Boyun Zheng

Fuqiang Chen, Ranran Zhang, Boyun Zheng et al.

Conventional hematoxylin-eosin (H&E) staining is limited to revealing cell morphology and distribution, whereas immunohistochemical (IHC) staining provides precise and specific visualization of protein activation at the molecular level. Virtual staining technology has emerged as a solution for highly efficient IHC examination, which directly transforms H&E-stained images to IHC-stained images. However, virtual staining is challenged by the insufficient mining of pathological semantics and the spatial misalignment of pathological semantics. To address these issues, we propose the Pathological Semantics-Preserving Learning method for Virtual Staining (PSPStain), which directly incorporates the molecular-level semantic information and enhances semantics interaction despite any spatial inconsistency. Specifically, PSPStain comprises two novel learning strategies: 1) Protein-Aware Learning Strategy (PALS) with Focal Optical Density (FOD) map maintains the coherence of protein expression level, which represents molecular-level semantic information; 2) Prototype-Consistent Learning Strategy (PCLS), which enhances cross-image semantic interaction by prototypical consistency learning. We evaluate PSPStain on two public datasets using five metrics: three clinically relevant metrics and two for image quality. Extensive experiments indicate that PSPStain outperforms current state-of-the-art H&E-to-IHC virtual staining methods and demonstrates a high pathological correlation between the staging of real and virtual stains.

Min Tan, Yushun Tao, Boyun Zheng et al.

With the increasing application of automated robotic digestive endoscopy (RDE), ensuring safe and efficient navigation in the unstructured and narrow digestive tract has become a critical challenge. Existing automated reinforcement learning navigation algorithms often result in potentially risky collisions due to the absence of essential human intervention, which significantly limits the safety and effectiveness of RDE in actual clinical practice. To address this limitation, we proposed a Human Intervention (HI)-based Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) framework, dubbed HI-PPO, which incorporates expert knowledge to enhance RDE's safety. Specifically, HI-PPO combines Enhanced Exploration Mechanism (EEM), Reward-Penalty Adjustment (RPA), and Behavior Cloning Similarity (BCS) to address PPO's exploration inefficiencies for safe navigation in complex gastrointestinal environments. Comparative experiments were conducted on a simulation platform, and the results showed that HI-PPO achieved a mean ATE (Average Trajectory Error) of \(8.02\ \text{mm}\) and a Security Score of \(0.862\), demonstrating performance comparable to human experts. The code will be publicly available once this paper is published.

Shengyuan Liu, Wenting Chen, Boyun Zheng et al.

Tumor data synthesis offers a promising solution to the shortage of annotated medical datasets. However, current approaches either limit tumor diversity by using predefined masks or employ computationally expensive two-stage processes with multiple denoising steps, causing computational inefficiency. Additionally, these methods typically rely on binary masks that fail to capture the gradual transitions characteristic of tumor boundaries. We present TumorGen, a novel Boundary-Aware Tumor-Mask Synthesis with Rectified Flow Matching for efficient 3D tumor synthesis with three key components: a Boundary-Aware Pseudo Mask Generation module that replaces strict binary masks with flexible bounding boxes; a Spatial-Constraint Vector Field Estimator that simultaneously synthesizes tumor latents and masks using rectified flow matching to ensure computational efficiency; and a VAE-guided mask refiner that enhances boundary realism. TumorGen significantly improves computational efficiency by requiring fewer sampling steps while maintaining pathological accuracy through coarse and fine-grained spatial constraints. Experimental results demonstrate TumorGen's superior performance over existing tumor synthesis methods in both efficiency and realism, offering a valuable contribution to AI-driven cancer diagnostics.