Kun Huang

Yuhan Zhang, Kun Huang, Mingchao Li et al.

Most of the existing disease prediction methods in the field of medical image processing fall into two classes, namely image-to-category predictions and image-to-parameter predictions. Few works have focused on image-to-image predictions. Different from multi-horizon predictions in other fields, ophthalmologists prefer to show more confidence in single-horizon predictions due to the low tolerance of predictive risk. We propose a single-horizon disease evolution network (SHENet) to predictively generate post-therapeutic SD-OCT images by inputting pre-therapeutic SD-OCT images with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD). In SHENet, a feature encoder converts the input SD-OCT images to deep features, then a graph evolution module predicts the process of disease evolution in high-dimensional latent space and outputs the predicted deep features, and lastly, feature decoder recovers the predicted deep features to SD-OCT images. We further propose an evolution reinforcement module to ensure the effectiveness of disease evolution learning and obtain realistic SD-OCT images by adversarial training. SHENet is validated on 383 SD-OCT cubes of 22 nAMD patients based on three well-designed schemes based on the quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Compared with other generative methods, the generative SD-OCT images of SHENet have the highest image quality. Besides, SHENet achieves the best structure protection and content prediction. Qualitative evaluations also demonstrate that SHENet has a better visual effect than other methods. SHENet can generate post-therapeutic SD-OCT images with both high prediction performance and good image quality, which has great potential to help ophthalmologists forecast the therapeutic effect of nAMD.

Chao Tu, Kun Huang, Jie Zhang et al.

The burgeoning discipline of computational pathology shows promise in harnessing whole slide images (WSIs) to quantify morphological heterogeneity and develop objective prognostic modes for human cancers. However, progress is impeded by the computational bottleneck of gigapixel-size inputs and the scarcity of dense manual annotations. Current methods often overlook fine-grained information across multi-magnification WSIs and variations in tumor microenvironments. Here, we propose an easy-to-hard progressive representation learning, termed dual-curriculum contrastive multi-instance learning (DCMIL), to efficiently process WSIs for cancer prognosis. The model does not rely on dense annotations and enables the direct transformation of gigapixel-size WSIs into outcome predictions. Extensive experiments on twelve cancer types (5,954 patients, 12.54 million tiles) demonstrate that DCMIL outperforms standard WSI-based prognostic models. Additionally, DCMIL identifies fine-grained prognosis-salient regions, provides robust instance uncertainty estimation, and captures morphological differences between normal and tumor tissues, with the potential to generate new biological insights. All codes have been made publicly accessible at https://github.com/tuuuc/DCMIL.