Histopathological image classification is an important task in medical image analysis. Recent approaches generally rely on weakly supervised learning due to the ease of acquiring case-level labels from pathology reports. However, patch-level classification is preferable in applications where only a limited number of cases are available or when local prediction accuracy is critical. On the other hand, acquiring extensive datasets with localized labels for training is not feasible. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised patch-level histopathological image classification model, named CLASS-M, that does not require extensively labeled datasets. CLASS-M is formed by two main parts: a contrastive learning module that uses separated Hematoxylin images and Eosin images generated through an adaptive stain separation process, and a module with pseudo-labels using MixUp. We compare our model with other state-of-the-art models on two clear cell renal cell carcinoma datasets. We demonstrate that our CLASS-M model has the best performance on both datasets. Our code is available at github.com/BzhangURU/Paper_CLASS-M/tree/main.

Synthesis of myocardial infarction enhancement (MIE) images without contrast agents (CAs) has shown great potential to advance myocardial infarction (MI) diagnosis and treatment. It provides results comparable to late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) images, thereby reducing the risks associated with CAs and streamlining clinical workflows. The existing knowledge-and-data-driven approach has made progress in addressing the complex challenges of synthesizing MIE images (i.e., invisible myocardial scars and high inter-individual variability) but still has limitations in the interpretability of kinematic inference, morphological knowledge integration, and kinematic-morphological fusion, thereby reducing the transparency and reliability of the model and causing information loss during synthesis. In this paper, we proposed a knowledge-driven interpretative conditional diffusion model (K-ICDM), which learns kinematic and morphological information from non-enhanced cardiac MR images (CINE sequence and T1 sequence) guided by cardiac knowledge, enabling the synthesis of MIE images. Importantly, our K-ICDM introduces three key innovations that address these limitations, thereby providing interpretability and improving synthesis quality. (1) A novel cardiac causal intervention that generates counterfactual strain to intervene in the inference process from motion maps to abnormal myocardial information, thereby establishing an explicit relationship and providing the clear causal interpretability. (2) A knowledge-driven cognitive combination strategy that utilizes cardiac signal topology knowledge to analyze T1 signal variations, enabling the model to understand how to learn morphological features, thus providing interpretability for morphology capture. (3) An information-specific adaptive fusion strategy that integrates kinematic and morphological information into the conditioning input of the diffusion model based on their specific contributions and adaptively learns their interactions, thereby preserving more detailed information. Experiments on a broad MI dataset with 315 patients show that our K-ICDM achieves state-of-the-art performance in contrast-free MIE image synthesis, improving structural similarity index measure (SSIM) by at least 2.1% over recent methods. These results demonstrate that our method effectively overcomes the limitations of existing methods in capturing the complex relationship between myocardial motion and scar distribution and integrating of static and dynamic sequences, thus enabling the accurate synthesis of subtle scar boundaries.

Splenomegaly, the enlargement of the spleen, is an important clinical indicator for various associated medical conditions, such as sickle cell disease (SCD). Spleen length measured from 2D ultrasound is the most widely used metric for characterising spleen size. However, it is still considered a surrogate measure, and spleen volume remains the gold standard for assessing spleen size. Accurate spleen volume measurement typically requires 3D imaging modalities, such as computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging, but these are not widely available, especially in the Global South which has a high prevalence of SCD. In this work, we introduce a deep learning pipeline, DeepSPV, for precise spleen volume estimation from single or dual 2D ultrasound images. The pipeline involves a segmentation network and a variational autoencoder for learning low-dimensional representations from the estimated segmentations. We investigate three approaches for spleen volume estimation and our best model achieves 86.62%/92.5% mean relative volume accuracy (MRVA) under single-view/dual-view settings, surpassing the performance of human experts. In addition, the pipeline can provide confidence intervals for the volume estimates as well as offering benefits in terms of interpretability, which further support clinicians in decision-making when identifying splenomegaly. We evaluate the full pipeline using a highly realistic synthetic dataset generated by a diffusion model, achieving an overall MRVA of 83.0% from a single 2D ultrasound image. Our proposed DeepSPV is the first work to use deep learning to estimate 3D spleen volume from 2D ultrasound images and can be seamlessly integrated into the current clinical workflow for spleen assessment. We also make our synthetic spleen ultrasound dataset publicly available.

Surgical domain models seek to optimize the surgical workflow through the incorporation of each staff member's role. However, mounting evidence indicates that team familiarity and individuality impact surgical outcomes. We present a novel staff-centric modeling approach that characterizes individual team members through their distinctive movement patterns and physical characteristics, enabling long-term tracking and analysis of surgical personnel across multiple procedures. To address the challenge of inter-clinic variability, we develop a generalizable re-identification framework that encodes sequences of 3D point clouds to capture shape and articulated motion patterns unique to each individual. Our method achieves 86.19% accuracy on realistic clinical data while maintaining 75.27% accuracy when transferring between different environments - a 12% improvement over existing methods. When used to augment markerless personnel tracking, our approach improves accuracy by over 50%, addressing failure modes including occlusions and personnel re-entering the operating room. Through extensive validation across three datasets and the introduction of a novel workflow visualization technique, we demonstrate how our framework can reveal novel insights into surgical team dynamics and space utilization patterns, advancing methods to analyze surgical workflows and team coordination.

Artificial intelligence and deep learning are powerful tools for extracting knowledge from large datasets, particularly in healthcare. However, their black-box nature raises interpretability concerns, especially in high-stakes applications. Existing eXplainable Artificial Intelligence methods often focus solely on visualization or rule-based explanations, limiting interpretability's depth and clarity. This work proposes a novel explainable AI method specifically designed for medical image analysis, integrating statistical, visual, and rule-based explanations to improve transparency in deep learning models. Statistical features are derived from deep features extracted using a custom Mobilenetv2 model. A two-step feature selection method - zero-based filtering with mutual importance selection - ranks and refines these features. Decision tree and RuleFit models are employed to classify data and extract human-readable rules. Additionally, a novel statistical feature map overlay visualization generates heatmap-like representations of three key statistical measures (mean, skewness, and entropy), providing both localized and quantifiable visual explanations of model decisions. The proposed method has been validated on five medical imaging datasets - COVID-19 radiography, ultrasound breast cancer, brain tumor magnetic resonance imaging, lung and colon cancer histopathological, and glaucoma images - with results confirmed by medical experts, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing interpretability for medical image classification tasks.