Artificial intelligence and neuroscience have a long and intertwined history. Advancements in neuroscience research have significantly influenced the development of artificial intelligence systems that have the potential to retain knowledge akin to humans. Building upon foundational insights from neuroscience and existing research in adversarial and continual learning fields, we introduce a novel framework that comprises two key concepts: feature distillation and re-consolidation. The framework distills continual learning (CL) robust features and rehearses them while learning the next task, aiming to replicate the mammalian brain’s process of consolidating memories through rehearsing the distilled version of the waking experiences. Furthermore, the proposed framework emulates the mammalian brain’s mechanism of memory re-consolidation, where novel experiences influence the assimilation of previous experiences via feature re-consolidation. This process incorporates the new understanding of the CL model after learning the current task into the CL-robust samples of the previous task(s) to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. The proposed framework, called Robust Rehearsal, circumvents the limitations of existing CL frameworks that rely on the availability of pre-trained Oracle CL models to pre-distill CL-robustified datasets for training subsequent CL models. We conducted extensive experiments on three datasets, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and real-world helicopter attitude datasets, demonstrating that CL models trained using Robust Rehearsal outperform their counterparts’ baseline methods. In addition, we conducted a series of experiments to assess the impact of changing memory sizes and the number of tasks, demonstrating that the baseline methods employing robust rehearsal outperform other methods trained without robust rehearsal. Lastly, to shed light on the existence of diverse features, we explore the effects of various optimization training objectives within the realms of joint, continual, and adversarial learning on feature learning in deep neural networks. Our findings indicate that the optimization objective dictates feature learning, which plays a vital role in model performance. Such observation further emphasizes the importance of rehearsing the CL-robust samples in alleviating catastrophic forgetting. In light of our experiments, closely following neuroscience insights can contribute to developing CL approaches to mitigate the long-standing challenge of catastrophic forgetting.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) remains a major clinical challenge due to its aggressive behavior and lack of targeted therapies. Accurate early prediction of response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) is essential for guiding personalized treatment strategies and improving patient outcomes. In this study, we present an attention-based multiple instance learning (MIL) framework designed to predict pathologic complete response (pCR) directly from pre-treatment hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained biopsy slides. The model was trained on a retrospective in-house cohort of 174 TNBC patients and externally validated on an independent cohort (n = 30). It achieved a mean area under the curve (AUC) of 0.85 during five-fold cross-validation and 0.78 on external testing, demonstrating robust predictive performance and generalizability. To enhance model interpretability, attention maps were spatially co-registered with multiplex immunohistochemistry (mIHC) data stained for PD-L1, CD8+ T cells, and CD163+ macrophages. The attention regions exhibited moderate spatial overlap with immune-enriched areas, with mean Intersection over Union (IoU) scores of 0.47 for PD-L1, 0.45 for CD8+ T cells, and 0.46 for CD163+ macrophages. The presence of these biomarkers in high-attention regions supports their biological relevance to NACT response in TNBC. This not only improves model interpretability but may also inform future efforts to identify clinically actionable histological biomarkers directly from H&E-stained biopsy slides, further supporting the utility of this approach for accurate NACT response prediction and advancing precision oncology in TNBC.

Diabetes is a major global health challenge, with many individuals remaining undiagnosed due to the limitations of traditional screening methods. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis offers a promising, non-invasive approach for the early detection of diabetes. This systematic review aims to critically evaluate machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models developed for non-invasive prediction of diabetes and prediabetes using ECG signals. A comprehensive literature search was conducted across PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library in accordance with PRISMA 2020 guidelines. Twenty-five studies met the inclusion criteria. Extracted data included ECG input types, model architectures, preprocessing methods, feature sets, validation strategies, and performance metrics. Most studies used small, single-site, cross-sectional datasets, with sample sizes ranging from 24 to over 190,000 individuals. ECG preprocessing methods varied widely, including filtering, normalization, and decomposition. Features were extracted from time, frequency, morphological, and non-linear domains, though formal feature selection was applied inconsistently. ML and DL models reported high internal accuracy (>90%) but most lacked external validation and subgroup performance assessments. Notably, no study specifically focused on rural or underserved populations, and only one provided open-source code. AI-based ECG analysis demonstrates strong potential for detecting diabetes; however, current research is limited by generalizability issues, lack of standardized methods, poor external validation, and insufficient transparency. Future studies should prioritize rigorous validation, reproducibility, fairness audits, and applications in rural and underserved settings to ensure equitable and clinically viable deployment of these models.

Colorectal cancer histopathological grading relies on the accurate segmentation of glandular structures. Current deep learning–based methods depend heavily on large-scale pixel-level annotations that are labor-intensive and not amenable to clinical practice. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation offers a promising alternative; yet, existing class activation map–based weakly supervised semantic segmentation approaches often produce incomplete, low-quality pseudo-masks that overemphasize discriminative regions and fail to provide reliable supervision for unannotated glandular structures, limiting their suitability for dense histopathology segmentation under sparse supervision. We propose a novel weakly supervised teacher–student framework that leverages sparse pathologists’ annotations and an Exponential Moving Average–stabilized teacher network to generate refined pseudo-masks.

Domain generalization in computational histopathology is hindered by heterogeneity in whole slide images (WSIs), caused by variations in tissue preparation, staining, and imaging conditions across institutions. Unlike machine learning systems, pathologists rely on domain-invariant morphological cues such as nuclear atypia (enlargement, irregular contours, hyperchromasia, chromatin texture, spatial disorganization), structural atypia (abnormal architecture and gland formation), and overall morphological atypia that remain diagnostic across diverse settings. Motivated by this, we hypothesize that explicitly modeling biologically robust nuclear morphology and spatial organization will enable the learning of cancer representations that are resilient to domain shifts. We propose MorphGen (Morphology-Guided Generalization), a method that integrates histopathology images, augmentations, and nuclear segmentation masks within a supervised contrastive learning framework. By aligning latent representations of images and nuclear masks, MorphGen prioritizes diagnostic features such as nuclear and morphological atypia and spatial organization over staining artifacts and domain-specific features. To further enhance out-of-distribution robustness, we incorporate stochastic weight averaging (SWA), steering optimization toward flatter minima. Attention map analyses revealed that MorphGen primarily relies on nuclear morphology, cellular composition, and spatial cell organization within tumors or normal regions for final classification. Finally, we demonstrate resilience of the learned representations to image corruptions (such as staining artifacts) and adversarial attacks, showcasing not only OOD generalization but also addressing critical vulnerabilities in current deep learning systems for digital pathology. Code, datasets, and trained models are available at: https://github.com/hikmatkhan/MorphGen