Lizhou Wu

Wenxuan Li, Pedro R. A. S. Bassi, Lizhou Wu et al.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), one of the deadliest solid malignancies, is often detected at a late and inoperable stage. Retrospective reviews of prediagnostic CT scans, when conducted by expert radiologists aware that the patient later developed PDAC, frequently reveal lesions that were previously overlooked. To help detecting these lesions earlier, we developed an automated system named ePAI (early Pancreatic cancer detection with Artificial Intelligence). It was trained on data from 1,598 patients from a single medical center. In the internal test involving 1,009 patients, ePAI achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.939-0.999, a sensitivity of 95.3%, and a specificity of 98.7% for detecting small PDAC less than 2 cm in diameter, precisely localizing PDAC as small as 2 mm. In an external test involving 7,158 patients across 6 centers, ePAI achieved an AUC of 0.918-0.945, a sensitivity of 91.5%, and a specificity of 88.0%, precisely localizing PDAC as small as 5 mm. Importantly, ePAI detected PDACs on prediagnostic CT scans obtained 3 to 36 months before clinical diagnosis that had originally been overlooked by radiologists. It successfully detected and localized PDACs in 75 of 159 patients, with a median lead time of 347 days before clinical diagnosis. Our multi-reader study showed that ePAI significantly outperformed 30 board-certified radiologists by 50.3% (P < 0.05) in sensitivity while maintaining a comparable specificity of 95.4% in detecting PDACs early and prediagnostic. These findings suggest its potential of ePAI as an assistive tool to improve early detection of pancreatic cancer.

Siqing Fu, Lizhou Wu, Tiejun Li et al.

Monte Carlo particle transport problems play a vital role in scientific computing, but solving them on exiting von Neumann architectures suffers from random branching and irregular memory access, causing computing inefficiency due to a fundamental mismatch between stochastic algorithms and deterministic hardware. To bridge this gap, we propose MCPT-Solver, a spin-based hardware true random number generator (TRNG) with tunable output probability enabled by a Bayesian inference network architecture. It is dedicated for efficiently solving stochastic applications including Monte Carlo particle transport problems. First, we leverage the stochastic switching property of spin devices to provide a high-quality entropy source for the TRNG and achieve high generating throughput and process-voltage-temperature tolerance through optimized control logic and write mechanism designs. Next, we propose a hardware Bayesian inference network to enable probability-tunable random number outputs. Finally, we present a system-level simulation framework to evaluate MCPT-Solver. Experimental results show that MCPT-Solver achieves a mean squared error of 7.6e-6 for solving transport problems while demonstrating a dramatic acceleration effect over general-purpose processors. Additionally, the MCPT-Solver's throughput reaches 185 Mb/s with an area of 27.8 um2/bit and energy consumption of 8.6 pJ/bit, making it the first spin-based TRNG that offers both process-voltage-temperature tolerance and adjustable probability.

Wenxuan Li, Pedro R. A. S. Bassi, Tianyu Lin et al.

Building trusted datasets is critical for transparent and responsible Medical AI (MAI) research, but creating even small, high-quality datasets can take years of effort from multidisciplinary teams. This process often delays AI benefits, as human-centric data creation and AI-centric model development are treated as separate, sequential steps. To overcome this, we propose ScaleMAI, an agent of AI-integrated data curation and annotation, allowing data quality and AI performance to improve in a self-reinforcing cycle and reducing development time from years to months. We adopt pancreatic tumor detection as an example. First, ScaleMAI progressively creates a dataset of 25,362 CT scans, including per-voxel annotations for benign/malignant tumors and 24 anatomical structures. Second, through progressive human-in-the-loop iterations, ScaleMAI provides Flagship AI Model that can approach the proficiency of expert annotators (30-year experience) in detecting pancreatic tumors. Flagship Model significantly outperforms models developed from smaller, fixed-quality datasets, with substantial gains in tumor detection (+14%), segmentation (+5%), and classification (72%) on three prestigious benchmarks. In summary, ScaleMAI transforms the speed, scale, and reliability of medical dataset creation, paving the way for a variety of impactful, data-driven applications.