Nick DiSanto

Hao Li, Daiwei Lu, Jesse d'Almeida et al.

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) is a critical task to guide autonomous medical robots. However, obtaining absolute (metric) depth from an endoscopy camera in surgical scenes is difficult, which limits supervised learning of depth on real endoscopic images. Current image-level unsupervised domain adaptation methods translate synthetic images with known depth maps into the style of real endoscopic frames and train depth networks using these translated images with their corresponding depth maps. However a domain gap often remains between real and translated synthetic images. In this paper, we present a latent feature alignment method to improve absolute depth estimation by reducing this domain gap in the context of endoscopic videos of the central airway. Our methods are agnostic to the image translation process and focus on the depth estimation itself. Specifically, the depth network takes translated synthetic and real endoscopic frames as input and learns latent domain-invariant features via adversarial learning and directional feature consistency. The evaluation is conducted on endoscopic videos of central airway phantoms with manually aligned absolute depth maps. Compared to state-of-the-art MDE methods, our approach achieves superior performance on both absolute and relative depth metrics, and consistently improves results across various backbones and pretrained weights. Our code is available at https://github.com/MedICL-VU/MDE.

Nick DiSanto, Ehsan Khodapanah Aghdam, Han Liu et al.

Handheld Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) enables noninvasive retinal imaging in uncooperative or pediatric subjects, but is highly susceptible to motion artifacts that severely degrade volumetric image quality. Sudden motion during 3D acquisition can lead to unsampled retinal regions across entire B-scans (cross-sectional slices), resulting in blank bands in en face projections. We propose VAMOS-OCTA, a deep learning framework for inpainting motion-corrupted B-scans using vessel-aware multi-axis supervision. We employ a 2.5D U-Net architecture that takes a stack of neighboring B-scans as input to reconstruct a corrupted center B-scan, guided by a novel Vessel-Aware Multi-Axis Orthogonal Supervision (VAMOS) loss. This loss combines vessel-weighted intensity reconstruction with axial and lateral projection consistency, encouraging vascular continuity in native B-scans and across orthogonal planes. Unlike prior work that focuses primarily on restoring the en face MIP, VAMOS-OCTA jointly enhances both cross-sectional B-scan sharpness and volumetric projection accuracy, even under severe motion corruptions. We trained our model on both synthetic and real-world corrupted volumes and evaluated its performance using both perceptual quality and pixel-wise accuracy metrics. VAMOS-OCTA consistently outperforms prior methods, producing reconstructions with sharp capillaries, restored vessel continuity, and clean en face projections. These results demonstrate that multi-axis supervision offers a powerful constraint for restoring motion-degraded 3D OCTA data. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MedICL-VU/VAMOS-OCTA.

Nick DiSanto, Gavin Harding, Ethan Martinez et al.

While skin cancer detection has been a valuable deep learning application for years, its evaluation has often neglected the context in which testing images are assessed. Traditional melanoma classifiers assume that their testing environments are comparable to the structured images they are trained on. This paper challenges this notion and argues that mole size, a critical attribute in professional dermatology, can be misleading in automated melanoma detection. While malignant melanomas tend to be larger than benign melanomas, relying solely on size can be unreliable and even harmful when contextual scaling of images is not possible. To address this issue, this implementation proposes a custom model that performs various data augmentation procedures to prevent overfitting to incorrect parameters and simulate real-world usage of melanoma detection applications. Multiple custom models employing different forms of data augmentation are implemented to highlight the most significant features of mole classifiers. These implementations emphasize the importance of considering user unpredictability when deploying such applications. The caution required when manually modifying data is acknowledged, as it can result in data loss and biased conclusions. Additionally, the significance of data augmentation in both the dermatology and deep learning communities is considered.

Nick DiSanto, Anthony Corso, Benjamin Sanders et al.

While transformers have pioneered attention-driven architectures as a cornerstone of language modeling, their dependence on explicitly contextual information underscores limitations in their abilities to tacitly learn overarching textual themes. This study challenges the heuristic paradigm of performance benchmarking by investigating social media data as a source of distributed patterns. In stark contrast to networks that rely on capturing complex long-term dependencies, models of online data inherently lack structure and are forced to detect latent structures in the aggregate. To properly represent these abstract relationships, this research dissects empirical social media corpora into their elemental components, analyzing over two billion tweets across population-dense locations. We create Bag-of-Word embedding specific to each city and compare their respective representations. This finds that even amidst noisy data, geographic location has a considerable influence on online communication, and that hidden insights can be uncovered without the crutch of advanced algorithms. This evidence presents valuable geospatial implications in social science and challenges the notion that intricate models are prerequisites for pattern recognition in natural language. This aligns with the evolving landscape that questions the embrace of absolute interpretability over abstract understanding and bridges the divide between sophisticated frameworks and intangible relationships.

Nick DiSanto

With state-of-the-art models achieving high performance on standard benchmarks, contemporary research paradigms continue to emphasize general intelligence as an enduring objective. However, this pursuit overlooks the fundamental disparities between the high-level data perception abilities of artificial and natural intelligence systems. This study questions the Turing Test as a criterion of generally intelligent thought and contends that it is misinterpreted as an attempt to anthropomorphize computer systems. Instead, it emphasizes tacit learning as a cornerstone of general-purpose intelligence, despite its lack of overt interpretability. This abstract form of intelligence necessitates contextual cognitive attributes that are crucial for human-level perception: generalizable experience, moral responsibility, and implicit prioritization. The absence of these features yields undeniable perceptual disparities and constrains the cognitive capacity of artificial systems to effectively contextualize their environments. Additionally, this study establishes that, despite extensive exploration of potential architecture for future systems, little consideration has been given to how such models will continuously absorb and adapt to contextual data. While conventional models may continue to improve in benchmark performance, disregarding these contextual considerations will lead to stagnation in human-like comprehension. Until general intelligence can be abstracted from task-specific domains and systems can learn implicitly from their environments, research standards should instead prioritize the disciplines in which AI thrives.