Xiangxue Wang

Bin Xu, Yufei Zhou, Boling Song et al.

We propose a Hierarchical Multi-scale Knowledge-aware Graph Network (HMKGN) that models multi-scale interactions and spatially hierarchical relationships within whole-slide images (WSIs) for cancer prognostication. Unlike conventional attention-based MIL, which ignores spatial organization, or graph-based MIL, which relies on static handcrafted graphs, HMKGN enforces a hierarchical structure with spatial locality constraints, wherein local cellular-level dynamic graphs aggregate spatially proximate patches within each region of interest (ROI) and a global slide-level dynamic graph integrates ROI-level features into WSI-level representations. Moreover, multi-scale integration at the ROI level combines coarse contextual features from broader views with fine-grained structural representations from local patch-graph aggregation. We evaluate HMKGN on four TCGA cohorts (KIRC, LGG, PAAD, and STAD; N=513, 487, 138, and 370) for survival prediction. It consistently outperforms existing MIL-based models, yielding improved concordance indices (10.85% better) and statistically significant stratification of patient survival risk (log-rank p < 0.05).

Abu Bakor Hayat Arnob, Xiangxue Wang, Yiping Jiao et al.

Medical image processing usually requires a model trained with carefully crafted datasets due to unique image characteristics and domain-specific challenges, especially in pathology. Primitive detection and segmentation in digitized tissue samples are essential for objective and automated diagnosis and prognosis of cancer. SAM (Segment Anything Model) has recently been developed to segment general objects from natural images with high accuracy, but it requires human prompts to generate masks. In this work, we present a novel approach that adapts pre-trained natural image encoders of SAM for detection-based region proposals. Regions proposed by a pre-trained encoder are sent to cascaded feature propagation layers for projection. Then, local semantic and global context is aggregated from multi-scale for bounding box localization and classification. Finally, the SAM decoder uses the identified bounding boxes as essential prompts to generate a comprehensive primitive segmentation map. The entire base framework, SAM, requires no additional training or fine-tuning but could produce an end-to-end result for two fundamental segmentation tasks in pathology. Our method compares with state-of-the-art models in F1 score for nuclei detection and binary/multiclass panoptic(bPQ/mPQ) and mask quality(dice) for segmentation quality on the PanNuke dataset while offering end-to-end efficiency. Our model also achieves remarkable Average Precision (+4.5%) on the secondary dataset (HuBMAP Kidney) compared to Faster RCNN. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/learner-codec/autoprom_sam.

Xin Ding, Yun Chen, Yongwei Wang et al.

Recent advances in conditional generative modeling have introduced Continuous conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CcGAN) and Continuous Conditional Diffusion Model (CCDM) for estimating high-dimensional data distributions conditioned on scalar, continuous regression labels (e.g., angles, ages, or temperatures). However, these approaches face fundamental limitations: CcGAN suffers from data imbalance due to fixed-size vicinity constraints, while CCDM requires computationally expensive iterative sampling. To address these issues, we propose CcGAN-AVAR, an enhanced CcGAN framework featuring (1) two novel components for handling data imbalance - an adaptive vicinity mechanism that dynamically adjusts vicinity size and a multi-task discriminator that enhances generator training through auxiliary regression and density ratio estimation - and (2) the GAN framework's native one-step generator, enable 30x-2000x faster inference than CCDM. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets (64x64 to 256x256 resolution) across eleven challenging settings demonstrate that CcGAN-AVAR achieves state-of-the-art generation quality while maintaining sampling efficiency.