PET/CT is an essential imaging instrument for lymphoma diagnosis and prognosis. PET/CT image based automatic lymphoma segmentation is increasingly used in the clinical community. U-Net-like deep learning methods have been widely used for PET/CT in this task. However, their performance is limited by the lack of sufficient annotated data, due to the existence of tumor heterogeneity. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised image generation scheme to improve the performance of another independent supervised U-Net for lymphoma segmentation by capturing metabolic anomaly appearance (MAA). Firstly, we propose an anatomical-metabolic consistency generative adversarial network (AMC-GAN) as an auxiliary branch of U-Net. Specifically, AMC-GAN learns normal anatomical and metabolic information representations using co-aligned whole-body PET/CT scans. In the generator of AMC-GAN, we propose a complementary attention block to enhance the feature representation of low-intensity areas. Then, the trained AMC-GAN is used to reconstruct the corresponding pseudo-normal PET scans to capture MAAs. Finally, combined with the original PET/CT images, MAAs are used as the prior information for improving the performance of lymphoma segmentation. Experiments are conducted on a clinical dataset containing 191 normal subjects and 53 patients with lymphomas. The results demonstrate that the anatomical-metabolic consistency representations obtained from unlabeled paired PET/CT scans can be helpful for more accurate lymphoma segmentation, which suggest the potential of our approach to support physician diagnosis in practical clinical applications.
9 May 2025 in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Cervical cancer is a malignant tumor that endangers women's life and health. While deep learning has enhanced the accuracy of cervical cell classification, there remain obstacles impeding further performance enhancement, including the similarities between different categories, variability between single cells and cell clusters, as well as the accuracy of annotations. To address these issues, a novel multi-task collaborative framework for cervical cell classification is proposed. Specifically, to solve the similarity between different categories, we propose a grouping cell contrast auxiliary branch, which divides cervical cells into different groups and utilizes supervised contrastive learning to learn representative feature between different categories. And we introduce a multi-level cell classification auxiliary branch that simultaneously performs 5-class, 3-class, and 2-class classification tasks, and explicitly constrains the inter-class relationship learning of cervical cells. Furthermore, to solve the variations within the same category of single cells and cell clusters, we propose an image reconstruction auxiliary branch, which encourages the model to learn more contextual features. Finally, to solve subjectivity and accuracy of annotations, we introduce a soft label distillation auxiliary branch, which constrains the consistency of probability distributions between the encoder and the momentum encoder. It is worth noting that these auxiliary branches only work during training and will not add additional computational consumption during inference. We validate on the HSJCC, DSCC and SIPaKMeD datasets. Compared to existing methods, our approach has achieved outstanding performance and effectively mitigates the issues raised, demonstrating its effectiveness in automated cervical cell classification.
Diabetes is a chronic disease that poses a serious threat to health, and its early risk prediction has been a hot research topic in the field of medical artificial intelligence. Routine medical checkups are the most common way to monitor people’s health status, and the data from medical checkups contain rich diagnostic information, which is valuable for diabetes risk prediction. Currently, most of the available studies on diabetes risk prediction are based on publicly available datasets, and the models and algorithms do not work well on real clinical datasets. Real routine checkup data are characterized by complex information, diverse features, high redundancy and poor balance, which pose great challenges for diabetes risk prediction. To address this problem, this paper proposes a multi-strategy data augmentation-based diabetes risk prediction method, after completing data pre-processing and feature selection, a counterfactual-based data balancing strategy is used to augment a minority class of instances, and a density clustering-based supplemental counterfactual data augmentation strategy is proposed to address the problem of insufficient representation of generated instances in the counterfactual method. Moreover, the uncertainty-weighted method is used in the model training phase. Based on the real checkup dataset, five machine learning methods including Logistic Regression (LR), SVM, Decision Tree, Random Forest and Gradient Boosting are used to model and use 5-fold cross-validation to carry out diabetes risk assessment and prediction. The experimental results showed that the sensitivity and precision of the models were significantly improved compared with the existing methods, and the sensitivity of the LR model for diabetes risk prediction on the real routine checkup dataset reached more than 90[ ], which meet the requirements of clinical application.
1 October 2025 in Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology
Background: Cancer metastasis usually means that cancer cells spread to other tissues or organs, and the condition worsens. Identifying whether cancer has metastasized can help doctors infer the progression of a patient's condition and is an essential prerequisite for devising treatment plans. Fluorine 18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography ( 18F -FDG PET/CT) is an advanced cancer diagnostic imaging technique that provides both metabolic and structural information. Method: In cancer metastasis recognition tasks, effectively integrating metabolic and structural information stands as a key technology to enhance feature representation and recognition performance. This paper proposes a cancer metastasis identification network based on dynamic coordinated metabolic attention and structural attention to address these challenges. Specifically, metabolic and structural features are extracted by incorporating a dynamic coordinated attention module (DCAM) into two branches of ResNet networks, thereby amalgamating high metabolic spatial information from PET images with texture structure information from CT images, and dynamically adjusting this process through iterations. Discussion: Next, to improve the efficacy of feature expression, a multi-receptive field feature fusion module (MRFM) is included in order to execute multi-receptive field fusion of semantic features. Result: To validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, experiments were conducted on both a private lung lymph nodes dataset and a public soft tissue sarcomas dataset. Conclusion: The accuracy of our method reached 76.0% and 75.1% for the two datasets, respectively, demonstrating an improvement of 6.8% and 5.6% compared to ResNet, thus affirming the efficacy of our method.