Elena Sofina

Ms. Elena Sofina


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

1Year (2026-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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21 August 2026 in Preprints.org
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ESElena Sofina
Elena Sofina
AKAjay Kumar
Ajay Kumar
CCCharlie A. Coupland
Charlie A. Coupland
TVTânia Faria Vaz
Tânia Faria Vaz
TFTemitayo Fagbola
Temitayo Fagbola
ESEva Maria Valerio de Sousa
Eva Maria Valerio de Sousa
Existing automated deep learning frameworks for cellular analysis, such as the standard U-Net and Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN), face significant performance degradation when processing clinical samples with high morphological variance, dense clumping, and low-contrast borders. While advanced iterations like Transformer-based U-Nets and pure Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) attempt to address these limitations, they introduce substantial technical gaps. Transformers suffer from prohibitive computational overhead and demand massive annotated datasets, whereas pure spline-based models are highly sensitive to noise and introduce severe memory strain. Consequently, existing automated models struggle to maintain fine-grained boundary definitions without suffering from edge-blurring pitfalls or structural inefficiency in aggregated cell environments.To address these limitations, this study evaluates an improved and more effective Kolmogorov-Arnold Attention U-Net (KC-UNet) architecture. This framework integrates learnable B-spline activation functions directly into a localized two-dimensional latent bottleneck to resolve overlapping junctions, while utilizing Convolutional Block Attention Modules along the skip connections to suppress background noise and enhance multi-scale feature routing. The performance of this system was evaluated against standard baseline models, including U-Net, FCN, and DeepLabV3, using a rigorous nested 5-fold cross-validation strategy across both a static original dataset and an augmented dataset injected with simulated clinical artifacts.The empirical results demonstrate a notable improvement in both performance resilience and clinical utility. Under dataset augmentation, standard models suffered severe performance drop-offs, with U-Net and DeepLabV3 yielding negative mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) delta changes. In contrast, the KC-UNet was the only architecture to maintain structural stability under clinical noise, demonstrating a positive resilience change of +0.0133 mIoU. Downstream instance counting accuracy further validated its clinical value, with the architecture achieving the lowest Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 13.15, significantly outperforming the standard U-Net (MAE of 23.50) and DeepLabV3 (MAE of 30.40). Validation analysis additionally confirmed that this framework provides the narrowest error variance and a 50% reduction in systematic counting bias compared to baseline convolutional models.This research provides a highly robust, parameter-efficient framework for automated hematological diagnostics, demonstrating that combining the local feature-extraction capabilities of convolutions with the non-linear flexibility of learnable spline edges resolves dense platelet clumping effectively. By mitigating operator bias and batch-dependent manual threshold adjustments, this strategy advances automated high-throughput clinical screening pipelines. Future work will focus on structural model pruning for embedded clinical deployment, accelerating edge computations, and exploring self-supervised learning paradigms to eliminate the pipeline's reliance on pseudo-ground truth masks.