Emine Ülkü Sarıtaş

Idil Aytekin, Onat Dalmaz, Kaan Gonc et al.

Monitoring of prevalent airborne diseases such as COVID-19 characteristically involves respiratory assessments. While auscultation is a mainstream method for preliminary screening of disease symptoms, its utility is hampered by the need for dedicated hospital visits. Remote monitoring based on recordings of respiratory sounds on portable devices is a promising alternative, which can assist in early assessment of COVID-19 that primarily affects the lower respiratory tract. In this study, we introduce a novel deep learning approach to distinguish patients with COVID-19 from healthy controls given audio recordings of cough or breathing sounds. The proposed approach leverages a novel hierarchical spectrogram transformer (HST) on spectrogram representations of respiratory sounds. HST embodies self-attention mechanisms over local windows in spectrograms, and window size is progressively grown over model stages to capture local to global context. HST is compared against state-of-the-art conventional and deep-learning baselines. Demonstrations on crowd-sourced multi-national datasets indicate that HST outperforms competing methods, achieving over 83% area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) in detecting COVID-19 cases.

Abdallah Zaid Alkilani, Tolga Çukur, Emine Ulku Saritas

Recent learning-based correction approaches in EPI estimate a displacement field, unwarp the reversed-PE image pair with the estimated field, and average the unwarped pair to yield a corrected image. Unsupervised learning in these unwarping-based methods is commonly attained via a similarity constraint between the unwarped images in reversed-PE directions, neglecting consistency to the acquired EPI images. This work introduces an unsupervised deep-learning method for fast and effective correction of susceptibility artifacts in reversed phase-encode (PE) image pairs acquired with EPI. FD-Net predicts both the susceptibility-induced displacement field and the underlying anatomically-correct image. Unlike previous methods, FD-Net enforces the forward-distortions of the correct image in both PE directions to be consistent with the acquired reversed-PE image pair. FD-Net further leverages a multiresolution architecture to maintain high local and global performance. FD-Net performs competitively with a gold-standard reference method (TOPUP) in image quality, while enabling a leap in computational efficiency. Furthermore, FD-Net outperforms recent unwarping-based methods for unsupervised correction in terms of both image and field quality. The unsupervised FD-Net method introduces a deep forward-distortion approach to enable fast, high-fidelity correction of susceptibility artifacts in EPI by maintaining consistency to measured data. Therefore, it holds great promise for improving the anatomical accuracy of EPI imaging.

Bilal Kabas, Fuat Arslan, Valiyeh A. Nezhad et al.

Medical image reconstruction from undersampled acquisitions is an ill-posed inverse problem requiring accurate recovery of anatomical structures from incomplete measurements. Physics-driven (PD) network models have gained prominence for this task by integrating data-consistency mechanisms with learned priors, enabling improved performance over purely data-driven approaches. However, reconstruction quality still hinges on the network's ability to disentangle artifacts from true anatomical signals-both of which exhibit complex, multi-scale contextual structure. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) capture local correlations but often struggle with non-local dependencies. While transformers aim to alleviate this limitation, practical implementations involve design compromises to reduce computational cost by balancing local and non-local sensitivity, occasionally resulting in performance comparable to CNNs. To address these challenges, we propose MambaRoll, a novel physics-driven autoregressive state space model (SSM) for high-fidelity and efficient image reconstruction. MambaRoll employs an unrolled architecture where each cascade autoregressively predicts finer-scale feature maps conditioned on coarser-scale representations, enabling consistent multi-scale context propagation. Each stage is built on a hierarchy of scale-specific PD-SSM modules that capture spatial dependencies while enforcing data consistency through residual correction. To further improve scale-aware learning, we introduce a Deep Multi-Scale Decoding (DMSD) loss, which provides supervision at intermediate spatial scales in alignment with the autoregressive design. Demonstrations on accelerated MRI and sparse-view CT reconstructions show that MambaRoll consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CNN-, transformer-, and SSM-based methods.