Bikash Santra

Prajwal Vijay Kajare, Priyanshu Priya, Bikash Santra et al.

Emotion plays a pivotal role in shaping negotiation outcomes, influencing trust, cooperation, and long-term relationships. Developing negotiation dialog systems that can recognize and respond strategically to emotions is, therefore, essential to create more effective human-centered interactions. Beyond generating emotionally appropriate responses, interpretability - understanding how a system generates a particular emotion-aware response, is critical for fostering reliability and building rapport. Driven by these aspects, in this work, we introduce PRISMA, an interpretable emotionally intelligent negotiation dialogue system targeting two application domains, viz. job interviews and resource allocation. To enable interpretability, we propose an Emotion-aware Negotiation Strategy-informed Chain-of-Thought (ENS-CoT) reasoning mechanism, which mimics human negotiation by perceiving, understanding, using, and managing emotions. Leveraging ENS-CoT, we curate two new datasets: JobNego (for job interview negotiation) and ResNego (for resource allocation negotiation). We then leverage these datasets to develop PRISMA by augmenting self-training with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), guiding agents toward more accurate, interpretable, and emotionally appropriate negotiation responses. Automatic and human evaluation on JobNego and ResNego datasets demonstrate that PRISMA substantially enhances interpretability and generates appropriate emotion-aware responses, while improving overall negotiation effectiveness.

David C. Oluigboa, Bikash Santra, Tejas Sudharshan Mathai et al.

Pheochromocytomas and Paragangliomas (PPGLs) are rare adrenal and extra-adrenal tumors which have the potential to metastasize. For the management of patients with PPGLs, CT is the preferred modality of choice for precise localization and estimation of their progression. However, due to the myriad variations in size, morphology, and appearance of the tumors in different anatomical regions, radiologists are posed with the challenge of accurate detection of PPGLs. Since clinicians also need to routinely measure their size and track their changes over time across patient visits, manual demarcation of PPGLs is quite a time-consuming and cumbersome process. To ameliorate the manual effort spent for this task, we propose an automated method to detect PPGLs in CT studies via a proxy segmentation task. As only weak annotations for PPGLs in the form of prospectively marked 2D bounding boxes on an axial slice were available, we extended these 2D boxes into weak 3D annotations and trained a 3D full-resolution nnUNet model to directly segment PPGLs. We evaluated our approach on a dataset consisting of chest-abdomen-pelvis CTs of 255 patients with confirmed PPGLs. We obtained a precision of 70% and sensitivity of 64.1% with our proposed approach when tested on 53 CT studies. Our findings highlight the promising nature of detecting PPGLs via segmentation, and furthers the state-of-the-art in this exciting yet challenging area of rare cancer management.

Tanjin Taher Toma, Tejas Sudharshan Mathai, Bikash Santra et al.

Accurate segmentation of pheochromocytoma (PCC) in abdominal CT scans is essential for tumor burden estimation, prognosis, and treatment planning. It may also help infer genetic clusters, reducing reliance on expensive testing. This study systematically evaluates anatomical priors to identify configurations that improve deep learning-based PCC segmentation. We employed the nnU-Net framework to evaluate eleven annotation strategies for accurate 3D segmentation of pheochromocytoma, introducing a set of novel multi-class schemes based on organ-specific anatomical priors. These priors were derived from adjacent organs commonly surrounding adrenal tumors (e.g., liver, spleen, kidney, aorta, adrenal gland, and pancreas), and were compared against a broad body-region prior used in previous work. The framework was trained and tested on 105 contrast-enhanced CT scans from 91 patients at the NIH Clinical Center. Performance was measured using Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Normalized Surface Distance (NSD), and instance-wise F1 score. Among all strategies, the Tumor + Kidney + Aorta (TKA) annotation achieved the highest segmentation accuracy, significantly outperforming the previously used Tumor + Body (TB) annotation across DSC (p = 0.0097), NSD (p = 0.0110), and F1 score (25.84% improvement at an IoU threshold of 0.5), measured on a 70-30 train-test split. The TKA model also showed superior tumor burden quantification (R^2 = 0.968) and strong segmentation across all genetic subtypes. In five-fold cross-validation, TKA consistently outperformed TB across IoU thresholds (0.1 to 0.5), reinforcing its robustness and generalizability. These findings highlight the value of incorporating relevant anatomical context into deep learning models to achieve precise PCC segmentation, offering a valuable tool to support clinical assessment and longitudinal disease monitoring in PCC patients.