Zhenghan Yang

Chao Fan, Hongyuan Yu, Yan Huang et al.

Despite the progress made in Mamba-based medical image segmentation models, existing methods utilizing unidirectional or multi-directional feature scanning mechanisms struggle to effectively capture dependencies between neighboring positions, limiting the discriminant representation learning of local features. These local features are crucial for medical image segmentation as they provide critical structural information about lesions and organs. To address this limitation, we propose SliceMamba, a simple and effective locally sensitive Mamba-based medical image segmentation model. SliceMamba includes an efficient Bidirectional Slice Scan module (BSS), which performs bidirectional feature slicing and employs varied scanning mechanisms for sliced features with distinct shapes. This design ensures that spatially adjacent features remain close in the scanning sequence, thereby improving segmentation performance. Additionally, to fit the varying sizes and shapes of lesions and organs, we further introduce an Adaptive Slice Search method to automatically determine the optimal feature slice method based on the characteristics of the target data. Extensive experiments on two skin lesion datasets (ISIC2017 and ISIC2018), two polyp segmentation (Kvasir and ClinicDB) datasets, and one multi-organ segmentation dataset (Synapse) validate the effectiveness of our method.

Chao Fan, Xibin Jia, Anqi Xiao et al.

Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation (FSMIS) aims to segment novel classes of medical objects using only a few labeled images. Prototype-based methods have made significant progress in addressing FSMIS. However, they typically generate a single global prototype for the support image to match with the query image, overlooking intra-class variations. To address this issue, we propose a Self-guided Prototype Enhancement Network (SPENet). Specifically, we introduce a Multi-level Prototype Generation (MPG) module, which enables multi-granularity measurement between the support and query images by simultaneously generating a global prototype and an adaptive number of local prototypes. Additionally, we observe that not all local prototypes in the support image are beneficial for matching, especially when there are substantial discrepancies between the support and query images. To alleviate this issue, we propose a Query-guided Local Prototype Enhancement (QLPE) module, which adaptively refines support prototypes by incorporating guidance from the query image, thus mitigating the negative effects of such discrepancies. Extensive experiments on three public medical datasets demonstrate that SPENet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance.

Honglei Liu, Yan Xu, Zhiqiang Zhang et al.

Despite the rapid development of natural language processing (NLP) implementation in electronic medical records (EMRs), Chinese EMRs processing remains challenging due to the limited corpus and specific grammatical characteristics, especially for radiology reports. In this study, we designed an NLP pipeline for the direct extraction of clinically relevant features from Chinese radiology reports, which is the first key step in computer-aided radiologic diagnosis. The pipeline was comprised of named entity recognition, synonyms normalization, and relationship extraction to finally derive the radiological features composed of one or more terms. In named entity recognition, we incorporated lexicon into deep learning model bidirectional long short-term memory-conditional random field (BiLSTM-CRF), and the model finally achieved an F1 score of 93.00%. With the extracted radiological features, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator and machine learning methods (support vector machine, random forest, decision tree, and logistic regression) were used to build the classifiers for liver cancer prediction. For liver cancer diagnosis, random forest had the highest predictive performance in liver cancer diagnosis (F1 score 86.97%, precision 87.71%, and recall 86.25%). This work was a comprehensive NLP study focusing on Chinese radiology reports and the application of NLP in cancer risk prediction. The proposed NLP pipeline for the radiological feature extraction could be easily implemented in other kinds of Chinese clinical texts and other disease predictive tasks.