Elena Mulero Ayllón

Irene Iele, Giulia Romoli, Daniele Molino et al.

Short-term forecasting of vegetation dynamics is a key enabler for data-driven decision support in precision agriculture. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) forecasting from satellite observations, however, remains challenging due to sparse and irregular sampling caused by cloud masking, as well as the heterogeneous climatic conditions under which crops evolve. In this work, we propose a probabilistic forecasting framework for field-level NDVI prediction under sparse, irregular clear-sky acquisitions. The architecture separates the encoding of historical NDVI and meteorological observations from future exogenous covariates, fusing both representations for multi-step quantile prediction. To address irregular revisit patterns and horizon-dependent uncertainty, we introduce a temporal-distance weighted quantile loss that aligns the training objective with the effective forecasting horizon. In addition, we incorporate cumulative and extreme-weather feature engineering to capture delayed meteorological effects relevant to vegetation response. Experiments on European satellite data show that the proposed approach outperforms statistical, deep learning, and time-series baselines on both pointwise and probabilistic evaluation metrics. Ablation studies confirm that target history is the primary driver of performance, with meteorological covariates providing additional gains in the full multimodal setting. The code is available at https://github.com/arco-group/ndvi-forecasting.

Elena Mulero Ayllón, Linlin Shen, Pierangelo Veltri et al.

Accurate lung tumor segmentation is vital for improving diagnosis and treatment planning, and effectively combining anatomical and functional information from PET and CT remains a major challenge. In this study, we propose vMambaX, a lightweight multimodal framework integrating PET and CT scan images through a Context-Gated Cross-Modal Perception Module (CGM). Built on the Visual Mamba architecture, vMambaX adaptively enhances inter-modality feature interaction, emphasizing informative regions while suppressing noise. Evaluated on the PCLT20K dataset, the model outperforms baseline models while maintaining lower computational complexity. These results highlight the effectiveness of adaptive cross-modal gating for multimodal tumor segmentation and demonstrate the potential of vMambaX as an efficient and scalable framework for advanced lung cancer analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/arco-group/vMambaX.

Massimiliano Mantegna, Elena Mulero Ayllón, Alice Natalina Caragliano et al.

Predicting tumor evolution during radiotherapy is a clinically critical challenge, particularly when longitudinal changes are driven by both anatomy and treatment. In this work, we introduce a Virtual Treatment (VT) framework that formulates non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) progression as a dose-aware multimodal conditional image-to-image translation problem. Given a CT scan, baseline clinical variables, and a specified radiation dose increment, VT aims to synthesize plausible follow-up CT images reflecting treatment-induced anatomical changes. We evaluate the proposed framework on a longitudinal dataset of 222 stage III NSCLC patients, comprising 895 CT scans acquired during radiotherapy under irregular clinical schedules. The generative process is conditioned on delivered dose increments together with demographic and tumor-related clinical variables. Representative GAN-based and diffusion-based models are benchmarked across 2D and 2.5D configurations. Quantitative and qualitative results indicate that diffusion-based models benefit more consistently from multimodal, dose-aware conditioning and produce more stable and anatomically plausible tumor evolution trajectories than GAN-based baselines, supporting the potential of VT as a tool for in-silico treatment monitoring and adaptive radiotherapy research in NSCLC.

Elena Mulero Ayllón, Massimiliano Mantegna, Linlin Shen et al.

Accurate lung tumor segmentation is crucial for improving diagnosis, treatment planning, and patient outcomes in oncology. However, the complexity of tumor morphology, size, and location poses significant challenges for automated segmentation. This study presents a comprehensive benchmarking analysis of deep learning-based segmentation models, comparing traditional architectures such as U-Net and DeepLabV3, self-configuring models like nnUNet, and foundation models like MedSAM, and MedSAM~2. Evaluating performance across two lung tumor segmentation datasets, we assess segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency under various learning paradigms, including few-shot learning and fine-tuning. The results reveal that while traditional models struggle with tumor delineation, foundation models, particularly MedSAM~2, outperform them in both accuracy and computational efficiency. These findings underscore the potential of foundation models for lung tumor segmentation, highlighting their applicability in improving clinical workflows and patient outcomes.