Theory, algorithms, and architectures for the formation, capture, processing, communication, analysis, and display of images, video, and multidimensional signals in a wide variety of applications. Topics of interest include: mathematical, statistical, and perceptual image and video modeling and representation; linear and nonlinear filtering, de-blurring, enhancement, restoration, and reconstruction from degraded, low-resolution or tomographic data; lossless and lossy compression and coding; segmentation, alignment, and recognition; image rendering, visualization, and printing; computational imaging, including ultrasound, tomographic and magnetic resonance imaging; and image and video analysis, synthesis, storage, search and retrieval.
We present NeuroQA, a large-scale benchmark for visual question answering in 3D brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), with 56,953 QA pairs from 12,977 subjects across 12 datasets. It spans ages 5-104 and five clinical domains: Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, tumors, white matter disease, and neurodevelopment. Unlike prior medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) efforts that operate on 2D slices or rely on narrow diagnostic labels, NeuroQA pairs every item with a full 3D volume. It evaluates 11 clinically grounded reasoning skills across Yes/No, multiple-choice, and open-ended formats. Of the 203 templates, 131 are image-grounded (answerable from a 3-plane viewer) and 72 are image-informed (ground truth from quantitative volumetry or clinical instruments). To remove text-only shortcuts, we apply answer-distribution refinement, reducing closed-format text-only accuracy from $>$80% to 44.6%; image necessity is assessed separately through an image-grounding protocol released with the benchmark. A 38-rule deterministic pipeline and two rounds of expert review verify every QA pair against FreeSurfer measurements, metadata, or radiology report fields, with zero same-subject contradictions across templates. We conduct a clinician evaluation in which two clinicians independently assess 100 frozen test items on a three-plane viewer. On closed-format (Yes/No + multiple-choice) test-public items, the best zero-shot vision-language model and a supervised 3D CNN baseline reach 47.5% and 43.7% accuracy respectively, both below the 49.4% text-only majority-template floor. NeuroQA adopts a two-tier release with public QA pairs for open-access datasets and reproducible generation scripts for datasets restricted by data use agreements (DUAs), plus subject-level splits, a held-out private test set, and an online leaderboard.
For clinical deployment, it is essential that automated diagnostic systems remain reliable when confronted with previously unseen cases, yet deep models routinely misclassify out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs with high confidence, underscoring the need for more robust OOD detection methods. Although substantial effort has been devoted to improving model robustness, most of the existing literature assumes balanced datasets, evaluates OOD detection on coarse or non-clinical OOD sources, or lacks comprehensive assessment across diverse OOD scenarios. To address the gaps, we propose a novel methodology trained on diverse and imbalanced medical datasets and evaluated across a clinically reflective OOD spectrum. Our framework comprises three key components: (1) a Nonlinear von Mises-Fisher (NvMF) classifier capable of learning non-linear decision boundaries, with theoretical proof of its asymptotic connection to cosine classifiers; (2) a multi-expert framework in which margin-aware NvMF classifiers specialise in different regions of label distribution to better handle imbalance; and (3) an outlier expert trained explicitly to distinguish inlier from outlier data, thereby strengthening OOD detection. Evaluation on RFMiD, ISIC2019, and NCTCRC datasets demonstrates consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving mean FPR95 reductions of 8.45%, 13.02%, and 36.90% respectively. These gains are further supported by comprehensive ablations that validated the contributions of each component. This enables reliable identification of unfamiliar cases for deferral to clinicians, supporting safer AI-assisted diagnosis in real-world workflows. Our code is available at https://github.com/redboxup/MARVEL.
Accelerated magnetic resonance imaging reduces acquisition time, but reconstruction from undersampled k-space can blur diagnostically relevant structures or introduce failures that are not captured by global image metrics. We propose SA-RDM-DC, a Self-Auditing Residual generative Drifting Model with Data Consistency for accelerated knee MRI. The method adapts the newly proposed generative drifting paradigm to accelerated MRI by training a physics-conditioned drift field from the zero-filled reconstruction toward the fully sampled residual correction. It predicts image- and missing-k-space residual corrections, enforces data consistency with acquired k-space, uses frequency-aware and residual drifting supervision to recover fine detail, and produces dense error maps and slice-level risk scores in the same inference pass. We evaluate SA-RDM-DC on multi-coil fastMRI knee data at acceleration factors of 4, 8, and 12, with fastMRI+ pathology annotations for region-level and classifier-based task preservation, and on SKM-TEA for zero-shot and fine-tuned protocol-shift evaluation. Compared with zero-filled reconstruction, UNet-image-SENSE, DC-UNet, Score-Diffusion, ELF-Diff, SENSE-VarNet, and MoDL baselines, SA-RDM-DC achieves the highest SSIM across fastMRI acceleration factors while retaining subsecond per-slice inference and avoiding the long sampling time of iterative diffusion baselines. In pathology-aware analysis, SA-RDM-DC preserves lesion-region structural fidelity and reduces meniscus prediction instability. Its self-auditing scores strongly identify high-error reconstructions on fastMRI and partially transfer as a selective-review signal under SKM-TEA protocol shift. These results support reconstruction evaluation that jointly considers image fidelity, pathology preservation, runtime, and case-specific reliability.
Alzheimers disease (AD) is a brain disorder that develops slowly and mainly affects memory, thinking, language, and daily activities. It is one of the most common causes of dementia and creates many difficulties for patients as well as their families. In the early stage, the symptoms are often mild and may look like normal ageing. For this reason, many people are diagnosed late, when the disease has already progressed. At present, there is no complete cure for AD. Still, early detection can help doctors manage the condition better and take suitable steps at the right time. In this study, a machine learning model is proposed to detect the early stages of Alzheimers disease using clinical details, neuropsychological test scores, and neuroimaging-related measures. The data used in this work is collected from the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). As the dataset has missing values, iterative imputation is applied to fill them. The dataset also has class imbalance, which is handled using Borderline SVM-SMOTE. After that, feature selection is carried out using wrapper-based and embedded methods so that only important features are used for training. The selected features are divided into training and testing sets, and feature scaling is applied. A stacking ensemble model is developed using Logistic Regression, Extra Trees, Bagging KNN, and LightGBM as base classifiers. Along with this, an artificial neural network is also trained on the same dataset. The performance of these models is compared using precision, recall, F1-score, and AUC-ROC. This study aims to find the best classifier and also identify important biomarkers that may help in the early diagnosis of Alzheimers disease.
Penile measurement is clinically relevant across male reproductive and urogenital health, including conditions such as micropenis, congenital and endocrine disorders, and sexual or urinary dysfunction. However, quantitative assessment of penile size has relied mainly on external length or circumference measurements, which are difficult to standardize, sensitive to measurement conditions, and unable to capture the internal portion of the penis. MRI enables volumetric assessment of the whole penis in vivo, but automated segmentation has not previously been established at population scale. Automated whole-organ volumetry would enable high-throughput phenotyping for multi-omics and clinical studies of male reproductive disease.
Here, we present a deep learning framework for whole-penis segmentation in multi-channel DIXON MRI. Using a newly curated expert-annotated training dataset ($n = 145$ subjects; $13,050$ annotated slices) and a double-annotated independent test benchmark ($n = 24$ subjects; $2,160$ double-annotated slices), we optimized a 3D nnU-Net architecture. The model achieved a 5-fold cross-validation Dice score of $0.90$ and performed at observer-level accuracy on the independent test set (Dice: $0.92$; Hausdorff distance: $3.58$).
We deployed the model in $34,412$ UK Biobank participants, enabling automated quantification of total penile tissue, including both external and internal components. Longitudinal evaluation in 2,282 men demonstrated high inter-session reproducibility ($r = 0.87$). This framework establishes a reproducible and population-scalable method for MRI-based assessment of penile anatomy and provides an open technical resource for future studies in urological imaging and male reproductive health. The trained model weights will be publicly released.
Treating images as probabilistic waves integrates physics into AI for better bias handling and noise robustness.
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This study provides a theoretical expansion of the recent Data Relativistic Uncertainty (DRU) framework by formalizing a physics-to-AI paradigm for image enhancement. By modeling images as probabilistic wave functions rather than deterministic states, the paradigm explicitly integrates wave-particle duality to illustrate the system flow of how DRU leverages the intrinsic physical uncertainty of light, a dimension requiring further theoretical discussion. Consequently, this paradigm provides a rigorous Explainable AI (XAI) approach that enhances the interpretability of how DRU mitigates illumination bias and maintains robustness against data noise.
At the heart of human visual perception lies the ability to maintain a continuous and coherent understanding of the external world. By integrating observations with accumulated experience, the human visual system can continuously adapt to variations in both the target and its surrounding environment, while preserving robust visual continuity as scene dynamics evolve. Human vision can therefore integrate prior knowledge, spatial geometry, and semantic context to understand complex scenes and their changes. As a core problem in computer vision, visual object tracking aims to bring machine perception closer to human visual perception. These capabilities are central to the task of Generic Object Tracking (GOT). In this task, a visual tracker is initialized only with the bounding box of an arbitrarily specified target in the first frame, and must continuously localize the target in subsequent dynamic visual streams. However, future events, observations, and real-world variations are inherently unpredictable; therefore, the model's generalization and online adaptation capabilities remain bottlenecks. Tracking reliability can deteriorate when the target undergoes severe deformation, is affected by complex distractors, encounters significant environmental changes, or belongs to a category unseen during training. This dissertation aims to narrow the gap between machine visual tracking systems and human visual perception by proposing a series of methods that systematically enhance the target discrimination, robust adaptation, and geometric reasoning capabilities of tracking models.
Active learning reduces labeling cost by querying the most informative unlabeled samples, but standard coreset methods ignore known data symmetries and can waste budget on transformed versions of the same instance. We propose GRINCO, a group-invariant coreset framework that performs acquisition in the quotient space induced by a transformation group, so that selection operates on orbits rather than raw samples. The method uses either canonical representatives or learned orbit-separating invariant embeddings to define practical quotient metrics, and combines quotient-space k-center selection with invariant training through an orbit-averaged loss. We further derive a generalization bound that relates excess orbit-averaged risk to quotient-space coverage, label uncertainty, and intra-orbit variability. Experiments on synthetic scale-invariant data and image benchmarks with rotation-induced redundancy show that GRINCO improves orbit coverage and achieves stronger label efficiency than conventional coreset baselines, especially when group-induced redundancy is substantial.
Short-horizon prediction is essential for electro-optical UAV tracking, especially when the target is small, maneuvering, or intermittently observed. Image center, line-of-sight, and range measurements provide direct constraints on target position, but their constraints on acceleration are weak. As a result, prediction can lag during aggressive maneuvers.
This paper proposes an image-domain tilt constrained distributed fusion method for maneuvering UAV tracking. The method uses the apparent roll and pitch of a rotorcraft target in the image as low-level maneuver cues. A weak-prior auto-labeling pipeline first generates oriented bounding box and image-domain tilt labels from synchronized video, gimbal IMU, and UAV IMU data. A YOLO-OBB detector is then trained to provide online target position and tilt measurements. The front-end Python implementation is publicly available at github.com/ShineMinxing/PythonYOLO.
In the fusion stage, the UAV state is modeled by position, velocity, and acceleration. Image-domain roll and pitch are introduced as acceleration-related pseudo-observations. For distributed tracking, one mobile gimbal camera and two fixed ground cameras are fused asynchronously. Camera attitude error states are augmented into the filter to absorb extrinsic drift and cross-camera systematic inconsistency. A Mahalanobis gate with time-since-last-valid covariance widening is used to reject false detections and handle dropouts.
In simulation, adding roll/pitch observations reduces the prediction RMSE from 1.991 m to 0.821 m and decreases the cumulative prediction error by 60.75\%. In real distributed experiments, a self-consistency evaluation shows an 18.10\% reduction in cumulative prediction error. The results show that image-domain tilt can provide useful acceleration constraints for robust short-horizon UAV prediction.
Cardiovascular disease is still one of the main causes of death around the world. Acute myocardial infarction (MI), or heart attack, claims millions of lives each year. MI happens when blood flow to the coronary arteries is blocked or reduced, which causes permanent damage to the heart muscle. Without treatment, this can lead to cardiac arrest, where the heart stops pumping blood to the organs, resulting in organ failure and death. Even survivors often face serious problems like heart failure, pulmonary edema, and asystole. Research shows that 5 to 10 percent of survivors die within the first year after an MI, and nearly half need to be hospitalized again. Early thrombolytic treatment leads to better outcomes, so there is a clear need for faster and more accurate ways to diagnose MI. Right now, doctors usually review patient history and use their own experience to find the causes of MI. This process takes a lot of time and can be inconsistent. Detecting MI accurately and quickly can help patients take better care of themselves and prevent fatal events. In this study, we introduce an automated model to predict deadly outcomes of MI and help doctors understand important biomarkers linked to its complications. This approach aims to make diagnosis clearer, faster, and more affordable. The process includes preparing the data, filling in missing values, and handling imbalanced data using SVMSMOTE, ADASYN, and class-weighted methods. We use wrapper and embedded feature selection to find the most important variables, then scale the features for consistency. The model combines Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Light-GBM, and Bagging SVM, and is further improved with an artificial neural network to increase accuracy. We evaluate all models using precision, recall, and other key measures to find the best option for clinical use.
Automated malaria diagnosis from blood smear microscopy is a critical challenge in global health AI; in resource-limited settings, the scarcity of expert microscopists remains the primary bottleneck to timely and accurate diagnosis. Three compounding failure modes prevent reliable clinical deployment of existing deep learning systems. First, end-to-end detectors treat unannotated cells as background during training, producing recall figures that are strongly influenced by annotation completeness rather than reflecting true cell recovery. Second, Non-Maximum Suppression tends to suppress valid detections in dense smear regions where infection counts matter most. Third, existing whole-slide detection pipelines lack per-cell spatial evidence for clinical audit, despite image-level explainability methods such as Grad-CAM having been applied to malaria image classification tasks. We present MalariAI, a two-stage decoupled framework that addresses all three failure modes in a unified pipeline. Stage 1 applies an annotation-agnostic distance-transform guided watershed algorithm to isolate every cell in a full 1600x1200 blood smear image, recovering 75.95% of ground-truth cells by centroid localisation across the 120-image NIH BBBC041 test set without any ground-truth input. Stage 2 fine-tunes EfficientNet-B0 with Focal Loss (gamma = 2.0, per-class inverse-frequency weights) on 64x64 crops, achieving 98.36% overall classification accuracy with 87.5% and 75.0% per-class accuracy on the rare schizont and gametocyte stages, compared to only 24.57% and 25.95% AP for a Faster R-CNN baseline on the same classes. Grad-CAM++ heatmaps generated per detected cell provide instance-level spatial evidence for clinical audit, enabling microscopists to verify model predictions at the individual parasite level without sacrificing classification performance.
MRI guided adaptive radiotherapy (MRgART) for prostate cancer (PCa) targets tumors while sparing organs from unnecessary radiation. Daily treatment adaptation requires accurate segmentation of tumors and organs. Manual delineation can be time and cost prohibitive. Deep learning segmentation methods have limited success applied to datasets distinct from training, hampering generalizability and adoption of MRgART. We develop a novel parallel route coherent mixup (PaRC-mix) training approach for single source to multi-domain generalization. PaRC-mix creates feature augmentations at multiple network layers through linear combination of features from different training samples in a batch. PaRC-mix training was implemented on two deep and residually connected networks, a multiple resolution residual network (MRRN) and UNet++ to segment PCa dominant intraprostatic lesions from apparent diffusion coefficient images. Models were trained on 2,029 samples from 3.0T GE MRI and tested on 1,547 PCa samples from 5 datasets acquired using 3T Siemens, 3T Philips, and 1.5T Elekta Unity MR-Linac scanners. PaRC-mix training led to significantly more accurate tumor detection and segmentation for both networks compared to training without mixup as well as input-mix training. PaRC-mix also achieved better recall to precision tradeoff than mixup applied only on the network backbone or input-mixup. Using a normalized composite DSC, HD95, and MSD score the accuracy gap between aggressive and non-aggressive lesions decreased from 21.1 and 19.5 for MRRN and UNet++ models trained without mixup to 5.2 and 7.9 with same models trained with PaRC-mix. This paper presents an easy to implement network agnostic approach to feature augmentation in multi-stream networks that enhances generalizability for the difficult problem of prostate cancer lesion segmentation.
This paper examines several model based approaches for retrieving surface soil moisture from ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 quad-pol imagery, over a lime stone quarry in southeastern Finland. The study primarily targets physically interpretable semi-empirical modeling approaches, with generic ML modeling used as a benchmark. Along with common polarimetric observables, we propose a generalization of the SAR time series based TU Wien soil moisture index (SMI) retrievals examined across several representational spaces derived from polarimetric coherency matrix $[T3]$. This study was conducted over a closed tailing storage facility and a landfill, with a set of 9 repeat pass PALSAR-2 images. The best semi-empirical configuration combining temporal context SMI and current observation PolSAR parameters achieved $R^2=0.67$ and RMSE $=5.65$ volumetric \% units. The strongest $SMI_{[T3]}$ approach with sediment-specific calibration, achieved $R^2=0.66$ and RMSE $=5.67$ vol. \%, which was considerably better than using $SMI_{HH}$ or $SMI_{VV}$. The proposed approach was sensitive to representations: dB-based projection outperformed linear or trace-normalized $[T3]$ representation. Factoring in sediment information dramatically improved retrieval performance compared to using global model fitting. Machine learning results closely approached but not outperformed semi-empirical model based methodologies. Similarly, they highlighted the need for sediment-specific modeling as well as the importance of including time-series/temporal backscatter dynamics during SSM retrieval. Our study demonstrated the utility of physics based SSM retrieval approaches in the complex multi-sediment mine environment under relatively scarce reference data conditions.
Echo Planar Imaging (EPI) is the standard acquisition technique for diffusion and functional neuroimaging, enabling rapid imaging but suffering from geometric distortions caused by B0 field inhomogeneities. Existing correction methods first reconstruct distorted images using parallel imaging, then estimate the B0 field and correct the distortion in the image domain. In this sequential process, reconstruction artifacts at high acceleration factors and low SNR at high diffusion b-values degrade B0 estimation and limit the overall correction quality. We propose a physics-informed framework that jointly estimates the B0 field and distortion-free image directly from k-space data, without depending on an intermediate parallel-imaging reconstruction for the correction. The image and the B0 field are each represented as a superposition of Gaussian primitives embedded within an MRI physics forward model. The explicit, continuous parameterization captures both smooth regions and tissue boundaries and supports rotated-view EPI acquisitions without interpolation. The diffusion-weighted image is modeled as real and non-negative, with the image phase absorbed into a per-shot phase factor. Rotated views distribute distortions across multiple phase-encoding orientations, improving point spread function isotropy and providing stronger constraints for B0 estimation. On in vivo brain diffusion EPI, the proposed method attains the closest brain-boundary agreement with a distortion-free structural reference, with the largest improvement over sequential methods at high b-value and high acceleration. Extensive visual comparisons further show improved detail fidelity and noise suppression.
Merge with Motion Vector Difference (MMVD) is a key coding tool in Versatile Video Coding for improving motion prediction accuracy. However, its exhaustive search strategy imposes a significant computational burden on the encoder. To address this issue, we propose a novel fast MMVD algorithm for the VVenC encoder based on fractional motion vector filter difference analysis. By approximating the 8-tap interpolation filter with a 2-tap filter, we derive a criterion based on spatial gradients and prediction residuals for estimating the potential gain of MMVD candidates. We further generalize this criterion to accommodate both shifted integer reference samples and 2D separable filtering. To minimize the overhead of the proposed method, we introduce implementation optimizations, including symmetric offset inference and cross-shaped downsampled dot-product computation. Compared with existing fast MMVD algorithms in VVenC, our method reduces the average MMVD search ratio from 21.07\% to 11.05\% and decreases the efficiency-complexity metric $\eta$ from 11.79 to 7.10 under the fast preset.
We introduce Point-supervised Multi-Object Tracking (PS-MOT) as a cost-effective alternative to traditional bounding box supervision, shifting the focus from spatial fitting to topological center-driven representation. However, PS-MOT faces challenges, e.g., spatial ambiguity and identity drift due to the lack of explicit geometric structure and scale constraints. To address these, we propose PS-Track, a hierarchical pipeline transitioning from points to instances across data, model, and loss levels. At the data level, we introduce Temporal-Feedback Prompting (TFP) to evolve points into temporally consistent pseudo-labels using negative spatial cues and motion priors. At the model level, we design the Point-Excited Wavelet Attention (PEWA) module, which leverages semantic correlations to activate high-frequency components, ``hallucinating'' object boundaries. At the loss level, Uncertainty-Guided Gaussian Learning (UGL) models pseudo-labels as probabilistic distributions, dynamically calibrating supervision intensity. Experiments on DanceTrack, EmboTrack, SportsMOT, and JRDB demonstrate that PS-Track provides a feasible and effective point-supervised alternative across diverse tracking scenarios, establishing a new state-of-the-art for point-supervised tracking. The source code is available at https://github.com/xifen523/PS-MOT.
Accurate identification of resistor values from unconstrained images remains a challenging computer vision task due to variations in lighting, orientation, scale, and background complexity. This paper presents HiRes, a hierarchical cascaded pipeline for end-to-end resistor value identification directly from full-frame images. The approach combines object detection (YOLOv8n), semantic segmentation (UNet++ with EfficientNet-B2), and structured geometric decoding via projection along the resistor axis. To improve robustness, we incorporate geometric filtering, gap-preserving band separation, and validation against the E24 resistor series. Experiments across diverse real-world images show that HiRes achieves a detection mAP50 of 0.9906, a segmentation mIoU of 0.8444, and an end-to-end identification accuracy of 85.8% (95% CI: 78.0-91.9%), outperforming the publicly available classical baseline, CVResist, which fails to generalize beyond controlled conditions. In addition, our architecture outperforms state-of-the-art MLLMs on our challenging test set, offering a lower cost, high efficiency, and an interpretable alternative method. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating learned visual representations with structured reasoning for robust resistor interpretation. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/HiRes491/HiRes.
Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is a core capability for embodied perception, and panoramic cameras are attractive for embodied systems because their 360{\deg} field of view reduces blind spots and keeps surrounding targets observable for longer durations. However, panoramic MOT is not a straightforward extension of perspective MOT. In equirectangular panoramic videos, the horizontal image domain is periodic rather than Euclidean, which breaks planar motion assumptions and makes IoU-based association unreliable near the 0{\deg}/360{\deg} seam. Meanwhile, large-FoV scenes often contain more objects, stronger scale variation, and more frequent interactions, making online association particularly sensitive to unstable frame-wise depth cues. To address these issues, we propose CylindTrack, a depth-aware cylindrical tracking-by-detection framework for panoramic MOT. CylindTrack first introduces Depth-Temporal Trajectory Modeling (DTM), which promotes instance depth from an isolated frame-wise cue to a temporally filtered trajectory-level state. To improve the reliability of depth observations, we further develop Spherical Spatio-Temporal Consistency Learning (SSTC), which combines a Temporal Mixer and Spherical Geometry-aware Attention to enhance temporal coherence and panoramic geometric alignment in depth-aware representations. Finally, we design a Topology-Aware Cylindrical Motion Model (TCMM) that lifts horizontal motion into a continuous angular state space and performs seam-consistent motion prediction and association in the periodic panoramic domain. By jointly modeling trajectory-level depth consistency and panoramic topology, CylindTrack improves identity preservation and trajectory continuity in challenging panoramic scenes. The source code will be released at https://github.com/warriordby/CylindTrack.
Objectives: To characterize residual false positives in prostate MRI detection, and to evaluate a lightweight post-hoc refinement head for case-level specificity. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study used PI-CAI (5-fold cross-validation) and Prostate158 (n=158; external). A context-aware evidence head and an 89,216-parameter refinement head were trained on a frozen detection backbone; the evidence head was also trained on four further backbones (bare nnU-Net, bare U-Net, bare Mamba, MIGF-Mamba). For each false-positive region, T2-weighted, apparent-diffusion-coefficient, and high-b-value contrast ratios versus peri-lesional rings were compared against ground-truth lesions and contralateral benign regions. Results: False positives were closer to true cancers than to benign tissue in evidence and raw T2-weighted and apparent-diffusion-coefficient contrast, reproducing 35/35 across five architectures (Cohen's d 1.10; FP/benign evidence ratio 2.38x) and 105/105 across modality-perturbation scenarios. On PI-CAI fold-0, refinement raised case-level specificity from 0.469 to 0.549 (+17.2%) at preserved sensitivity (0.943); 5-fold cross-validation showed fold-conditional behavior (9/15 observations positive; range -22% to +28%). On Prostate158, both models saturated (McNemar pooled p=0.69), while the false-positive contrast-matching finding replicated. Conclusion: Residual false positives are contrast-matched to cancer (sharing raw imaging features rather than histologically confirmed mimicry), reproducing across five architectures -- a data-level imaging property, not model-specific artifacts; post-hoc refinement adds practical specificity in-domain but is fold-conditional.
H&E-stained whole-slide images offer cohort-scale availability and rich spatial context but lack molecular specificity, whereas bulk RNA-seq provides transcriptome-wide resolution at high cost with limited archival availability. We show that training a lightweight alignment module atop frozen histopathology and RNA-Seq foundation models enables open-vocabulary molecular prompting -- querying H&E slides with gene-set signatures to predict pathway activity without sequencing or end-to-end retraining. Using contrastive learning on a multi-cancer cohort (N=1,720), we achieve a 25-fold improvement in retrieval over baseline methods. Systematic analysis reveals a graduated predictability spectrum: morphologically grounded programs (cell-cycle programs, immune-related) are most reliably predicted (R^2>0.5), while predicting pathways with no morphological footprint remains challenging as expected. We validate clinical utility on the POSEIDON clinical trial: H&E-predicted squamous cell carcinoma scores recapitulate NSCLC subtype identity and predicted IFN-gamma mirror PD-L1 tumor-cell expression groups. Furthermore, genesets describing immune activation and fibrosis predict known tumor microenvironment archetypes from histology alone. We further validate generalization of our approach across unseen cohorts and demonstrate data-efficient domain adaptation, establishing a slide-native framework for molecular analysis on H&E images.
Standard GPUs now support the 10-bit 4:2:2 demands of high-density volumetric streaming without custom chips.
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Video-based Point Cloud Compression (V-PCC) encodes volumetric data by projecting 3D geometry and texture onto 2D video frames. To prevent spatial distortion and color bleeding during 3D reconstruction, this process requires 10-bit color depth and 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, rather than the standard 8-bit 4:2:0 format. Additionally, capturing high-density dynamic point clouds requires demanding encoding parameters, such as 8K resolution at framerates up to 120 fps. Historically, the lack of 4:2:2 chroma support in older GPU hardware encoders restricted real-time V-PCC to custom Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). However, the recent introduction of NVIDIA's Blackwell GPU architecture, featuring on-chip hardware encoders with 10-bit 4:2:2 support, presents an opportunity to shift this workload to general-purpose hardware. This paper investigates the feasibility of such an approach. Using a commercially available Blackwell GPU equipped with four parallel on-die hardware encoders as a testbed, we evaluate the throughput, rate-distortion (RD) performance, and power consumption of 8K 10-bit 4:2:2 HEVC across various Split-Frame Encoding (SFE) configurations. Our results demonstrate that 4-way SFE achieves an encoding throughput of 122 fps, successfully meeting the strict real-time constraints of high-density V-PCC. Although the inability to exploit spatial redundancies across slice boundaries results in a BD-Rate penalty of up to 5%, the measured throughput and power efficiency establish standard, commercial off-the-shelf GPUs as a highly viable baseline for real-time volumetric video streaming.
Adaptive video streaming is a widely used technique for delivering video content over the internet. One of the key challenges is determining the optimal encoding settings for each video, which can vary significantly based on its content and characteristics. In this paper, we propose Compression Echo Contrastive Learning (CECL), a novel self-supervised learning framework for clustering videos based on their encoding complexity. Our method leverages the response of a video to compression - the Compression Echo - as a supervisory signal, allowing the model to capture underlying encoding characteristics during pretraining. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned representations for the downstream task of clustering videos by their encoding complexity. Our results show that CECL improves upon existing state-of-the-art visual encoders and delivers strong bitrate and quality savings against the fixed bitrate ladder.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) currently drives state-of-the-art performance in no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). However, standard SSL pipelines uniformly apply synthetic distortions across the entire image field, which can limit their sensitivity to spatially localized and co-occurring degradations encountered in real-world content. In this work, we empirically expose this representational blind spot across existing state-of-the-art encoders, demonstrating their reduced sensitivity to spatially bounded image degradations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Spatial Localized Image Degradation Embeddings for Image Quality Assessment (SLIDE-IQA). SLIDE-IQA employs a dual-branch Vision Transformer framework that injects spatially bounded degradations into a contrastive pretraining objective. To handle the spatial complexity of these degradations, we introduce a Threshold-Bounded Exclusion Mechanism, a representational design choice that resolves structural conflicts arising from spatially localized distortions to ensure the latent space respects both degradation type and spatial scale. Finally, we show that SLIDE-IQA's synthetic-only pretraining significantly improves sensitivity to localized distortions, while achieving competitive performance on NR-IQA benchmarks against existing SSL NR-IQA models.
X-ray microtomography and refined algorithms recover full text from unopened ancient papyrus without damage.
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The carbonized papyri from Herculaneum preserve the only large-scale library to survive from classical antiquity, but many unopened rolls remain unread because physical opening risks irreversible damage. X-ray computed microtomography ($\mu$CT) and virtual unwrapping offer a non-invasive route to their texts, yet previous work on sealed Herculaneum scrolls has recovered only localized readings or limited surface regions. Here, using high-resolution phase-contrast $\mu$CT acquired on the BM18 beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), together with improved computational unrolling and machine learning, we achieve the complete virtual unwrapping and reading of PHerc. 1667 under explicit coverage and papyrological-review criteria. This makes PHerc. 1667 the first Herculaneum papyrus to be fully digitally unrolled and read for extended scholarly study without physical opening. In PHerc. Paris 4, the optimized scan protocol makes ink directly visible in the tomographic volume, allowing three-dimensional ink segmentation and independent validation of surface-conditioned ink recovery. In PHerc. 139, we recover title and author-attribution evidence identifying the scroll as Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8. These results move virtual unwrapping of the Herculaneum scrolls beyond isolated demonstrations towards a scalable framework for systematic recovery of the still-unopened library.
Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) routinely records structured acquisition metadata, yet most CMR foundation models rely primarily on image-only pre-training and leave this naturally available source of weak semantic supervision largely underexplored. We propose MetaCLIP-CMR, a metadata-driven framework based on Contrastive Language--Image Pre-training (CLIP), which converts imaging modality, anatomical view, scanner vendor, field strength, and scanner model into textual supervision for CMR representation learning. The pretrained image encoder is evaluated on imaging modality classification, cine view classification, and cardiac segmentation. MetaCLIP-CMR achieves 86.8% modality accuracy and 86.5% cine view accuracy, clearly outperforming ImageNet and masked reconstruction initialisations. For downstream cardiac segmentation, MetaCLIP-CMR consistently obtains the highest Dice score across the evaluated ACDC and M&Ms cine short-axis (SAX) settings under both full-data and 20% fine-tuning regimes. Compared with recent image-focused large-scale CMR pre-training models, MetaCLIP-CMR achieves comparable ACDC segmentation performance, while requiring less than 1% of their pre-training image scale. These results suggest that metadata learning offers a natural and easy-to-use strategy for transforming routinely recorded acquisition information into effective supervision for foundation-level CMR representation learning, highlighting the promise of metadata-driven multimodal pre-training.
Different synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors vary significantly in resolution, polarization modes, and frequency bands, making it difficult to directly apply existing models to newly launched SAR satellites. These new systems require large amounts of labeled data for model retraining, but collecting sufficient data in a short time is often infeasible. To address this contradiction, this paper proposes a data generation and transfer framework, integrating a stable diffusion model with attention distillation, that leverages historical SAR data to synthesize training data tailored to the unique characteristics of new SAR systems. Specifically, we fine-tune the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) modules within the multimodal diffusion transformer (MM-DiT) architecture to enable class-controllable SAR image generation guided by textual prompts. To ensure that the generated images reflect the statistical properties and imaging characteristics of the target SAR system, we further introduce an attention distillation mechanism that transfers sensor-specific features, such as spatial texture, speckle distribution, and structural patterns, from real target-domain data to the generative model. Extensive experiments on multi-class aircraft target datasets from two real spaceborne SAR systems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in alleviating data scarcity and supporting cross-sensor remote sensing applications.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data augmentation is important for improving the generalization of data-driven SAR interpretation models, yet practical augmentation workflows are often hindered by heterogeneous dataset formats, task-dependent metadata requirements, diverse generation methods, and weak validation of generated samples. This paper presents the \textbf{S}AR \textbf{A}ugmentation and \textbf{G}eneration \textbf{A}gent (SAGA), a schema-grounded and benefit-aware agent framework for task-oriented SAR data generation and augmentation. Given a natural-language request and heterogeneous SAR inputs, SAGA extracts observable dataset facts, validates executable dataset schemas, selects feasible augmentation strategies through validator-constrained planning, and compiles the selected strategy into an auditable augmentation workflow. Generated data are further assessed by quality, distribution, SAR-artifact, duplicate, leakage, and optional downstream-task evaluators to support evidence-qualified augmentation claims. By separating semantic proposal from deterministic validation and execution, SAGA improves the reliability and reproducibility of SAR augmentation decisions. Experiments on controlled agentic benchmarks and downstream SAR interpretation tasks show that SAGA improves schema grounding, skill planning, invalid-sample rejection, and downstream augmentation utility compared with rule-based, LLM-only, ReAct-style, and fixed-augmentation baselines.
Compositor freezes static background pixels before encoding so codecs skip re-encoding them while keeping moving objects at full quality.
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Continuous-recording surveillance systems face a storage problem that codec tuning alone cannot fully solve: even at aggressive CRF settings, a static-camera scene spends most of its bits re-encoding a background that has not changed. We present BLUE, a pre-encode compositor that exploits this structure by maintaining a persistent seed frame of the background and substituting background pixels with seed pixels before the encoder runs. The encoder then emits near-free SKIP macroblocks for the frozen background, while live pixels in foreground regions are carried unchanged at full quality. We evaluate BLUE on all 308 annotated short subclips from the VIRAT Ground Surveillance Release 2.0 dataset using a six-point CRF sweep with both x264 and x265. At CRF 28, BLUE reduces file size by a mean of 34.6% (x264) / 39.4% (x265) on 95.8% / 99.4% of clips respectively. Foreground-region PSNR, computed only over VIRAT object-annotation bounding boxes, is preserved or improved on 60.7% of clips (+0.36 dB mean, +5.48 dB maximum). Full-frame perceptual quality (VMAF) drops by a median of 6.75-8.59 points; we quantify and disclose this trade-off explicitly. A lightweight deployment gate measuring the compositor's own VMAF on a 2-second prefix identifies the 40% of clips where even full-frame quality degradation is near-imperceptible (Delta VMAF <= -2.9), enabling a selective-activation strategy that retains both the storage benefit and acceptable perceptual fidelity.
Causally linking disease-related factors to image-derived biomarkers provides a powerful pathway to understanding disease mechanisms. Despite growing interest in applying causal artificial intelligence (AI) approaches for this task, these methods still need to be adapted for complex medical images, and especially, neuroimaging. However, the lack of ground-truth data presents a barrier to development. To bridge this gap, we developed and tested a method for generating synthetic neuroimages, which adhere to a user-specified causal structure describing the non-image to image variable relationships, permitting the creation of ground-truth neuroimaging datasets. In the simulated T1-weighted magnetic resonance images, anatomical variability is modeled by sampling from a subspace estimated from real data and deforming a template image to create unique simulated subjects. Causal relationships are encoded via precise volumetric changes of any region-of-interest without unwanted global artifacts. We achieved relative volume errors of 0.3-2.66% for the targeted regions-of-interest and demonstrate their statistically significant causal relationships, while maintaining mean absolute errors for non-target brain regions between 0.034-0.397ml. An initial evaluation of causal discovery methods exposes their limited ability to suppress spurious connections, highlighting the need for image-appropriate methods. Our framework is the first to enable the generation of realistic synthetic 3D neuroimages with explicit causal control that can serve as the missing ground-truth data necessary for the objective benchmarking and development of causal AI methods.
Localized generative editing needs localized evaluation: full-image identity metrics are structurally confounded under hard-composited edits. We present Envisage, a FLUX.1-Fill inpainting reference pipeline for rhinoplasty goal visualization from a single frontal photograph. The pipeline combines 8 rhinoplasty clinical presets (the released framework also includes 8 blepharoplasty and 8 rhytidectomy presets), MediaPipe masks, and hard-mask compositing. The composite preserves outside-mask pixels by construction, so full-face identity scores are dominated by copied pixels rather than by the diffusion backbone. Because full-face identity metrics cannot grade localized edits, we introduce SurgicalScore, a mask-decomposed 0-1 protocol scoring edit direction, edit magnitude, masked LPIPS, realism, and outside-mask preservation; SS_raw assigns 0.919 [0.918, 0.920] to a perfect-predictor control , anchoring the ceiling. On N=211, the paired ArcFace gain (output-to-GT minus input-to-GT) is negative for all methods (Envisage -0.048 smallest, vs. ICEdit -0.139, Kontext -0.242, InstructPix2Pix -0.294; p < 1e-4), with external validation on a 457-pair ASPS/PCA corpus showing a larger negative gap. With SurgicalScore, Envisage achieves the highest score (0.599 [0.579, 0.619]) and leads on both metrics, but the all-negative ArcFace gap shows that full-face identity is poorly aligned with localized surgical accuracy under hard compositing. A 5-seed GT-oracle (an upper bound, not a deployable result) reduces the residual ArcFace gap by 73% (-0.054 to -0.015), with positive output-to-GT gain on 33.9% of cases, indicating candidate-space headroom for a learned ranker. For localized edits, progress should be measured with edit-region fidelity rather than full-face identity metrics. We release Envisage, SurgicalScore, preset definitions, and matched split manifests.
Positron emission tomography (PET) seeks to balance diagnostic quality with ra-diation dose. Low-count PET noise is non-Gaussian, non-stationary, and spatial-ly dependent. It scales directly with local activity and is shaped by iterative recon-struction and physical corrections. Standard denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) ignore these PET properties. Their forward process adds iso-tropic, homoscedastic Gaussian noise to the target. Such an approach fails to cap-ture the realistic physical degradation generated by the imaging system. To ad-dress the above limitations, this study introduces a heteroscedastic residual diffu-sion model (HDDPM) for low-count brain PET recovery in which the forward corruption is itself intensity-aware. We designed a fixed, Poisson-based variance module to generate voxel-wise noise maps. These maps naturally place stronger noise perturbation on low-activity regions than high-activity ones, meanwhile the network predicts the low-to-standard-count residual under explicit dose-fraction conditioning. We evaluated our proposed model (HDDPM) alongside generative frameworks across three different scanners, using both internal and external da-tasets at various simulated dose levels (1% to 50%). HDDPM and isotropic DDPM showed comparable overall image quality, but HDDPM stood out in the lowest-dose (1%) external scans. It is highly reliable and significantly reduces measurement errors in both high- and low-activity regions, compared to the standard model. These results support that heteroscedastic noising with the pro-posed HDDPM is feasible, and it provides a physically motivated inductive bias for quantitative low-count PET recovery by reflecting the activity-dependent noise structure of PET.
Accurate correspondence matching across multiple angiographic views is the prerequisite for 3D coronary reconstruction and interventional guidance. However, the development of robust deep learning models for this task has been stifled by a fundamental data bottleneck. Obtaining ground truth for matching tasks in angiography pairs is prohibitively expensive and hard to scale. To overcome this barrier, we introduce a physically-grounded data generation framework that synthesizes high-fidelity Digital Reconstructed Radiographs (DRRs) from 3D Coronary CT Angiography (CCTA) volumes. Our framework generates dense, highly accurate 3D-to-2D projection labels by simulating realistic C-arm acquisition geometry on patient anatomy at zero human cost. Leveraging this dense supervision, we propose a Geometry-Informed Matching Module (GIMM) that integrates global feature and anatomical structure into correspondence learning. Unlike real angiography where assessment relies on subjective human annotation, our dataset provides 2D correspondence labels with paired images, allowing human-free evaluation. We comprehensively evaluate our method on the proposed CT-derived DRR dataset and demonstrate improvements over other matching baseline models.
Implicit neural representations (INRs) have recently emerged as a promising approach to video compression, delivering competitive rate-distortion performance alongside rapid decoding. However, existing neural video codecs struggle to balance complexity and scalability. Lightweight models often suffer from degraded compression performance when scaled to different bitrate/quality levels, whereas high-performance models exhibit limited scalability, as their model complexity typically increases with quality. This lack of a unified architecture capable of maintaining consistent complexity across a wide range of bitrates severely limits their diverse real-world deployment. To address these challenges, we introduce NVRC++, a novel INR-based video codec that utilizes a lightweight INR with multiple high-resolution feature grids, providing high scalability at any given complexity level. This is paired with an optimization framework that enables efficient overfitting on high-resolution grids for long video sequences, thereby exploiting spatio-temporal redundancies without prohibitive computational or memory overhead. Additionally, an advanced entropy model is designed for efficiently compressing the high-dimensional grid parameters. As a result, NVRC++ provides four complexity levels (from 7kMACs/pixel to 360kMACs/pixel), each spanning wide bitrate and quality ranges while supporting real-time decoding. The experimental results show that NVRC++ offers a much faster decoding speed (up to 7.6x) compared to the SOTA INR-based video codec, NVRC, while delivering comparable performance.
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have recently emerged as a promising framework for addressing the Calder\'on inverse problem from limited boundary data. In this work, we revisit neural Calder\'on inversion by introducing multiscale boundary excitations based on randomized wavelet functions and investigating the role of Fourier-feature encoding (FFE) for representing sharp conductivity variations. We propose a physics-informed reconstruction framework that represents the unknown conductivity and the associated family of electric potentials with separate neural networks conditioned on the applied boundary excitations. The governing elliptic PDE is enforced through physics-informed residuals, while finite Dirichlet-to-Neumann (DtN) data are incorporated through boundary losses. Using synthetic data from a finite-difference forward solver, we evaluate the method on conductivity fields with inclusions, sharp interfaces, smooth profiles, and heterogeneous media. Results show that the framework recovers dominant conductivity structures from finite boundary measurements with relative errors between $3\%-12\%$ approximately. We show that FFE improves the reconstruction of localized sharp features, particularly for inclusions and interfaces, but are not universally optimal, with raw-coordinate networks performing competitively for smoother fields. These results highlight coordinate representations and boundary excitation design as key factors in neural Calder\'on inversion.
Neural video codecs have surpassed classical codecs in coding efficiency but remain impractical for deployment due to cross-platform incompatibility and high computational cost. Existing quantization-based solutions fail to produce deterministic results across diverse hardware platforms, leading to catastrophic decoding failures. We introduce MLVC, a hardware-robust neural video codec designed for practical cross-platform inference. The key idea is to explicitly transmit scale parameters through the hyperprior, which guarantees entropy coding consistency across devices without requiring bit-exact arithmetic. While this increases bitrate overhead, we recover most of the coding efficiency through architectural improvements (gated memory, ReGLU activation), a long-term reference recovery mechanism, and domain-specific perceptual training. On the VCD video conferencing benchmark, MLVC achieves >70% BD-rate (MOS) improvement over hardware HEVC, the strongest deployable baseline, while reaching subjective quality competitive with DCVC-RT, which cannot operate across diverse platforms. Both the encoder and decoder run at 100 FPS on average on commodity NPUs from Apple, Intel, and Qualcomm. MLVC is the first neural video codec to combine competitive compression performance, real-time speed, and cross-platform robustness across diverse consumer devices, making it suitable for widespread deployment. Code will be released.
Computed tomography (CT) plays a crucial role in medical diagnosis, but minimizing radiation exposure while maintaining image quality remains a critical challenge. Low-dose CT (LDCT) protocols reduce radiation risks but inevitably suffer from severe noise and artifacts that compromise diagnostic accuracy. While existing deep learning methods have achieved promising results, there remains a continuous quest for generative paradigms that intrinsically capture global-to-local structural dependencies to better preserve fine anatomical details. To this end, we propose DeVAR, a novel generative framework that applies visual autoregressive modeling (VAR) to LDCT denoising for the first time. Conditioned on global context provided by LDCT prefix tokens, DeVAR progressively generates discrete token maps of the target normal-dose CT (NDCT) via next-scale prediction. Because quantization inherently discards high-frequency information, we introduce a residual refiner to capture subtle anatomical structures beyond the capacity of a discrete codebook. Finally, empowered by a dual-representation hybrid training strategy, our hybrid NDCT decoder seamlessly integrates continuous and discrete latents to reconstruct high-fidelity, detail-preserved images. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that DeVAR consistently achieves superior qualitative and quantitative performance compared to state-of-the-art LDCT denoising methods.
Diffusion posterior samplers for accelerated MRI can reconstruct accurately yet still disagree on the acquired k-space across samples, placing posterior variability on coefficients the scanner has already measured. We identify this measured-subspace leakage as a physical-admissibility failure. Under a hard-constraint model it violates the measurement constraint and inflates the reported uncertainty with disagreement about coefficients the scanner has already determined. To quantify this leakage, we introduce complementary measured- and unmeasured-subspace k-space dispersion metrics (MSD/USD). We then present Measured-Subspace Consistency (MSC), a training-free terminal correction that wraps any compatible image-space posterior sampler with a standard multi-coil consistency lock. The ideal lock follows classical range/null-space data consistency. Our contribution is to repurpose it as a black-box posterior audit and correction rather than a new reconstructor or learned sampler. Theoretically, we prove that the ideal transform confines pairwise sample differences to the MRI null space and bound the residual cross-subspace coupling left by practical sensitivity-weighted implementations. Across six base samplers and two MRI anatomies, including out-of-distribution transfer where a knee prior reconstructs brain, MSC substantially reduces measured-subspace dispersion for Soft samplers (a median 16.5x reduction for DPS across five brain contrasts, up to ~29x), while preserving unmeasured-subspace diversity and acting as a near-identity map for Consistent ones. Furthermore, MSC maintains or modestly improves PSNR/SSIM, with no retraining, retuning, or significant computational overhead.
Vehicle license plate recognition is an integral component of intelligent transportation systems. In this work, we present an embedded real-time license plate recognition system customized for developing countries. We address the challenge of handling complex, unstructured traffic scenes with diverse vehicle types while implementing the system on an embedded platform for low-cost deployment. Our method consists of license plate detection on a multi-vehicle image, followed by character recognition on the detected license plates. Both steps use lightweight convolutional neural networks to balance accuracy and efficiency. We also introduce the SL-LPR dataset of Sri Lankan road images, which contains a variety of vehicle types and traffic conditions typically seen in developing countries. On this dataset, the license plate detection and character recognition models achieved 93.6% mAP and 87.88% accuracy, respectively, and were competitive against larger models on several public datasets. To achieve real-time performance in a resource-constrained embedded environment, we applied low-bitwidth quantization using the Brevitas library and implemented FPGA acceleration for the models using the FINN framework. The end-to-end system can operate at 11.5~FPS when implemented on the Xilinx Kria KV260 platform. These results demonstrate that our system is effective for real-time license plate recognition on an embedded device, even in complex traffic scenarios. The SL-LPR dataset is available for research use at: https://github.com/sl-lpr-uom/SL-LPR.git.
Fluorescence microscopy images are degraded by noise and diffraction-induced blur, which compromise structural fidelity and limit quantitative analysis. Supervised deep learning methods achieve impressive restoration performance but require large-scale paired datasets that are difficult to obtain in practice. To address this issue, we propose SDIP, a zero-shot deep image prior (DIP) framework that sequentially performs denoising and deconvolution without external training data. An aSeqDIP-based module first suppresses noise while preserving fine structures through sequential autoencoding regularization. In the deconvolution stage, a wavelet-based background correction step is incorporated before the proposed RLG-DIP module performs artifact-reduced deconvolution. RLG-DIP uses the Richardson-Lucy deconvolution result as a physically consistent guidance prior, integrating the imaging model with the implicit prior of DIP to stabilize the ill-posed deconvolution process. Experiments on the BioSR dataset across multiple cellular structures demonstrate that SDIP improves both signal-to-noise ratio and resolution, achieving superior visual quality and improved quantitative performance on most evaluated structures. The proposed framework may also provide useful insights for designing physically guided DIP methods for other inverse problems.
Silicon photonics enables integration of optical components using standard semiconductor processes, greatly improving data communication bandwidth and energy efficiency. However, photonics integrated circuits (PICs) face unique security challenges, such as counterfeit or tampering threats, that conventional electronic security methods do not address. We propose a novel hardware fingerprinting technique that embeds two dimensional photonic crystal patterns into the density control filler regions of a PIC. Each PhC pattern is designed to resonate a specific visible to near infrared wavelengths, producing a distinctive optical signature (based on wavelength, polarization, and incident angle) for each device. Finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulation using ANSYS Lumerical is employed to optimize nanostructure dimensions and spacing so that each device's reflection/absorption spectrum contains unique narrowband peaks. No extra fabrication steps or materials are required beyond standard lithography, keeping costs low. The embedded nanostructures have sub-50nm precision, making forgery extremely difficult. Our method yields a high resolution, scalable fingerprint for silicon photonic chips, enabling cost-effective device authentication and improved supply chain security.
3D Scene Graph Generation (3DSGG) represents 3D scenes as structured object-relation-object graphs, providing a compact relational abstraction for spatial understanding. In embodied intelligence settings, the same 3D scene may be observed by agents from viewpoints that differ by yaw rotations. However, current 3DSGG models often fail to produce relation predictions that follow the expected transformation behavior under such viewpoint shifts. This behavior reveals an empirical mismatch related to predicate-level transformation heterogeneity: directional predicates such as left, front, right, and behind should transform with the observation frame, whereas most contact, support, and semantic predicates such as standing on and attached to should remain stable. To reduce this mismatch, we propose Transformation-Aware Decoupling (TAD), a viewpoint-robust 3DSGG framework that decouples relation reasoning according to predicate transformation behavior and is supported by viewpoint-stable object representations. TAD decomposes relation reasoning into two parts: one learns cues that should stay stable across viewpoints, while the other learns directional cues that should change with the observation frame. The two parts are merged for standard multi-label predicate prediction. Transformation-specific descriptors and group-aware auxiliary supervision encourage the two branches to capture complementary relation cues. Extensive experiments on 3DSSG show that TAD achieves state-of-the-art robustness under yaw viewpoint changes without training-time rotation augmentation, while maintaining competitive performance under the standard benchmark. The project page is available at https://tad-predicate.github.io/.
Reliable organ localization in abdominal CT can provide spatial priors for downstream trauma analysis. We propose CT-3GDINO, a lightweight 3D detector that adapts a Grounding-DINO-style query-based architecture to fixed organ localization using frozen pseudo-text class tokens instead of a real text encoder. The model combines a Swin3D visual backbone, bidirectional feature enhancement, pseudo-text-guided query selection, and a cross-modality decoder to predict normalized 3D boxes for liver, spleen, left kidney, right kidney, and bowel. We train and evaluate on 193 matched RSNA/RATIC CT volumes with segmentation-derived boxes. The best multi-scale model, trained from scratch, achieves 0.5830 overall top-1 class-wise mAP over 3D IoU thresholds from 0.1 to 0.7, outperforming fixed- and trainable-backbone classification-pretrained variants with 0.5570 and 0.4657 mAP. Performance is strong for coarse localization, with 0.9649 AP at IoU 0.1, but remains limited for strict box alignment, with 0.1552 AP at IoU 0.7. These results establish CT-3GDINO as an open-source baseline for pseudo-text-conditioned 3D organ localization and motivate future work on localization-aware pretraining, richer multimodal conditioning, and injury-focused detection.
X-ray computed tomography reconstruction is an ill-posed inverse problem, particularly in low-dose and sparse-angle settings where measurements are noisy and incomplete. While learned reconstruction methods such as the Learned Primal-Dual algorithm achieve strong performance, they typically rely on supervised training with access to ground-truth data, which is often unavailable in practice.
In this work, we propose a self-supervised reconstruction method by extending the Noise2Inverse framework to the Learned Primal-Dual algorithm. The resulting approach, called Noise2Inverse Learned Primal-Dual (N2I-LPD), enables training of a learned iterative reconstruction operator without ground-truth images by exploiting the statistical independence of noise in distinct measurements with respect to angular rotation of the CT-scan.
We compare the proposed method with classical reconstruction methods, as well as neural network-based approaches such as a U-Net trained within the same N2I framework. The results demonstrate that N2I-LPD achieves improved reconstruction quality, highlighting the potential of combining learned reconstruction operators with self-supervised training strategies for practical CT imaging scenarios where ground-truth data is unavailable.
Trash-qubit scores on brain patches reach 0.95 slice-level AUC and localize to tumors better than classical baselines.
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We study a quantum autoencoder (QAE) for compression-driven anomaly detection in brain MRI data. The approach leverages angle encoding to map image patches into quantum states, followed by a variational encoder-decoder architecture trained to discard information via auxiliary trash qubits. Anomaly scores reflect the degree to which inputs resist compression relative to normal data, with higher scores corresponding to deviations from the learned normal manifold. Evaluated on publicly available brain MRI DICOM datasets, the method achieves a slice-level ROC-AUC of approximately 0.95 and a patch-level ROC-AUC of approximately 0.813, outperforming classical autoencoder and PCA baselines. Analysis of the learned parameters reveals a pronounced encoder-decoder asymmetry, where effective anomaly detection arises from structured information compression within the encoder rather than increased parameter magnitude or decoder expressivity. This results in a controlled compression-reconstruction trade-off with a clear operating regime that supports principled threshold selection. Qualitative evaluation further shows that the QAE produces spatially localized anomaly heatmaps aligned with tumorous regions. The results, supported by promising baseline performances, demonstrate that quantum autoencoders provide an interpretable and controllable mechanism for anomaly detection based on incompressibility with respect to a learned latent representation. This work highlights the potential of quantum autoencoders as a principled tool for studying compression dynamics in quantum machine learning, with promising implications for decision support in medical imaging workflows.
The primary goal of Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning (RSICC) is to automatically generate descriptions of changes between remote sensing images captured at different time points. Existing models still rely on a single autoregressive generation paradigm, which tends to prioritize learning easily generated vocabulary over capturing discriminative differences between images. To address this, we reframe the training paradigm and propose a novel Difference Feature Modeling (DFM) framework. Specifically, we introduce a Text-guided Gated Contrastive Loss (TGCL) to guide the vision encoder to extract critical features from a text-modal perspective. Additionally, we incorporate a pre-trained Change Detection model to transfer stable change detection knowledge. In order to further enhance the representation, we design a Joint Feature Modeling (JFM) module to achieve the fusion of multi-scale difference representations, thereby capturing comprehensive spatiotemporal variations between multi-temporal images. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Spin plays a crucial role in many ball sports due to its effect on the trajectory of the ball. Vision-based estimation of the ball's spin during a game with conventional cameras is challenging due to the ball's small size, high speed, and fast rotation. To address these challenges, we propose an event-based active vision system that can track unmodified balls and measure their spin in real time. The system consists of an event camera for its high temporal resolution and minimal motion blur, high-speed pan/tilt galvanometer mirrors to keep the ball in the field of view, and a low-latency focus-tunable telephoto lens to increase the spatial resolution on the ball and keep it in focus. To track the ball, we use a hybrid approach that combines 2D event-based detection for centering and 3D positions from a ball localization system for re-initialization. For high-accuracy spin estimation, we propose an offline method that performs contrast maximization on the sphere (s-CMax). This method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on static balls across multiple sports (table tennis, baseball, tennis, and golf), with mean magnitude and axis errors of 1.2% and 1.5 degrees, respectively. We then develop a low-latency online method for table tennis as a case study in real-time applications. This method uses an uncertainty-aware convolutional neural network trained on pseudo-ground-truth spin labels from the offline approach, combined with a GPU-accelerated batch implementation of contrast maximization for refinement. We demonstrate reliable tracking and spin estimation with a three-view setup during professional table tennis matches, with high accuracy (8.8% magnitude and 6.4 degrees axis mismatch w.r.t. the offline method), 3 ms latency, and 750 Hz throughput.
Arbitrary slice super-resolution reconstructs isotropic volumes from anisotropic clinical acquisitions by synthesizing intermediate slices at arbitrary scales. However, treating this ill-posed inverse problem as unconstrained residual-based regression risks hallucinating anatomically implausible structures or altering the originally observed data. To address both concerns, this paper presents the Dual-Prior Null-space Learning (DP-NSL) framework, which reformulates the task as a constrained recovery process guided by two complementary priors. A Measurement-Consistent Projection (MCP) enforces a Deterministic Observation Prior: the reconstruction undergoes an exact orthogonal projection that reproduces every acquired slice with zero error, confining all learned details to the unobservable null space. Within this null space, a Mixture-of-Splines (MoS) module imposes a Geometric Continuity Prior by dynamically mixing B-spline experts of different analytic orders, allowing each anatomical region to be modeled with a content-aware level of continuity. To promote spatial coherence, a Local Spatial Consistency Decoder (LSCD) further injects local inductive bias. Experiments on three CT and one MRI benchmark show that DP-NSL outperforms existing approaches while strictly preserving measurement consistency. Code is available at https://github.com/DeepMed-Lab-ECNU/Medical-Image-Reconstruction.
Skin lesion segmentation is a key task in computer-aided dermatological diagnosis, where accuracy directly impacts downstream analysis and disease classification. However, dermoscopic images are challenging due to blurred boundaries, low contrast, large shape variations, and artifacts such as hair and shadows. Recently, diffusion models have shown strong performance in medical image segmentation thanks to their progressive denoising and distribution modeling capabilities. Nevertheless, existing diffusion-based methods still suffer from limited cross-level feature interaction and insufficient boundary detail recovery.
To address these issues, we propose MLFFM-SegDiff, a multi-level feature fusion diffusion model for skin lesion segmentation. Built on a diffusion framework, the method introduces a dual-path U-Net encoder, a Multi-Level Feature Fusion Module (MLFFM), and a boundary-sensitive loss function. The dual-path encoder enhances interaction between noisy mask features and dermoscopic image features. MLFFM improves skip connections via attention, scale alignment, and adaptive cross-level fusion. These designs enable the decoder to jointly leverage shallow boundary cues and deep semantic representations, improving mask reconstruction quality.
Experiments on ISIC2018, PH2, and HAM10000 demonstrate that MLFFM-SegDiff outperforms representative methods including DermoSegDiff, U-Net, and SwinUNETR across Accuracy, F1-score, Jaccard index, Recall, and Dice. In particular, it achieves an average Jaccard index of 0.8546 and Dice coefficient of 0.9207. These results validate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-level feature fusion strategy for improving lesion segmentation performance. The code will be released at https://github.com/Qacket/MLFFM-SegDiff.git after publication.
Event cameras asynchronously report brightness changes with microsecond-level temporal resolution, but real event data remain difficult to collect at scale because specialized sensors, careful synchronization, and task-specific annotations are required. Event-camera simulation is therefore important to event-based vision tasks. Most practical simulators build on contrast-threshold event generation, some with additional filtering, stochastic noise, or hand-tuned sensor parameters. While effective, such formulations often simplify the temporal structure produced by the lifecycle of each pixel, which can distort event timing and weaken downstream transfer. We introduce FracEvent, an event simulator that models this pixel-level lifecycle with fractional-relaxation voltage dynamics. Given a log-intensity trajectory, FracEvent drives a compact stack of relaxation modes, combines their responses into a voltage state, emits ON/OFF events by localizing threshold crossings on the continuous voltage trajectory, and updates the reference while retaining the underlying memory modes. This retained state links residual voltage response to later event timing. We evaluate FracEvent through event-stream comparison and downstream transfer on image reconstruction and optical flow estimation. Across multiple datasets, FracEvent improves the temporal structure of generated events and achieves stronger downstream-transfer results than competing simulator baselines, showing its practical value for event-camera simulation.
While traditional image restoration focuses on perceptual quality, Task-Driven Image Restoration (TDIR) aims to maximize the performance of downstream high-level vision tasks. Recent approaches leveraging generative priors have shown promise for TDIR; however, they typically suffer from computational inefficiency and potential semantic alteration by indiscriminately updating all latent tokens. In this paper, we posit that not all visual information is equally important for machine perception. Through an analysis of the latent token space, we observe that task-relevant cues are unevenly distributed across the token sequence, exhibiting index-wise specialization. This suggests that selectively refining a subset of tokens can be sufficient for task-driven objectives. Leveraging this insight, we propose TaskTok, a novel framework that selectively restores only task-relevant tokens via a learnable token switch and a lightweight token refinement module. Extensive experiments across image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection demonstrate that TaskTok significantly enhances task performance with high computational efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/jimmy9704/TaskTok
Deep learning has shown significant potential in medical image analysis, particularly for disease detection using MRI scans. Accurate and early diagnosis of brain tumors remains challenging due to the complexity of brain structures and reliance on manual interpretation. This work presents an automated deep learning-based approach for brain tumor detection from MRI images using Convolutional Neural Networks and Residual Networks. Transfer learning is applied with two pretrained architectures, ResNet18 and ResNet50, to classify MRI scans into tumor and non-tumor categories. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of 3,929 brain MRI images, evaluating the impact of model depth and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that ResNet18 achieves a higher accuracy of 97% compared to 96% for ResNet50, demonstrating better generalization on limited medical data. The proposed framework enables fast, accurate, and cost-effective brain tumor detection, supporting early diagnosis and clinical decision-making.
Patch embeddings from a pre-trained model surface recurring patterns tied to 5-year risk, including dense tissue, calcifications, and artifa
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Mammogram-based deep learning models have improved breast cancer risk prediction, but the learned imaging patterns remain underexplored. Existing interpretability methods rely on single-image saliency maps, failing to identify recurring mammographic phenotypes across large patient cohorts. By clustering patch embeddings from a pre-trained model, Mirai, we isolate recurring phenotypes linked to 5-year cancer risk. Analyses show risk-increasing phenotypes capture complex structures (e.g., dense tissue, microcalcifications) and shortcut artifacts (e.g., clips). These phenotypes correlate strongly with older age and higher BI-RADS density. Our framework connects tissue patterns to AI risk scores, revealing clinical signatures and potential latent model confounders.
Framework analyzes parameters and materials to raise inspection image quality and defect detection in advanced semiconductor packaging.
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The shift towards advanced packaging technologies, including 2.5D and 3D integration, addresses the limitations of traditional methods while meeting increasing demands for performance, miniaturization, and efficiency. These methods enhance functionality and support heterogeneous integration but also introduce metrology challenges due to complex, three-dimensional structures. X-ray imaging, crucial for nondestructive inspection, faces compatibility issues such as material density similarities and noise scattering. To address these challenges, we propose a framework based on AI-integrated Design of Experiment (DoE) to develop design guidelines to optimize X-ray compatibility during the design stage. This framework, demonstrated through a case study on Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS) packaging, systematically analyzes design parameters and material properties to develop guidelines for improved inspection accuracy. Our method integrates AI to predict outcomes and optimize processes, ensuring high-quality X-ray images and enhancing defect detection. Implementing these guidelines can significantly improve inspection accuracy and reliability, reducing production costs and supporting the efficiency and scalability of advanced semiconductor technologies.
As hardware security threats escalate across semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging, there is a growing need for novel physical mechanisms to counter sophisticated attacks such as tampering, counterfeiting, and supply chain infiltration. This paper presents Nanoelectromechanical Systems (NEMS) as an emerging class of hardware security primitives that enable physical assurance, tamper detection, and authentication at the device level. Leveraging mechanisms such as NEMS-based Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), shape memory materials, resonance-based fingerprints, and physical unlocking architectures, these systems offer enhanced resilience to reverse engineering, side-channel attacks, and environmental degradation. By harnessing mechanical unpredictability and fabrication-induced nanoscale variability, NEMS technologies introduce a physically robust and low-power alternative to conventional digital security methods. Their seamless integration into standard semiconductor workflows paves the way for scalable, verifiable, and secure solutions across defense, aerospace, critical infrastructure, and consumer electronics.
Media over QUIC enables ultra low latency video streaming over QUIC, but its default quality-switching semantics risk introducing playback gaps during periods of network congestion. The in-progress SWITCH specification for MOQ Transport aims to streamline rate adaptation for MoQ. In this work, we characterize the performance of SWITCH-style Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) for both live and time-shifted clients in a Mininet simulated topology. We validate that standard ABR algorithms can be directly applied to time-shifted playback without modification, yielding substantially higher throughput. We demonstrate that a subscriber can experience increased overall throughput after a rebuffering scenario, and we identify focal points for further optimizations of MoQ ABR switching.
The objective of this paper is to improve radiological gradings measured on MRIs of spines, by resampling scans so that the new view planes are better aligned with the target anatomy than the original sparse images. To this end, we adapt 3D Gaussian Splatting to form a volumetric reconstruction starting from sparse anisotropic MRIs, and imaging planes aligned with the anatomy relevant for clinical evaluation are then sampled and rendered. The novel view plane is optimal for diagnostic radiological grading of the target anatomy, whereas the original MRI is not. The resampled scans are then used to predict ordinal severity grades of localised stenosis conditions in spinal MRIs. We compare our method against Voxel Interpolation resampling, which takes the average of inverse-distance weighted nearest neighbour intensities for each target coordinate. Experiments show that across all stenosis conditions, resampled scans using Gaussian Splatting produce more accurate stenosis gradings compared to the raw scans which do not include the complete anatomy in-plane, as well as images resampled using Voxel Interpolation.
Risk stratification for pulmonary embolism (PE) is critical for clinical decision-making. Stratification guidelines are based on patient medical records, parameters measured from computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA), and blood tests. However, blood tests are often missing in routine practice. This work studies whether state-of-the-art models can accurately classify risk stratification from only medical records and biomarkers extracted from CTPA images. We benchmark different approaches to combine medical records and cardiac biomarkers with rich pulmonary vascular information; we add vascular biomarkers to tabular models and apply graph neural networks (GNNs) on the vascular tree's intrinsic graph representation. We use a private dataset (n=353) with uniquely complete data for PE risk stratification. Our results show that, among global features, medical records and cardiac biomarkers are the most significant predictors, while vascular biomarkers do not further improve stratification. Even more surprising, even GNNs on vascular graphs fail to outperform strong tabular baseline on global features. We consider hypotheses, on both models and data, that could explain this suboptimal performance. Our investigation suggests that, counter-intuitively, vascular graphs might hold no discriminative information for PE risk stratification. Code is available from https://github.com/creatis-myriad/GENESIS.
Richardson--Lucy (RL) deconvolution improves fluorescence microscopy images by recovering details lost to diffraction. It estimates the original fluorescence signal that most likely produced the measured photon counts under a Poisson imaging model. Although RL incorporates a physical model of fluorescence image formation and can improve contrast, deconvolution remains fundamentally ill-posed, and the measurements alone provide limited evidence for reliably reconstructing fine biological structure. Without additional structural guidance, RL can amplify noise and exhibit unstable convergence in low-photon regimes. Regularizers such as total variation (TV) reduce this instability but often introduce oversmoothing. Here, we investigate learned generative priors as a form of structural guidance for RL by integrating a score-based diffusion prior into a decoupled inverse-problem framework for fluorescence microscopy deconvolution. The diffusion prior is used during the RL optimization iterations, while RL retains Poisson data consistency. We validate the framework across diverse biological samples and cellular morphologies. The results show reduced RL noise amplification with improved preservation of weak filamentous and punctate structures under low photon counts.
Urban tree biomass remains less spatially explicitly quantified than biomass in managed forests because many estimates rely on inventories or coarse products that cannot resolve individual crowns or fine-scale heterogeneity. We present a crown-level above-ground biomass (AGB) framework for an 810~km$^2$ landscape in Ontario, Canada, using leaf-off airborne LiDAR (8--10~pulses~m$^{-2}$) and near-infrared RGB orthophotography (0.16--0.20~m) from 2018 and 2023. A dual-stream cross-attention network trained on rule-based pseudo-labels produced semantic marks for buildings, needleleaf trees, and deciduous trees, supporting crown delineation and functional-type assignment. On independently annotated withheld tiles, global/mean precision, recall, and Dice scores were 0.86, 0.83, and 0.84. Crowns were delineated with multiscale watershed segmentation in mapped tree areas, and AGB was estimated from a crown area--height power-law proxy calibrated to species-specific allometry (Lambert et al., 2005) for 21,921 inventory trees. For 18,713 inventory--segment matched pairs from a 90,726-tree held-out test set, AGB prediction achieved $R^2=0.609$ using inventory crown geometry and $R^2=0.570$ under operational segmentation, identifying crown delineation as the remaining uncertainty source. Aggregated to 30~m, estimates yielded total AGB stocks of 1.73~Tg in 2018 and 1.81~Tg in 2023 (811--850~Gg~C), local densities up to ${\sim}140$~Mg~ha$^{-1}$ along the Niagara Escarpment, and a net carbon gain of 39~Gg~C over five years. Deep-ensemble uncertainty maps highlighted high-epistemic-uncertainty areas linked to underrepresented land covers and guided assignment of uncertain crowns to a pooled allometric equation. The framework uses standard provincial data, requires no manual annotation, and produces a public bitemporal crown-level AGB database for trees outside forests at management-relevant resolution.
Robotic table tennis has emerged as a compelling benchmark for real-time robotic perception due to its fast ball dynamics and stringent timing requirements. Accurate, high-frequency, and low-latency ball state estimation is critical for reliable trajectory prediction and timely control. Traditional frame-based cameras face an inherent trade-off: low frame rates leave temporal blind spots that miss fast-moving objects and high frame rates raise data and computational cost. Event cameras instead offer microsecond temporal resolution and, under sufficient illumination, remain largely free of motion blur even at high ball speeds. However, the community lacks large-scale datasets to develop and benchmark event-based perception in realistic sports scenarios. We address this gap by introducing the first large-scale event-camera dataset for table tennis, comprising over 1000 rallies from a diverse group of players ranging from amateurs to elite-level athletes. Each recording captures the event stream alongside 14 synchronized high-speed frame-based cameras at 200 FPS, which we use to produce 1 kHz pseudo ground-truth labels for ball position, velocity, and spin. Building on this dataset, we train a convolutional neural network robust to background player motion that jointly estimates the ball's position and velocity in the image-plane from events. Treating the predicted velocity as an additional measurement in the Kalman filter reduces bounce-point prediction error by 36% relative to a position-only baseline. Finally, we close the perception-action loop by integrating the event-based system with a St\"aubli robotic arm, enabling the first real-time human-robot table tennis rallies driven by event-based perception.
Background: Response to neoadjuvant imatinib in gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) is highly variable and cannot be reliably predicted using current clinical or molecular markers. This study developed and evaluated an explainable multimodal deep learning framework integrating computed tomography (CT) imaging and clinical variables to predict treatment response. Methods: Patients from four tertiary centers were retrospectively included between 2000-2023 in independent pretraining (n=935) and prediction (n=213) cohorts. A cross-attention framework integrating clinical variables and tumor-centered CT imaging was developed to predict response to neoadjuvant imatinib. Two training strategies were evaluated: (1) self-supervised pretraining with low-rank adaptation and (2) training from scratch. Hyperparameters were optimized using SMAC3. Performance was assessed through internal cross-validation and external testing. Ablation analyses and attention-based explanations were used to quantify modality contributions. Results: Among 213 patients (54.5% responders), responders had larger tumors (112 vs. 89 mm, P=0.026), higher mitotic index (3 vs. 0, P<0.001), and more frequent KIT mutations (69.0% vs. 56.7%, P=0.019). Cross-attention models achieved the highest internal performance (AUC up to 0.99) but lower external performance (AUC 0.60-0.63). Clinical-only performance was moderate (AUC 0.66), whereas imaging-only models showed limited generalizability (AUC 0.56-0.66). Explainability analyses identified significant differences in feature importance between responders and non-responders, including CD117, BRAF, PDGFRA, age, sex, disease status, and comorbidities (FDR-adjusted P<=0.036). Conclusion: The cross-attention framework shows potential for improving imatinib response prediction in GIST while providing interpretable insights into multimodal determinants of treatment response.
Resource-constrained visual Internet of Things (IoT) systems, such as edge cameras, unmanned sensing platforms, industrial inspection nodes, and remote monitoring sensors, often need to transmit task-relevant visual evidence over low-rate wireless links to an edge/cloud service. Existing image communication methods usually compress or transmit complete global representations, leaving limited room to exploit receiver-side generative restoration. This paper proposes a semantic-aware generative image transmission framework for edge-assisted visual IoT. The image captured by an IoT visual sensor is encoded into a discrete token grid by a VQ encoder. At the IoT transmitter or nearby gateway, token recoverability, estimated from prediction entropy and local structure complexity, is fused with semantic importance obtained from instance segmentation and category-aware scoring. A spatial dispersal sampler then selects the tokens to be transmitted under a bitrate budget. The transmitter sends only the quantization indices of kept tokens and a binary mask map, while the edge/cloud receiver recovers masked tokens through MaskGIT with Halton sequence scheduling. Experiments on Kodak and VisDrone scenes under AWGN and Rayleigh channels show that the proposed method provides a flexible bitrate-quality tradeoff for narrowband visual IoT links. At 0.074 bpp, it uses 44.6% of the transmitted bits of the 0.167-bpp DeepJSCC/WITT reference while achieving 29.9 dB PSNR. A pseudo-GT downstream detection study on Kodak further shows that semantic-aware masking preserves task-relevant objects better than random masking at both 30% and 50% mask ratios.
This study introduces Blasto-Net, a multi-task deep learning model for comprehensive blastocyst analysis. The proposed model performs three tasks simultaneously in a single forward pass: segmentation of the ZP, TE, and ICM compartments, morphological grading, and implantation outcome prediction. Accurate blastocyst analysis in in vitro fertilization (IVF) is challenging. The compartments often have similar textures but very different structures. To address these challenges, Blasto-Net employs an EfficientNet-B3 encoder with a UNet-style decoder enhanced by the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and a novel Edge-Aware Attention Module (EAAM) to effectively capture both semantic and boundary information. To handle distinct compartment topologies, the network employs specialized segmentation heads and a composite region- and boundary-based loss. Additionally, Grad-CAM++ visualizations are used to verify the anatomical consistency of the model's predictions. Evaluated on a public HMC blastocyst dataset, Blasto-Net achieves Dice scores of 94.93%, 91.60%, and 88.82% for ICM, ZP, and TE, respectively, alongside an implantation F1-score of 80.0%. These results demonstrate that Blasto-Net offers an accurate, interpretable, and efficient solution for automated blastocyst assessment, with strong potential to support clinical decision-making in IVF.
Maternal-fetal US is the primary imaging modality for monitoring fetal development, yet accurate automated segmentation remains challenging due to the scarcity of pixel-level annotations. To address this issue, we propose DACL, a semi-supervised framework for robust fetal US image segmentation. DACL jointly trains a deployment-oriented lightweight convolutional network (1.47\thinsp\mathrm{M} parameters) and a Transformer-based network, leveraging labeled data for supervised learning and unlabeled data via CPS. To enhance prediction stability, we introduce a dual-agreement consistency loss that couples pixel-wise probabilistic divergence with entropy-guided confidence alignment. Unlike conventional CPS methods that enforce agreement only at the prediction level, DACL explicitly regularizes both distributional alignment and uncertainty, thereby suppressing unreliable pseudo-labels and enabling stable cross-architecture pseudo-label learning under extreme annotation scarcity. Furthermore, an interpolation-based consistency strategy using mixup is applied to unlabeled samples to enhance robustness. Under 5% labeled data, DACL improves Dice by up to 2.77% and reduces HD95 by up to 14.69 mm compared with the strongest recent semi-supervised methods, demonstrating significant improvements in boundary accuracy on both fetal head and abdomen datasets. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of agreement-based consistency learning for annotation-efficient fetal US segmentation. Our code is on GitHub.
Inverse design of nanophotonic structures is challenging due to the large design space, nonlinear structure-response relationships, and the high computational cost of iterative electromagnetic simulations. Existing deep-learning approaches typically rely on large precomputed datasets or libraries of optimized structures, which limits scalability to continuous and complex inverse-design tasks. We introduce a Dimension Expansion Network (DEN), a fully unsupervised, simulation-efficient framework for nanophotonic inverse design. DEN addresses the mismatch between low-dimensional design objectives and high-dimensional nanophotonic structures by transforming compact target parameters into structured, high-dimensional conditioning representations before inverse design. This improves target expressivity and conditioning quality for structure generation. The model is trained end-to-end using differentiable electromagnetic simulations, removing the need for any pre-generated dataset. We validate DEN on free-form metalens and asymmetric Y-splitter design problems. For metalens design, DEN achieves focal intensities comparable to adjoint-based optimization while reducing simulation cost by approximately 50% and generalizing across tens to thousands of focal targets within a shared focal region. For Y-splitter design, DEN accurately produces arbitrary power-splitting ratios using only 21 training targets and demonstrates robust broadband performance. Ablation studies and representation analyses show that dimension expansion enhances sensitivity to target variations, increases structural diversity, and reduces mode-collapse-like behavior. Overall, DEN provides a scalable conditioning strategy for inverse design with low-dimensional objectives, enabling efficient photonic design across large continuous target spaces.
Field-scale retrieval of surface soil moisture (SM), leaf area index (LAI), and plant height (PH) is essential for precision agriculture, yet it remains an ill-posed inverse problem. Concurrent variations in soil moisture and canopy density generate substantial ambiguities in radar backscatter and spectral responses, which reduces the effectiveness of traditional feedforward regression models in heterogeneous smallholder cropping systems. This study presents the Iterative Energy-Based Transformer (iEBT) for the joint retrieval of coupled soil-canopy states from Sentinel-1 C-band SAR and Sentinel-2 multispectral time series. Instead of direct regression, iEBT embeds multi-modal predictors within a shared sequence, produces an initial state estimate, and iteratively updates the target [SM, LAI, PH] vector through normalized gradient descent to minimize a learned scalar compatibility energy function. Using 700 quality-controlled field measurements from Varanasi, India, iEBT achieved the highest learned-model performance on the random test split, with a four-seed mean R^2 of 0.854 \pm 0.012 (R_SM^2 = 0.841, R_LAI^2 = 0.905, R_PH^2 = 0.821). WCM and PROSAIL were retained as physically interpretable SAR and optical reference models for comparison. Modality ablations confirmed that Sentinel-1 drives SM retrieval, while Sentinel-2 dominates LAI, whereas PH relies on combined structural-phenological signatures. Crucially, the model's terminal energy functions as an uncalibrated post-retrieval quality diagnostic; screening the 10% highest-energy samples markedly reduced target level root-mean-square errors. While leave-one-campaign-out validation highlights persistent cross-season domain shift challenges due to localized management variations, compatibility-guided multimodal fusion offers a structured self-diagnostic path toward reliable biophysical parameter estimation
Volume and quality of datasets are crucial for deep learning model training, yet they are often constrained by availability and data acquisition costs. Synthetic data augmentation can extend existing datasets with realistic images, and the quality of these images is generally assessed through fidelity metrics such as FID, KID, IS, LPIPS and SSIM that measure structural or distributional similarity. However, such metrics, including the widely used FID, focus on visual fidelity without reflecting downstream utility, and can diverge from human perception under perturbations that are imperceptible to human observers. In this work, we systematically evaluate Earth observation datasets alongside synthetic counterparts generated by deep generative models, comparing automatic metrics against human perception and downstream tasks. Our results reveal a stark misalignment: semantics-preserving perturbations such as rotation drastically alter metric scores while leaving human recognition unaffected, and synthetic samples that score poorly on automatic metrics achieve comparable or higher perceived realism, and can improve downstream performance when combined with real data. By benchmarking semantic segmentation models trained on mixed real-synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that quality metrics rooted in ImageNet-pretrained feature spaces are unreliable indicators for geospatial data. Our findings underscore that automatic quality evaluation of synthetic datasets should be grounded in downstream task performance and human evaluation.
Advanced semiconductor nodes drastically increased demand for Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), yet destructive sample preparation, slow imaging and high costs severely limit the availability of diverse datasets needed for downstream machine learning (ML). Synthetic data generation is becoming essential, but current generative models often miss TEM-specific noise, structural detail, and stochastic variability crucial for evaluation. We present a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) framework for synthetic TEM image generation under extreme data scarcity. A progressive patch-based training strategy scales from low-resolution patches to full images, enabling from-scratch training with only 15 samples. We integrate a custom TrivialAugment adaptation, cross-process domain transfer, classifier guidance, and RePaint-style inpainting, culminating in full-image generation that preserves global structural and spatial relationships in compliance with FAB metrology requirements. Beyond synthesis, we repurpose DDPM feature representations for segmentation, partitioning encoder feature maps to obtain coherent region masks. Our synthetic images achieve up to MS-SSIM > 0.98 and qualitative expert assessment consistent with structural similarity results, facilitating downstream ML training for defect detection, segmentation, and metrology while preserving statistical and physical realism.
Standardized assessment of uterine MRI remains challenging due to anatomical variability, observer dependence, and the lack of workflow-integrated automated analysis tools. This work presents Female-RHINO: (R)eproductive (H)ealth (I)maging A(N)alysis T(O)ol, a real-time AI-assisted framework for automated quantitative uterine MRI analysis and structured reporting during image acquisition. We present an end-to-end system that integrates inline communication with the MRI scanner and deep learning-based analysis to derive quantitative uterine biomarkers from sagittal T2-weighted pelvic MRI. The framework combines segmentation and anatomical landmark detection models trained and evaluated on more than 500 multi-center datasets spanning diverse protocols, vendors, and patient populations. It performs volumetry, detects and quantifies common incidental findings such as fibroids and Nabothian cysts, and extracts six anatomical landmarks for biometric assessment. Results are compiled into a structured clinician-oriented report with integrated visualizations, without manual interaction. Evaluation on independent retrospective and prospective cohorts demonstrated robust performance across varying acquisition settings. Mean Dice similarity coefficients were 0.82 for the uterus and 0.80 for fibroids, with lower but consistent agreement for Nabothian cysts. Landmark detection achieved a mean radial error of 3.7 mm. End-to-end processing was completed in under 70 seconds, enabling availability of results during the ongoing scan. Prospective deployment yielded immediate, standardized, and reproducible analyses supported by inter-observer agreement. The proposed system enables real-time scanner-integrated AI for automated uterine MRI analysis and reporting, with potential to improve standardization, efficiency, and clinical workflow in pelvic imaging.
In this study, we examine the potential of continuous ground moisture monitoring over a mining site using a combination of in-situ soil moisture sensors and multi-sensor SAR images. We focus on assessing and improving methodologies for retrieval of surface soil moisture, i.e. ground moisture, from SAR measurements focusing on detailed in situ reference observations for several key geomaterials, i.e. sediments, typical in the study site. The mining site represents a limestone quarry locate in the southeastern Finland. Our hypothesis is that sediment-specific well-calibrated models can be instrumental in improving soil moisture retrieval under different weather conditions to produce spatially explicit soil moisture estimates at high resolution compared to baseline approaches. Studied SAR data are represented by Copernicus Sentinel-1 C-band images, while auxiliary datasets include optical Sentinel-2 data. Reference data were collected using IoT enabled capacitance sensors. The examined machine learning methods include Xgboost, LightGBM, RFs, linear regression and k-nearest neighbors regression. The best performance was achieved with the most comprehensive feature set which combines Sentinel-1 backscatter, time-series based soil moisture indices, Sentinel-2 optical, topographic, and temperature predictors. In the best sediment-area-level configurations, RMSE decreased to 0.037-0.050 m^3 m^(-3) (3.7-5.0 volumetric % points), with R^2 values reaching 0.90. Tree-based ensemble methods, especially LightGBM, RF, and XGBoost, provided the most accurate and stable predictions. Accuracy varied by sediment texture, with the lowest errors for clay and organic soil and higher errors for flotation sand and gravel. Adding sediment information improved Sentinel-1-only retrievals by more than 2 vol-%, but provided little additional benefit when richer multi-source feature sets were used.
Automated diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading from colour fundus photographs can achieve strong predictive performance, but clinical interpretation requires more than an image-level label. It requires understanding how lesion evidence is distributed around retinal vessels and how this evidence relates to quantitative vascular biomarkers. We present a dual-edge spatial-Jacobian image graph for interpretable DR grading. Each fundus image is represented as a graph node with four aligned evidence streams: AutoMorph vessel information ($X_1$), DR-XAI-style lesion evidence maps ($X_2$), a 128-dimensional lesion-based contrastive image embedding ($X_3$), and AutoMorph morphometric biomarkers ($X_4$). The spatial edge branch ($X_{12}$) encodes vessel-lesion geometry, while the Jacobian branch ($X_{34}$) models embedding-biomarker sensitivity. Lightweight two-token attention fuses both edge families into a final image graph. On 2,910 matched non-augmented APTOS images, the full graph achieves 0.8076 accuracy, 0.8312 quadratic weighted kappa, 0.5915 macro-F1, and 0.9330 adjacent-grade accuracy; referable DR reaches 0.9055 accuracy and 0.9711 AUROC. The framework is positioned as an explainable representation-learning tool for lesion-biomarker hypothesis generation, rather than as a deployment-ready clinical classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/Inamullah-Colab/dual-edge-dr-graph-xai.
Automated classification of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) from peripheral blood smear images has often reported near-perfect performance on the C-NMC 2019 dataset. We show that such results can be inflated by patient-level data leakage caused by random image-level partitioning, where cells from the same subject may appear in both training and test folds. We establish a leakage-aware benchmark under a strict subject-disjoint protocol, comparing LightGBM, RBF-SVM, EfficientNet-B0, EfficientNet-B1, and ViT-Tiny. Models are developed using three subject-disjoint folds from 73 subjects and evaluated on an external preliminary-phase test set of 1,867 images from 28 unseen subjects with zero patient overlap. Beyond discrimination, we assess calibration using expected calibration error, Brier score, and temperature scaling. Under honest evaluation, EfficientNet-B1 achieves the best performance, with AUROC 0.913, sensitivity 0.87, specificity 0.80, and calibrated ECE 0.024. Frozen-feature classifiers and ViT-Tiny show high sensitivity but poor specificity, indicating a tendency to over-predict the malignant class. A random-versus-subject-disjoint ablation shows that random splitting inflates AUROC by about 0.04 even in the conservative frozen-feature setting. These findings caution against image-level evaluation on C-NMC 2019 and provide a reproducible, calibration-aware benchmark for future work.
Timely, high-resolution maps of flood extent around settlements are essential for emergency response and damage assessment. We consider airborne RGB imagery for flood mapping as it can be collected rapidly at low cost. To produce flood maps, deep learning models for water segmentation are often used. CNN based and small vision transformer models are used. However, they need much data for adaptation to a change of scenery, i.e., another flooding event. Vision foundation models or large vision transformers are known to generalize across domains. Recently, foundation models for Earth observation became available. They are pretrained on satellite data, whose spatial resolution, viewing geometry, and radiometry differ from nadir RGB imagery. Thus, adaptation is required. We investigate how a satellite-pretrained Earth observation foundation model can be adapted to centimeter-scale floodwater mapping from RGB imagery. Specifically, we fine-tune a model we call Prithvi-2.0-UPN consisting of the Prithvi-EO-2.0-600M Vision Transformer combined with a UPerNet decoder for binary water segmentation on two RGB datasets (BlessemFlood21, NeuenahrFlood). In a first experiment we observe that Prithvi-2.0-UPN reaches state-of-the-art results on BlessemFlood21 and NeuenahrFlood, when trained on their datasets. In a second experiment we show that Prithvi-2.0-UPN performs better than state-of-the-art baseline models for transfer to a new flood event (trained on BlessemFlood21, tested on NeuenahrFlood) in a zero-shot setting. However, the performance indicates room for improvement. In this respect, we investigate in a third experiment how performance improves when further fine-tuning the models with small shares of NeuenahrFlood training data: Prithvi-2.0-UPN improves the fastest and reaches almost the performance level when fully trained on NeuenahrFlood, indicating transfer capabilities.
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show great promise in volumetric medical report generation, they frequently suffer from visual hallucinations and a lack of grounding in 3D CT data. Current Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) strategies typically optimize text fidelity alone, essentially rewarding correct diagnoses derived from language priors rather than genuine visual perception. To address this, we propose cross-view aligned Evidence-driven Multimodal Reinforcement Learning (Evidence-MRL, noted as E-MRL), a reliable RL reasoning framework that formulates the generation process as a Markov Decision Process of "diagnosis-localization-verification". Unlike standard approaches, our model is explicitly trained to identify a "key evidence slice" alongside the global diagnostic report, grounding its findings in verifiable visual evidence. Crucially, we introduce a novel cross-view consistency reward, which validates the semantic alignment between the golden-standard report and a local visual re-query of the selected key slice, providing additional rewards for correctly-localized reasoning. Experiments on large-scale 3D CT tumor datasets demonstrate that E-MRL significantly reduces hallucinations and improves diagnostic accuracy compared to SFT and RL baselines, offering a clinically interpretable solution for visually-grounded and tumor analysis.
Purpose: To evaluate the feasibility and challenges of heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT scans using contrastive unpaired image translation and deep learning-based segmentation. Approach: We developed ChameleonNet, a framework utilizing the Contrastive Unpaired Translation (CUT) network with decoupled contrastive learning (DCL) loss to synthesize non-contrast CT from contrast CT scans. Using annotations of four heart chambers (left atrium (LA), left ventricle (LV), right atrium (RA), and right ventricle (RV)) from contrast scans, we trained a Hausdorff distance loss-enhanced nnU-Net on synthesized non-contrast images. The translation model was trained with 35,538 contrast-enhanced and 37,197 non-contrast CT slices. The segmentation model was trained with 292 synthesized non-contrast scans. Performance was evaluated using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 95th Hausdorff distance (HD95) on 36 synthesized non-contrast scans, and volume agreement on 36 real non-contrast CT scans was assessed using Pearson correlation, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and mean percentage error (MPE). Results: The segmentation model achieved DSC of 0.94 (0.01), 0.91 (0.04), 0.92 (0.03), 0.93 (0.02), and HD95 of 3.63 (1.49), 5.74 (4.08), 5.18 (1.77), 5.51 (3.21) mm on synthesized non-contrast images for LA, LV, RA, and RV, respectively. On real non-contrast CT scans, Pearson correlations were 0.93, 0.82, 0.87, and 0.89 (all p<0.001), with MAPE ranging from 9.22% to 20.79%, and MPE ranging from -12.52% to 4.67%. Conclusions: ChameleonNet demonstrated feasibility for heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT without manual non-contrast annotations. However, volume errors, particularly for LV and RV, indicate that further refinement and validation are needed before clinical use.
ABACUS is a unified vision-language model that handles object counting, crowd counting, referring-expression counting, and count-faithful image generation without any benchmark-specific training required. Our model is built on existing 3B-parameter unified foundation model and is adapted for object localization tasks using three key innovations: density-aware adaptive zooming with objectness maps for spatial grounding; a boundary-aware count policy via GRPO to eliminate crop-boundary errors; and a cycle-consistent GRPO strategy where the understanding branch self-critiques generated outputs, closing the understanding-generation gap without any external annotations. ABACUS achieves state-of-the-art results across seven benchmarks, outperforming both task-specific specialists and larger generalist models.
Neighboring-slice self-supervised denoising is attractive for volumetric medical imaging, yet inter-slice misalignment breaks anatomical correspondence and often yields ghosting and blurred margins when adjacent slices are used naively as targets. We propose Neighbor-Guided Patch Sampling (NGPS), a lightweight framework that constructs neighboring supervision under local inter-slice misalignment without explicit registration. To avoid learning from misleading targets, prior methods commonly mask discrepant regions, but this stabilizes training at the cost of leaving a non-trivial portion of neighboring evidence unexploited, particularly around high-frequency anatomical boundaries. NGPS addresses this by decoupling structure matching from signal retrieval: for each masked location, it searches a local neighborhood for structurally similar candidate patches using a simple guide image (e.g., fast bilateral filtering), while retrieving the supervision signal directly from the raw noisy neighbor at the matched coordinates. By matching on a noise-attenuated guide while retrieving raw values from neighboring slices, NGPS constructs local pseudo targets without a learned registration module. Across the evaluated CT and synthetic-Rician MRI settings, NGPS improves fidelity and structure-sensitive metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/cv-cho/NGPS .
Non-invasive prediction of glioma molecular status from routine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has shown promising performance, but model generalization remains challenging given small-scale matched imaging-genomic datasets. Foundation models may address this bottleneck, but a comprehensive benchmark is needed to establish the impact of diverse architectures, pre-training domains, and objectives. Given the use case of isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutation prediction from FLAIR and post-contrast T1 MRIs, we compared four image-based foundation models, BrainIAC, MRI-CORE, BiomedCLIP, and BrainDINO, against radiomics-based TabPFN and logistic regression baselines. Prediction performance and calibration were assessed across four public adult glioma cohorts and an external post-treatment cohort. Within-cohort, TabPFN matched or outperformed all visual encoders, achieving 0.92 (0.03) AUROC and 0.74 (0.17) AUPRC (mean (SD) across all datasets). Among visual encoders, BiomedCLIP performed best (0.85 (0.08) AUROC), with BrainDINO competitive (0.82 (0.09) AUROC), while MRI-specific encoders (BrainIAC, MRI-CORE) consistently underperformed. Cross-cohort transfer showed moderate AUROC degradation but stronger AUPRC sensitivity to prevalence shifts. On the external cohort, BiomedCLIP achieved the highest AUROC (0.74 (0.07)), whereas TabPFN provided superior calibration (Expected Calibration Error 0.07 (0.01)). These results indicate that representation modality and evaluation context critically influence foundation-model performance in MRI-based molecular prediction. Tabular foundation models on radiomic features provide a strong, well-calibrated baseline, while image foundation models may offer complementary value under clinically distinct distribution shifts. Code available at https://github.com/nathanhollet/idh-status-prediction
Event cameras offer distinctive advantages, including microsecond-level latency and high dynamic range, rendering them promising for challenging perception tasks. Inspired by biological vision, they output asynchronous and sparse event streams rather than dense image frames, creating a fundamental mismatch with mainstream neural networks. This survey reviews recent advances in event camera representation learning from the perspective of converting raw event streams into learnable representations. We organize existing methods into two main categories: (1) dense-based representations, which transform raw event streams into regular grid-like structures to leverage mature RGB backbones and multimodal fusion pipelines, and (2) sparse-based representations, which retain events as discrete spatio-temporal structures to preserve fine-grained temporal dynamics and data sparsity. This representation-centric organization clarifies how different representations balance structural regularity, temporal fidelity, sparsity preservation, and architectural compatibility. For each category, we examine the underlying design choices, modeling principles, and task-level implications.We further summarize standard benchmarks and evaluation settings across representative high-level perception and low-level vision tasks. Finally, we discuss open problems and outline future research directions toward more efficient, scalable, and robust event-based perception systems.
The clinical diagnosis of skin diseases is susceptible to interference from inter-class similarity of skin lesions, and over-reliance on clinicians'experience easily leads to subjective bias. Although existing deep learning aided diagnosis methods achieve competitive accuracy, they suffer from the black-box opacity of Vision Transformer (ViT) and poor adaptability to medical few-shot scenarios. Moreover, mainstream explainable algorithms generally face the bottleneck of significant accuracy degradation when improving interpretability. This paper proposes an interpretable ViT (IViT) constrained by Quadratic Programming (QP). The introduced pre-trained transfer learning adapts to few-shot feature extraction. A discrete QP feature selection framework is constructed to screen generic and discriminative features consistent with clinical diagnostic logic. A multi-objective loss function is designed to reduce feature redundancy and optimize activation distribution while preserving classification performance. Experimental results on six standard skin disease datasets show that IViT achieves an accuracy of 93.80%, only 0.21% lower than the baseline, with feature redundancy reduced by 29.5%. Its core activation regions are consistent with clinically concerned lesion areas. The proposed model balances accuracy and interpretability, providing a reliable solution for the clinical deployment of few-shot intelligent skin disease diagnosis.