SeNMo for the task of overall survival using pan-cancer data involving 33 cancer sites from Genomics Data Commons (GDC). The training data includes gene expression, DNA methylation, miRNA expression, DNA mutations, protein expression modalities, and clinical data. We evaluated the model's performance in predicting overall survival using concordance index (C-Index). SeNMo performed consistently well in training regime, with the validation C-Index of 0.76 on GDC's public data. In the testing regime, SeNMo performed with a C-Index of 0.758 on a held-out test set. The model showed an average accuracy of 99.8% on the task of classifying the primary cancer type on the pan-cancer test cohort. SeNMo proved to be a mini-foundation model for multi-omics oncology data because it demonstrated robust performance, and adaptability not only across molecular data types but also on the classification task of predicting the primary cancer type of patients. SeNMo can be further scaled to any cancer site and molecular data type. We believe SeNMo and similar models are poised to transform the oncology landscape, offering hope for more effective, efficient, and patient-centric cancer care.

Millions of melanocytic skin lesions are examined by pathologists each year, the majority of which concern common nevi (i.e., ordinary moles). While most of these lesions can be diagnosed in seconds, writing the corresponding pathology report is much more time-consuming. Automating part of the report writing could, therefore, alleviate the increasing workload of pathologists. In this work, we develop a vision-language model specifically for the pathology domain of cutaneous melanocytic lesions. The model follows the Contrastive Captioner framework and was trained and evaluated using a melanocytic lesion dataset of 42,512 H&E-stained whole slide images and 19,645 corresponding pathology reports. Our results show that the quality scores of model-generated reports were on par with pathologist-written reports for common nevi, assessed by an expert pathologist in a reader study. While report generation revealed to be more difficult for rare melanocytic lesion subtypes, the cross-modal retrieval performance for these cases was considerably better.

Digital pathology enables automatic analysis of histopathological sections using artificial intelligence (AI). Automatic evaluation could improve diagnostic efficiency and help find associations between morphological features and clinical outcome. For development of such prediction models, identifying invasive epithelial cells, and separating these from benign epithelial cells and in situ lesions would be the first step. In this study, we aimed to develop an AI model for segmentation of epithelial cells in sections from breast cancer. We generated epithelial ground truth masks by restaining hematoxylin and eosin (HE) sections with cytokeratin (CK) AE1/AE3, and by pathologists' annotations. HE/CK image pairs were used to train a convolutional neural network, and data augmentation was used to make the model more robust. Tissue microarrays (TMAs) from 839 patients, and whole slide images from two patients were used for training and evaluation of the models. The sections were derived from four cohorts of breast cancer patients. TMAs from 21 patients from a fifth cohort was used as a second test set. In quantitative evaluation, a mean Dice score of 0.70, 0.79, and 0.75 for invasive epithelial cells, benign epithelial cells, and in situ lesions, respectively, were achieved. In qualitative scoring (0-5) by pathologists, results were best for all epithelium and invasive epithelium, with scores of 4.7 and 4.4. Scores for benign epithelium and in situ lesions were 3.7 and 2.0. The proposed model segmented epithelial cells in HE stained breast cancer slides well, but further work is needed for accurate division between the classes. Immunohistochemistry, together with pathologists' annotations, enabled the creation of accurate ground truths. The model is made freely available in FastPathology and the code is available at https://github.com/AICAN-Research/breast-epithelium-segmentation

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), ranking as the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, demands urgent improvements in early detection to enhance patient survival. While ultrasound remains the preferred screening modality due to its cost-effectiveness and real-time capabilities, its sensitivity (59%-78%) heavily relies on radiologists' expertise, leading to inconsistent diagnostic outcomes and operational inefficiencies. Recent advancements in AI technology offer promising solutions to bridge this gap. This study introduces the Hierarchical Sparse Query Transformer (HSQformer), a novel hybrid architecture that synergizes CNNs' local feature extraction with Vision Transformers' global contextual awareness through latent space representation and sparse learning. By dynamically activating task-specific experts via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework, HSQformer achieves hierarchical feature integration without structural redundancy. Evaluated across three clinical scenarios: single-center, multi-center, and high-risk patient cohorts, HSQformer outperforms state-of-the-art models (e.g., 95.38% AUC in multi-center testing) and matches senior radiologists' diagnostic accuracy while significantly surpassing junior counterparts. These results highlight the potential of AI-assisted tools to standardize HCC screening, reduce dependency on human expertise, and improve early diagnosis rates. The full code is available at https://github.com/Asunatan/HSQformer.

Breast cancer is a major cause of cancer death among women, emphasising the importance of early detection for improved treatment outcomes and quality of life. Mammography, the primary diagnostic imaging test, poses challenges due to the high variability and patterns in mammograms. Double reading of mammograms is recommended in many screening programs to improve diagnostic accuracy but increases radiologists' workload. Researchers explore Machine Learning models to support expert decision-making. Stand-alone models have shown comparable or superior performance to radiologists, but some studies note decreased sensitivity with multiple datasets, indicating the need for high generalisation and robustness models. This work devises MammoDG, a novel deep-learning framework for generalisable and reliable analysis of cross-domain multi-center mammography data. MammoDG leverages multi-view mammograms and a novel contrastive mechanism to enhance generalisation capabilities. Extensive validation demonstrates MammoDG's superiority, highlighting the critical importance of domain generalisation for trustworthy mammography analysis in imaging protocol variations.

Early detection of gastric cancer, a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, remains hampered by the limitations of current diagnostic technologies, leading to high rates of misdiagnosis and missed diagnoses. To address these challenges, we propose an integrated system that synergizes advanced hardware and software technologies to balance speed-accuracy. Our study introduces the One Class Twin Cross Learning (OCT-X) algorithm. Leveraging a novel fast double-threshold grid search strategy (FDT-GS) and a patch-based deep fully convolutional network, OCT-X maximizes diagnostic accuracy through real-time data processing and seamless lesion surveillance. The hardware component includes an all-in-one point-of-care testing (POCT) device with high-resolution imaging sensors, real-time data processing, and wireless connectivity, facilitated by the NI CompactDAQ and LabVIEW software. Our integrated system achieved an unprecedented diagnostic accuracy of 99.70%, significantly outperforming existing models by up to 4.47%, and demonstrated a 10% improvement in multirate adaptability. These findings underscore the potential of OCT-X as well as the integrated system in clinical diagnostics, offering a path toward more accurate, efficient, and less invasive early gastric cancer detection. Future research will explore broader applications, further advancing oncological diagnostics. Code is available at https://github.com/liu37972/Multirate-Location-on-OCT-X-Learning.git.

In the field of medical sciences, reliable detection and classification of brain tumors from images remains a formidable challenge due to the rarity of tumors within the population of patients. Therefore, the ability to detect tumors in anomaly scenarios is paramount for ensuring timely interventions and improved patient outcomes. This study addresses the issue by leveraging deep learning (DL) techniques to detect and classify brain tumors in challenging situations. The curated data set from the National Brain Mapping Lab (NBML) comprises 81 patients, including 30 Tumor cases and 51 Normal cases. The detection and classification pipelines are separated into two consecutive tasks. The detection phase involved comprehensive data analysis and pre-processing to modify the number of image samples and the number of patients of each class to anomaly distribution (9 Normal per 1 Tumor) to comply with real world scenarios. Next, in addition to common evaluation metrics for the testing, we employed a novel performance evaluation method called Patient to Patient (PTP), focusing on the realistic evaluation of the model. In the detection phase, we fine-tuned a YOLOv8n detection model to detect the tumor region. Subsequent testing and evaluation yielded competitive performance both in Common Evaluation Metrics and PTP metrics. Furthermore, using the Data Efficient Image Transformer (DeiT) module, we distilled a Vision Transformer (ViT) model from a fine-tuned ResNet152 as a teacher in the classification phase. This approach demonstrates promising strides in reliable tumor detection and classification, offering potential advancements in tumor diagnosis for real-world medical imaging scenarios.

For patients suffering from central nervous system tumors, prognosis estimation, treatment decisions, and postoperative assessments are made from the analysis of a set of magnetic resonance (MR) scans. Currently, the lack of open tools for standardized and automatic tumor segmentation and generation of clinical reports, incorporating relevant tumor characteristics, leads to potential risks from inherent decisions' subjectivity. To tackle this problem, the proposed Raidionics open-source software has been developed, offering both a user-friendly graphical user interface and stable processing backend. The software includes preoperative segmentation models for each of the most common tumor types (i.e., glioblastomas, lower grade gliomas, meningiomas, and metastases), together with one early postoperative glioblastoma segmentation model. Preoperative segmentation performances were quite homogeneous across the four different brain tumor types, with an average Dice around 85% and patient-wise recall and precision around 95%. Postoperatively, performances were lower with an average Dice of 41%. Overall, the generation of a standardized clinical report, including the tumor segmentation and features computation, requires about ten minutes on a regular laptop. The proposed Raidionics software is the first open solution enabling an easy use of state-of-the-art segmentation models for all major tumor types, including preoperative and postsurgical standardized reports.

While the use of combination therapy is increasing in prevalence for cancer treatment, it is often difficult to predict the exact interactions between different treatment forms, and their synergistic/antagonistic effects on patient health and therapy outcome. In this research, a system of ordinary differential equations is constructed to model nonlinear dynamics between tumor cells, immune cells, and three forms of therapy: chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiotherapy. This model is then used to generate optimized combination therapy plans using optimal control theory. In-silico experiments are conducted to simulate the response of the patient model to various treatment plans. This is the first mathematical model in current literature to introduce radiotherapy as an option alongside immuno- and chemotherapy, permitting more flexible and effective treatment plans that reflect modern therapeutic approaches.

Skin carcinoma is the most prevalent form of cancer globally, accounting for over $8 billion in annual healthcare expenditures. In clinical settings, physicians document patient visits using detailed SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan) notes. However, manually generating these notes is labor-intensive and contributes to clinician burnout. In this work, we propose a weakly supervised multimodal framework to generate clinically structured SOAP notes from limited inputs, including lesion images and sparse clinical text. Our approach reduces reliance on manual annotations, enabling scalable, clinically grounded documentation while alleviating clinician burden and reducing the need for large annotated data. Our method achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o, Claude, and DeepSeek Janus Pro across key clinical relevance metrics. To evaluate clinical quality, we introduce two novel metrics MedConceptEval and Clinical Coherence Score (CCS) which assess semantic alignment with expert medical concepts and input features, respectively.

Breast cancer screening plays a pivotal role in early detection and subsequent effective management of the disease, impacting patient outcomes and survival rates. This study aims to assess breast cancer screening rates nationwide in the United States and investigate the impact of social determinants of health on these screening rates. Data on mammography screening at the census tract level for 2018 and 2020 were collected from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. We developed a large dataset of social determinants of health, comprising 13 variables for 72337 census tracts. Spatial analysis employing Getis-Ord Gi statistics was used to identify clusters of high and low breast cancer screening rates. To evaluate the influence of these social determinants, we implemented a random forest model, with the aim of comparing its performance to linear regression and support vector machine models. The models were evaluated using R2 and root mean squared error metrics. Shapley Additive Explanations values were subsequently used to assess the significance of variables and direction of their influence. Geospatial analysis revealed elevated screening rates in the eastern and northern United States, while central and midwestern regions exhibited lower rates. The random forest model demonstrated superior performance, with an R2=64.53 and root mean squared error of 2.06 compared to linear regression and support vector machine models. Shapley Additive Explanations values indicated that the percentage of the Black population, the number of mammography facilities within a 10-mile radius, and the percentage of the population with at least a bachelor's degree were the most influential variables, all positively associated with mammography screening rates.

Skin carcinoma is the most prevalent form of cancer globally, accounting for over $8 billion in annual healthcare expenditures. Early diagnosis, accurate and timely treatment are critical to improving patient survival rates. In clinical settings, physicians document patient visits using detailed SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan) notes. However, manually generating these notes is labor-intensive and contributes to clinician burnout. In this work, we propose skin-SOAP, a weakly supervised multimodal framework to generate clinically structured SOAP notes from limited inputs, including lesion images and sparse clinical text. Our approach reduces reliance on manual annotations, enabling scalable, clinically grounded documentation while alleviating clinician burden and reducing the need for large annotated data. Our method achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o, Claude, and DeepSeek Janus Pro across key clinical relevance metrics. To evaluate this clinical relevance, we introduce two novel metrics MedConceptEval and Clinical Coherence Score (CCS) which assess semantic alignment with expert medical concepts and input features, respectively.

Cancer has relational information residing at varying scales, modalities, and resolutions of the acquired data, such as radiology, pathology, genomics, proteomics, and clinical records. Integrating diverse data types can improve the accuracy and reliability of cancer diagnosis and treatment. There can be disease-related information that is too subtle for humans or existing technological tools to discern visually. Traditional methods typically focus on partial or unimodal information about biological systems at individual scales and fail to encapsulate the complete spectrum of the heterogeneous nature of data. Deep neural networks have facilitated the development of sophisticated multimodal data fusion approaches that can extract and integrate relevant information from multiple sources. Recent deep learning frameworks such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers have shown remarkable success in multimodal learning. This review article provides an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art in GNNs and Transformers for multimodal data fusion in oncology settings, highlighting notable research studies and their findings. We also discuss the foundations of multimodal learning, inherent challenges, and opportunities for integrative learning in oncology. By examining the current state and potential future developments of multimodal data integration in oncology, we aim to demonstrate the promising role that multimodal neural networks can play in cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment through informed oncology practices in personalized settings.

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common cancers worldwide, so early pathological examination is very important. However, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to identify the number and type of cells on H&E images in clinical. Therefore, automatic segmentation and classification task and counting the cellular composition of H&E images from pathological sections is proposed by CoNIC Challenge 2022. We proposed a multi-scale Swin transformer with HTC for this challenge, and also applied the known normalization methods to generate more augmentation data. Finally, our strategy showed that the multi-scale played a crucial role to identify different scale features and the augmentation arose the recognition of model.

The World Health Organization added Disease X to their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic. During different virus outbreaks of the past, such as COVID-19, Influenza, Lyme Disease, and Zika virus, researchers from various disciplines utilized Google Trends to mine multimodal components of web behavior to study, investigate, and analyze the global awareness, preparedness, and response associated with these respective virus outbreaks. As the world prepares for Disease X, a dataset on web behavior related to Disease X would be crucial to contribute towards the timely advancement of research in this field. Furthermore, none of the prior works in this field have focused on the development of a dataset to compile relevant web behavior data, which would help to prepare for Disease X. To address these research challenges, this work presents a dataset of web behavior related to Disease X, which emerged from different geographic regions of the world, between February 2018 and August 2023. Specifically, this dataset presents the search interests related to Disease X from 94 geographic regions. The dataset was developed by collecting data using Google Trends. The relevant search interests for all these regions for each month in this time range are available in this dataset. This paper also discusses the compliance of this dataset with the FAIR principles of scientific data management. Finally, an analysis of this dataset is presented to uphold the applicability, relevance, and usefulness of this dataset for the investigation of different research questions in the interrelated fields of Big Data, Data Mining, Healthcare, Epidemiology, and Data Analysis with a specific focus on Disease X.

Oral cancer is highly common across the globe and is mostly diagnosed during the later stages due to the close visual similarity to benign, precancerous, and malignant lesions in the oral cavity. Implementing computer aided diagnosis systems early on has the potential to greatly improve clinical outcomes. This research intends to use deep learning to build a multiclass classifier for sixteen different oral lesions. To overcome the challenges of limited and imbalanced datasets, the proposed technique combines stratified data splitting and advanced data augmentation and oversampling to perform the classification. The experimental results, which achieved 83.33 percent accuracy, 89.12 percent precision, and 77.31 percent recall, demonstrate the superiority of the suggested model over state of the art methods now in use. The suggested model effectively conveys the effectiveness of oversampling and augmentation strategies in situations where the minority class classification performance is noteworthy. As a first step toward trustworthy computer aided diagnostic systems for the early detection of oral cancer in clinical settings, the suggested framework shows promise.

Pathology Foundation Models (FMs) hold great promise for healthcare. Before they can be used in clinical practice, it is essential to ensure they are robust to variations between medical centers. We measure whether pathology FMs focus on biological features like tissue and cancer type, or on the well known confounding medical center signatures introduced by staining procedure and other differences. We introduce the Robustness Index. This novel robustness metric reflects to what degree biological features dominate confounding features. Ten current publicly available pathology FMs are evaluated. We find that all current pathology foundation models evaluated represent the medical center to a strong degree. Significant differences in the robustness index are observed. Only one model so far has a robustness index greater than one, meaning biological features dominate confounding features, but only slightly. A quantitative approach to measure the influence of medical center differences on FM-based prediction performance is described. We analyze the impact of unrobustness on classification performance of downstream models, and find that cancer-type classification errors are not random, but specifically attributable to same-center confounders: images of other classes from the same medical center. We visualize FM embedding spaces, and find these are more strongly organized by medical centers than by biological factors. As a consequence, the medical center of origin is predicted more accurately than the tissue source and cancer type. The robustness index introduced here is provided with the aim of advancing progress towards clinical adoption of robust and reliable pathology FMs.