Peripheral blood smears remain a cornerstone in the diagnosis of hematological neoplasms, offering rapid and valuable insights that inform subsequent diagnostic steps. However, since neoplastic transformations typically arise in the bone marrow, they may not manifest as detectable aberrations in peripheral blood, presenting a diagnostic challenge. In this paper, we introduce cAItomorph, an explainable transformer-based AI model, trained to classify hematological malignancies based on peripheral blood cytomorphology. Our data comprises peripheral blood single-cell images from 6115 patients with diagnoses confirmed by cytomorphology, cytogenetics, molecular genetics, and immunophenotyping from bone marrow samples, and 495 healthy controls, eight coarse classes. cAItomorph leverages the DinoBloom hematology foundation model and aggregates image encodings via a transformer-based architecture into a single vector. It achieves an overall accuracy of 0.72 in eight disease classification, with F1 scores of 0.76 for acute leukemia, 0.80 for myeloproliferative neoplasms and 0.94 for healthy cases. The overall accuracy increases to 0.87 in top-2 predictions. cAItomorph achieves high sensitivi
Accurate prediction of malignancy in renal tumors is crucial for informing clinical decisions and optimizing treatment strategies. However, existing imaging modalities lack the necessary accuracy to reliably predict malignancy before surgical intervention. While deep learning has shown promise in malignancy prediction using 3D CT images, traditional approaches often rely on manual segmentation to isolate the tumor region and reduce noise, which enhances predictive performance. Manual segmentation, however, is labor-intensive, costly, and dependent on expert knowledge. In this study, a deep learning framework was developed utilizing an Organ Focused Attention (OFA) loss function to modify the attention of image patches so that organ patches attend only to other organ patches. Hence, no segmentation of 3D renal CT images is required at deployment time for malignancy prediction. The proposed framework achieved an AUC of 0.685 and an F1-score of 0.872 on a private dataset from the UF Integrated Data Repository (IDR), and an AUC of 0.760 and an F1-score of 0.852 on the publicly available KiTS21 dataset. These results surpass the performance of conventional models that rely on segmentati
Multimodal alignment of histopathology encoders with transcriptomic and genomic data has been shown to significantly improve performance in downstream diagnostic tasks. Hematological cytology is unique in that visual single-cell evaluation is often paired with cytogenetics and molecular genetics for blood cancer diagnosis. In this study, we present a framework to align single white blood cell images with chromosomal aberrations (karyotype) and somatic mutations from targeted gene panels. Our training strategy follows a two-stage approach: (i) self-supervised, vision-only pretraining of a transformer aggregator using an iBOT head on a cohort of over 1500 patients, and (ii) genetic alignment via supervised contrastive loss on acute myeloid leukemia patients. Our genetically aligned patient encoder improves hematological diagnostic tasks, outperforming slide-level histopathology foundation models. Additionally, the model provides off-the-shelf retrieval capabilities for diseases and genetic alterations. Incorporating genetic data into patient encoders increases the quality of patient representations, providing a framework that aligns with clinical diagnostic workflows and paves the wa
Purpose: We investigated the utilization of privacy-preserving, locally-deployed, open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract diagnostic information from free-text cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) reports. Materials and Methods: We evaluated nine open-source LLMs on their ability to identify diagnoses and classify patients into various cardiac diagnostic categories based on descriptive findings in 109 clinical CMR reports. Performance was quantified using standard classification metrics including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. We also employed confusion matrices to examine patterns of misclassification across models. Results: Most open-source LLMs demonstrated exceptional performance in classifying reports into different diagnostic categories. Google's Gemma2 model achieved the highest average F1 score of 0.98, followed by Qwen2.5:32B and DeepseekR1-32B with F1 scores of 0.96 and 0.95, respectively. All other evaluated models attained average scores above 0.93, with Mistral and DeepseekR1-7B being the only exceptions. The top four LLMs outperformed our board-certified cardiologist (F1 score of 0.94) across all evaluation metrics in analyzing CMR reports.
Hematologic toxicity (HT) is a major dose-limiting complication of pelvic radiotherapy for cervical cancer. Although radiomic and dosiomic features improve HT prediction beyond dosimetric metrics, their performance is highly sensitive to contour variability, limiting generalizability. We developed a cohort-aware representation-learning framework to address this challenge. We retrospectively analyzed 152 cervical cancer patients treated with pelvic radiotherapy without concurrent chemotherapy. Patients were divided into two cohorts based on the operators performing pelvic bone segmentation. HT prediction models were developed using cohort-specific training, pooled training, statistical harmonization, and a cohort-aware neural network (CANN) that learns shared and cohort-specific representations with contrastive regularization. Performance was evaluated using cross-validation and an independent test set. Cohort-specific models achieved test AUCs of 0.77 and 0.71, outperforming a dosimetry-only model (AUC=0.58). Directly pooling cohorts reduced performance (test AUC=0.64). Statistical harmonization provided limited benefit, while adversarial and correlation-based alignment further deg
Pulmonary nodules are an early sign of lung cancer, and detecting them early is vital for improving patient survival rates. Most current methods use only single Computed Tomography (CT) images to assess nodule malignancy. However, doctors typically make a comprehensive assessment in clinical practice by integrating follow-up CT scans with clinical data. To enhance this process, our study introduces a Cross-Modal Spatiotemporal Fusion Network, named CSF-Net, designed to predict the malignancy of pulmonary nodules using follow-up CT scans. This approach simulates the decision-making process of clinicians who combine follow-up imaging with clinical information. CSF-Net comprises three key components: spatial feature extraction module, temporal residual fusion module, and cross-modal attention fusion module. Together, these modules enable precise predictions of nodule malignancy. Additionally, we utilized the publicly available NLST dataset to screen and annotate the specific locations of pulmonary nodules and created a new dataset named NLST-cmst. Our experimental results on the NLST-cmst dataset demonstrate significant performance improvements, with an accuracy of 0.8974, a precision
To develop and externally validate integrated ultrasound nomograms combining BIRADS features and quantitative morphometric characteristics, and to compare their performance with expert radiologists and state of the art large language models in biopsy recommendation and malignancy prediction for breast lesions. In this retrospective multicenter, multinational study, 1747 women with pathologically confirmed breast lesions underwent ultrasound across three centers in Iran and Turkey. A total of 10 BIRADS and 26 morphological features were extracted from each lesion. A BIRADS, morphometric, and fused nomogram integrating both feature sets was constructed via logistic regression. Three radiologists (one senior, two general) and two ChatGPT variants independently interpreted deidentified breast lesion images. Diagnostic performance for biopsy recommendation (BIRADS 4,5) and malignancy prediction was assessed in internal and two external validation cohorts. In pooled analysis, the fused nomogram achieved the highest accuracy for biopsy recommendation (83.0%) and malignancy prediction (83.8%), outperforming the morphometric nomogram, three radiologists and both ChatGPT models. Its AUCs wer
Ultrasound-based risk stratification of thyroid nodules is a critical clinical task, but it suffers from high inter-observer variability. While many deep learning (DL) models function as "black boxes," we propose a fully automated, two-stage framework for interpretable malignancy prediction. Our method achieves interpretability by forcing the model to focus only on clinically relevant regions. First, a TransUNet model automatically segments the thyroid nodule. The resulting mask is then used to create a region of interest around the nodule, and this localised image is fed directly into a ResNet-18 classifier. We evaluated our framework using 5-fold cross-validation on a clinical dataset of 349 images, where it achieved a high F1-score of 0.852 for predicting malignancy. To validate its performance, we compared it against a strong baseline using a Random Forest classifier with hand-crafted morphological features, which achieved an F1-score of 0.829. The superior performance of our DL framework suggests that the implicit visual features learned from the localised nodule are more predictive than explicit shape features alone. This is the first fully automated end-to-end pipeline for b
Neuroblastoma is a paediatric extracranial solid cancer that arises from the developing sympathetic nervous system and is characterised by an abnormal distribution of cell types in tumours compared to healthy infant tissues. In this paper, we propose a new mathematical model of cell differentiation during sympathoadrenal development. By performing Bayesian inference of the model parameters using clinical data from patient samples, we show that the model successfully accounts for the observed differences in cell type heterogeneity among healthy adrenal tissues and four common types of neuroblastomas. Using a phenotypically structured model, we show that alterations in healthy differentiation dynamics are related to cell malignancy, and tumour volume growth. We use this model to analyse the evolution of malignant traits in a tumour. Our findings suggest that normal development dynamics make the embryonic sympathetic nervous system more robust to perturbations and accumulation of malignancies, and that the diversity of differentiation dynamics found in the neuroblastoma subtypes lead to unique risk profiles for neuroblastoma relapse after treatment.
The dynamic environment of laboratories and clinics, with streams of data arriving on a daily basis, requires regular updates of trained machine learning models for consistent performance. Continual learning is supposed to help train models without catastrophic forgetting. However, state-of-the-art methods are ineffective for multiple instance learning (MIL), which is often used in single-cell-based hematologic disease diagnosis (e.g., leukemia detection). Here, we propose the first continual learning method tailored specifically to MIL. Our method is rehearsal-based over a selection of single instances from various bags. We use a combination of the instance attention score and distance from the bag mean and class mean vectors to carefully select which samples and instances to store in exemplary sets from previous tasks, preserving the diversity of the data. Using the real-world input of one month of data from a leukemia laboratory, we study the effectiveness of our approach in a class incremental scenario, comparing it to well-known continual learning methods. We show that our method considerably outperforms state-of-the-art methods, providing the first continual learning approach
With the growth of global maritime transportation, energy optimization has become crucial for reducing costs and ensuring operational efficiency. Shaft power is the mechanical power transmitted from the engine to the shaft and directly impacts fuel consumption, making its accurate prediction a paramount step in optimizing vessel performance. Power consumption is highly correlated with ship parameters such as speed and shaft rotation per minute, as well as weather and sea conditions. Frequent access to this operational data can improve prediction accuracy. However, obtaining high-quality sensor data is often infeasible and costly, making alternative sources such as noon reports a viable option. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning-based approach for predicting vessels shaft power, where a model is initially trained on high-frequency data from a vessel and then fine-tuned with low-frequency daily noon reports from other vessels. We tested our approach on sister vessels (identical dimensions and configurations), a similar vessel (slightly larger with a different engine), and a different vessel (distinct dimensions and configurations). The experiments showed that the mean abso
In the realm of hematologic cell populations classification, the intricate patterns within flow cytometry data necessitate advanced analytical tools. This paper presents 'HemaGraph', a novel framework based on Graph Attention Networks (GATs) for single-cell multi-class classification of hematological cells from flow cytometry data. Harnessing the power of GATs, our method captures subtle cell relationships, offering highly accurate patient profiling. Based on evaluation of data from 30 patients, HemaGraph demonstrates classification performance across five different cell classes, outperforming traditional methodologies and state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the uniqueness of this framework lies in the training and testing phase of HemaGraph, where it has been applied for extremely large graphs, containing up to hundreds of thousands of nodes and two million edges, to detect low frequency cell populations (e.g. 0.01% for one population), with accuracies reaching 98%. Our findings underscore the potential of HemaGraph in improving hematoligic multi-class classification, paving the way for patient-personalized interventions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to u
Skin diseases affect millions of people worldwide, across all ethnicities. Increasing diagnosis accessibility requires fair and accurate segmentation and classification of dermatology images. However, the scarcity of annotated medical images, especially for rare diseases and underrepresented skin tones, poses a challenge to the development of fair and accurate models. In this study, we introduce a Fair, Efficient, and Diverse Diffusion-based framework for skin lesion segmentation and malignancy classification. FEDD leverages semantically meaningful feature embeddings learned through a denoising diffusion probabilistic backbone and processes them via linear probes to achieve state-of-the-art performance on Diverse Dermatology Images (DDI). We achieve an improvement in intersection over union of 0.18, 0.13, 0.06, and 0.07 while using only 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20% labeled samples, respectively. Additionally, FEDD trained on 10% of DDI demonstrates malignancy classification accuracy of 81%, 14% higher compared to the state-of-the-art. We showcase high efficiency in data-constrained scenarios while providing fair performance for diverse skin tones and rare malignancy conditions. Our newly
Lung nodule malignancy prediction has been enhanced by advanced deep-learning techniques and effective tricks. Nevertheless, current methods are mainly trained with cross-entropy loss using one-hot categorical labels, which results in difficulty in distinguishing those nodules with closer progression labels. Interestingly, we observe that clinical text information annotated by radiologists provides us with discriminative knowledge to identify challenging samples. Drawing on the capability of the contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) model to learn generalized visual representations from text annotations, in this paper, we propose CLIP-Lung, a textual knowledge-guided framework for lung nodule malignancy prediction. First, CLIP-Lung introduces both class and attribute annotations into the training of the lung nodule classifier without any additional overheads in inference. Second, we designed a channel-wise conditional prompt (CCP) module to establish consistent relationships between learnable context prompts and specific feature maps. Third, we align image features with both class and attribute features via contrastive learning, rectifying false positives and false negativ
Although some pollutants emitted in vehicle exhaust, such as benzene, are known to cause leukemia in adults with high exposure levels, less is known about the relationship between traffic-related air pollution (TRAP) and childhood hematologic cancer. In the 1990s, the US EPA enacted the reformulated gasoline program in select areas of the US, which drastically reduced ambient TRAP in affected areas. This created an ideal quasi-experiment to study the effects of TRAP on childhood hematologic cancers. However, existing methods for quasi-experimental analyses can perform poorly when outcomes are rare and unstable, as with childhood cancer incidence. We develop Bayesian spatio-temporal matrix completion methods to conduct causal inference in quasi-experimental settings with rare outcomes. Selective information sharing across space and time enables stable estimation, and the Bayesian approach facilitates uncertainty quantification. We evaluate the methods through simulations and apply them to estimate the causal effects of TRAP on childhood leukemia and lymphoma.
Due to the complexity of annotation and inter-annotator variability, most lung nodule malignancy grading datasets contain label noise, which inevitably degrades the performance and generalizability of models. Although researchers adopt the label-noise-robust methods to handle label noise for lung nodule malignancy grading, they do not consider the inherent ordinal relation among classes of this task. To model the ordinal relation among classes to facilitate tackling label noise in this task, we propose a Unimodal-Regularized Label-noise-tolerant (URL) framework. Our URL contains two stages, the Supervised Contrastive Learning (SCL) stage and the Memory pseudo-labels generation and Unimodal regularization (MU) stage. In the SCL stage, we select reliable samples and adopt supervised contrastive learning to learn better representations. In the MU stage, we split samples with multiple annotations into multiple samples with a single annotation and shuffle them into different batches. To handle label noise, pseudo-labels are generated using the similarity between each sample and the central feature of each class, and temporal ensembling is used to obtain memory pseudo-labels that supervi
Spiculations/lobulations, sharp/curved spikes on the surface of lung nodules, are good predictors of lung cancer malignancy and hence, are routinely assessed and reported by radiologists as part of the standardized Lung-RADS clinical scoring criteria. Given the 3D geometry of the nodule and 2D slice-by-slice assessment by radiologists, manual spiculation/lobulation annotation is a tedious task and thus no public datasets exist to date for probing the importance of these clinically-reported features in the SOTA malignancy prediction algorithms. As part of this paper, we release a large-scale Clinically-Interpretable Radiomics Dataset, CIRDataset, containing 956 radiologist QA/QC'ed spiculation/lobulation annotations on segmented lung nodules from two public datasets, LIDC-IDRI (N=883) and LUNGx (N=73). We also present an end-to-end deep learning model based on multi-class Voxel2Mesh extension to segment nodules (while preserving spikes), classify spikes (sharp/spiculation and curved/lobulation), and perform malignancy prediction. Previous methods have performed malignancy prediction for LIDC and LUNGx datasets but without robust attribution to any clinically reported/actionable feat
To increase the transparency of modern computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for assessing the malignancy of lung nodules, an interpretable model based on applying the generalized additive models and the concept-based learning is proposed. The model detects a set of clinically significant attributes in addition to the final malignancy regression score and learns the association between the lung nodule attributes and a final diagnosis decision as well as their contributions into the decision. The proposed concept-based learning framework provides human-readable explanations in terms of different concepts (numerical and categorical), their values, and their contribution to the final prediction. Numerical experiments with the LIDC-IDRI dataset demonstrate that the diagnosis results obtained using the proposed model, which explicitly explores internal relationships, are in line with similar patterns observed in clinical practice. Additionally, the proposed model shows the competitive classification and the nodule attribute scoring performance, highlighting its potential for effective decision-making in the lung nodule diagnosis.
In 1984 Edward Witten proposed that an extremely dense form of matter composed of up, down, and strange quarks may be stable at zero pressure (Witten, 1984). Massive nuggets of such dense matter, if they exist, may pass through the Earth and be detectable by the seismic signals they generate (de Rujula and Glashow, 1984). With this motivation we investigated over 1 million seismic data reports to the U.S. Geological Survey for the years 1990-1993 not associated with epicentral sources. We report two results: (1) with an average of about 0.16 unassociated reports per minute after data cuts, we found a significant excess over statistical expectation for sets with ten or more reports in ten minutes; and (2) in spite of a very small a priori probability from random reports, we found one set of reports with arrival times and other features appropriate to signals from an epilinear source. This event has the properties predicted for the passage of a nugget of strange quark matter (SQM) through the earth, although there is no direct confirmation from other phenomenologies.
The early identification of malignant pulmonary nodules is critical for better lung cancer prognosis and less invasive chemo or radio therapies. Nodule malignancy assessment done by radiologists is extremely useful for planning a preventive intervention but is, unfortunately, a complex, time-consuming and error-prone task. This explains the lack of large datasets containing radiologists malignancy characterization of nodules. In this article, we propose to assess nodule malignancy through 3D convolutional neural networks and to integrate it in an automated end-to-end existing pipeline of lung cancer detection. For training and testing purposes we used independent subsets of the LIDC dataset. Adding the probabilities of nodules malignity in a baseline lung cancer pipeline improved its F1-weighted score by 14.7%, whereas integrating the malignancy model itself using transfer learning outperformed the baseline prediction by 11.8% of F1-weighted score. Despite the limited size of the lung cancer datasets, integrating predictive models of nodule malignancy improves prediction of lung cancer.