Jingsong Liu

Yiheng Xiong, Jingsong Liu, Kamilia Zaripova et al. · deepmind

The extraction of structured clinical information from free-text radiology reports in the form of radiology graphs has been demonstrated to be a valuable approach for evaluating the clinical correctness of report-generation methods. However, the direct generation of radiology graphs from chest X-ray (CXR) images has not been attempted. To address this gap, we propose a novel approach called Prior-RadGraphFormer that utilizes a transformer model with prior knowledge in the form of a probabilistic knowledge graph (PKG) to generate radiology graphs directly from CXR images. The PKG models the statistical relationship between radiology entities, including anatomical structures and medical observations. This additional contextual information enhances the accuracy of entity and relation extraction. The generated radiology graphs can be applied to various downstream tasks, such as free-text or structured reports generation and multi-label classification of pathologies. Our approach represents a promising method for generating radiology graphs directly from CXR images, and has significant potential for improving medical image analysis and clinical decision-making.

Jingsong Liu, Han Li, Chen Yang et al.

Domain shift is a critical problem for pathology AI as pathology data is heavily influenced by center-specific conditions. Current pathology domain adaptation methods focus on image patches rather than WSI, thus failing to capture global WSI features required in typical clinical scenarios. In this work, we address the challenges of slide-level domain shift by proposing a Hierarchical Adaptation framework for Slide-level Domain-shift (HASD). HASD achieves multi-scale feature consistency and computationally efficient slide-level domain adaptation through two key components: (1) a hierarchical adaptation framework that integrates a Domain-level Alignment Solver for feature alignment, a Slide-level Geometric Invariance Regularization to preserve the morphological structure, and a Patch-level Attention Consistency Regularization to maintain local critical diagnostic cues; and (2) a prototype selection mechanism that reduces computational overhead. We validate our method on two slide-level tasks across five datasets, achieving a 4.1\% AUROC improvement in a Breast Cancer HER2 Grading cohort and a 3.9\% C-index gain in a UCEC survival prediction cohort. Our method provides a practical and reliable slide-level domain adaption solution for pathology institutions, minimizing both computational and annotation costs.

Christian Grashei, Christian Brechenmacher, Rao Muhammad Umer et al.

Pathology foundation models (FMs) have driven significant progress in computational pathology. However, these high-performing models can easily exceed a billion parameters and produce high-dimensional embeddings, thus limiting their applicability for research or clinical use when computing resources are tight. Here, we introduce Pathryoshka, a multi-teacher distillation framework inspired by RADIO distillation and Matryoshka Representation Learning to reduce pathology FM sizes while allowing for adaptable embedding dimensions. We evaluate our framework with a distilled model on ten public pathology benchmarks with varying downstream tasks. Compared to its much larger teachers, Pathryoshka reduces the model size by 86-92% at on-par performance. It outperforms state-of-the-art single-teacher distillation models of comparable size by a median margin of 7.0 in accuracy. By enabling efficient local deployment without sacrificing accuracy or representational richness, Pathryoshka democratizes access to state-of-the-art pathology FMs for the broader research and clinical community.

Chen Yang, Michael Deutges, Jingsong Liu et al.

Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) offer a robust and interpretable approach to image classification, making them a promising choice for microscopy image analysis. However, a performance gap remains between NCA and larger, more complex architectures. We address this challenge by integrating attention pooling with NCA to enhance feature extraction and improve classification accuracy. The attention pooling mechanism refines the focus on the most informative regions, leading to more accurate predictions. We evaluate our method on eight diverse microscopy image datasets and demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing NCA methods while remaining parameter-efficient and explainable. Furthermore, we compare our method with traditional lightweight convolutional neural network and vision transformer architectures, showing improved performance while maintaining a significantly lower parameter count. Our results highlight the potential of NCA-based models an alternative for explainable image classification.