Xu Qiao

Yuanye Liu, Nannan Shi, Zhejia Zhang et al.

Despite years of methodological progress, how far AI has come in liver fibrosis staging has never been systematically evaluated under the heterogeneous, multi-center conditions that define clinical practice. To address this gap, we introduce LiFS, a large-scale dataset and benchmark derived from the MICCAI 2025 CARE-Liver challenge, comprising 610 patients across multiple centers and scanners with multi-sequence MRI. To the best of our knowledge, LiFS is the first benchmark providing complete gadoxetic acid-enhanced sequences with histopathology-confirmed annotations from diverse real-world scanners. Through systematic evaluation of 9 independently developed methods selected from 96 registered teams against in-cohort radiologist reference results, our findings address how far current AI has progressed toward clinical-level liver fibrosis staging from three complementary perspectives. First, against radiologists, the best AI methods were broadly comparable to the senior radiologist and significantly exceeded the junior radiologist in selected settings, while median AI performance generally approached junior-radiologist levels. Second, from a data perspective, cross-center heterogeneity, label imbalance, and contrast-enhanced sequence variability emerge as the dominant challenges for AI methods. Third, from a technical perspective, methodological design choices, including spatial registration, input dimensionality, multi-modal fusion strategy, and backbone architecture, appear to modulate cross-center robustness, although no single choice alone closes the gap. Overall, LiFS provides a rigorous real-world benchmark for positioning the current state of AI in liver fibrosis staging and for enabling future research on the key challenges that limit clinically reliable deployment.

Zetong Chen, Yuzhuo Chen, Hai Zhong et al.

Immunohistochemical (IHC) staining serves as a valuable technique for detecting specific antigens or proteins through antibody-mediated visualization. However, the IHC staining process is both time-consuming and costly. To address these limitations, the application of deep learning models for direct translation of cost-effective Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained images into IHC stained images has emerged as an efficient solution. Nevertheless, the conversion from H&E to IHC images presents significant challenges, primarily due to alignment discrepancies between image pairs and the inherent diversity in IHC staining style patterns. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Style Distribution Constraint Feature Alignment Network (SCFANet), which incorporates two innovative modules: the Style Distribution Constrainer (SDC) and Feature Alignment Learning (FAL). The SDC ensures consistency between the generated and target images' style distributions while integrating cycle consistency loss to maintain structural consistency. To mitigate the complexity of direct image-to-image translation, the FAL module decomposes the end-to-end translation task into two subtasks: image reconstruction and feature alignment. Furthermore, we ensure pathological consistency between generated and target images by maintaining pathological pattern consistency and Optical Density (OD) uniformity. Extensive experiments conducted on the Breast Cancer Immunohistochemical (BCI) dataset demonstrate that our SCFANet model outperforms existing methods, achieving precise transformation of H&E-stained images into their IHC-stained counterparts. The proposed approach not only addresses the technical challenges in H&E to IHC image translation but also provides a robust framework for accurate and efficient stain conversion in pathological analysis.

Spyridon Bakas, Mauricio Reyes, Andras Jakab et al.

Gliomas are the most common primary brain malignancies, with different degrees of aggressiveness, variable prognosis and various heterogeneous histologic sub-regions, i.e., peritumoral edematous/invaded tissue, necrotic core, active and non-enhancing core. This intrinsic heterogeneity is also portrayed in their radio-phenotype, as their sub-regions are depicted by varying intensity profiles disseminated across multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) scans, reflecting varying biological properties. Their heterogeneous shape, extent, and location are some of the factors that make these tumors difficult to resect, and in some cases inoperable. The amount of resected tumor is a factor also considered in longitudinal scans, when evaluating the apparent tumor for potential diagnosis of progression. Furthermore, there is mounting evidence that accurate segmentation of the various tumor sub-regions can offer the basis for quantitative image analysis towards prediction of patient overall survival. This study assesses the state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods used for brain tumor image analysis in mpMRI scans, during the last seven instances of the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge, i.e., 2012-2018. Specifically, we focus on i) evaluating segmentations of the various glioma sub-regions in pre-operative mpMRI scans, ii) assessing potential tumor progression by virtue of longitudinal growth of tumor sub-regions, beyond use of the RECIST/RANO criteria, and iii) predicting the overall survival from pre-operative mpMRI scans of patients that underwent gross total resection. Finally, we investigate the challenge of identifying the best ML algorithms for each of these tasks, considering that apart from being diverse on each instance of the challenge, the multi-institutional mpMRI BraTS dataset has also been a continuously evolving/growing dataset.