Yanting Li

Fubao Zhu, Yanhui Tian, Chuang Han et al.

The privacy protection mechanism of federated learning (FL) offers an effective solution for cross-center medical collaboration and data sharing. In multi-site medical image segmentation, each medical site serves as a client of FL, and its data naturally forms a domain. FL supplies the possibility to improve the performance of seen domains model. However, there is a problem of domain generalization (DG) in the actual de-ployment, that is, the performance of the model trained by FL in unseen domains will decrease. Hence, MLA-BIN is proposed to solve the DG of FL in this study. Specifically, the model-level attention module (MLA) and batch-instance style normalization (BIN) block were designed. The MLA represents the unseen domain as a linear combination of seen domain models. The atten-tion mechanism is introduced for the weighting coefficient to obtain the optimal coefficient ac-cording to the similarity of inter-domain data features. MLA enables the global model to gen-eralize to unseen domain. In the BIN block, batch normalization (BN) and instance normalization (IN) are combined to perform the shallow layers of the segmentation network for style normali-zation, solving the influence of inter-domain image style differences on DG. The extensive experimental results of two medical image seg-mentation tasks demonstrate that the proposed MLA-BIN outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Zhanyuan Jia, Ni Yao, Danyang Sun et al.

Background: Brain tumor segmentation has a significant impact on the diagnosis and treatment of brain tumors. Accurate brain tumor segmentation remains challenging due to their irregular shapes, vague boundaries, and high variability. Objective: We propose a brain tumor segmentation method that combines deep learning with prior knowledge derived from a region-growing algorithm. Methods: The proposed method utilizes a multi-scale feature fusion (MSFF) module and adaptive attention mechanisms (AAM) to extract multi-scale features and capture global contextual information. To enhance the model's robustness in low-confidence regions, the Monte Carlo Dropout (MC Dropout) strategy is employed for uncertainty estimation. Results: Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance on Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) datasets, significantly outperforming various state-of-the-art methods. On the BraTS2021 dataset, the test Dice scores are 89.18% for Enhancing Tumor (ET) segmentation, 93.67% for Whole Tumor (WT) segmentation, and 91.23% for Tumor Core (TC) segmentation. On the BraTS2019 validation set, the validation Dice scores are 87.43%, 90.92%, and 90.40% for ET, WT, and TC segmentation, respectively. Ablation studies further confirmed the contribution of each module to segmentation accuracy, indicating that each component played a vital role in overall performance improvement. Conclusion: This study proposed a novel 3D brain tumor segmentation network based on the U-Net architecture. By incorporating the prior knowledge and employing the uncertainty estimation method, the robustness and performance were improved. The code for the proposed method is available at https://github.com/chenzhao2023/UPMAD_Net_BrainSeg.

Ni Yao, Xiangyu Liu, Danyang Sun et al.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) remains a leading cause of mortality worldwide, requiring accurate segmentation and stenosis detection using Coronary Computed Tomography angiography (CCTA). Existing methods struggle with challenges such as low contrast, morphological variability and small vessel segmentation. To address these limitations, we propose the Myocardial Region-guided Feature Aggregation Net, a novel U-shaped dual-encoder architecture that integrates anatomical prior knowledge to enhance robustness in coronary artery segmentation. Our framework incorporates three key innovations: (1) a Myocardial Region-guided Module that directs attention to coronary regions via myocardial contour expansion and multi-scale feature fusion, (2) a Residual Feature Extraction Encoding Module that combines parallel spatial channel attention with residual blocks to enhance local-global feature discrimination, and (3) a Multi-scale Feature Fusion Module for adaptive aggregation of hierarchical vascular features. Additionally, Monte Carlo dropout f quantifies prediction uncertainty, supporting clinical interpretability. For stenosis detection, a morphology-based centerline extraction algorithm separates the vascular tree into anatomical branches, enabling cross-sectional area quantification and stenosis grading. The superiority of MGFA-Net was demonstrated by achieving an Dice score of 85.04%, an accuracy of 84.24%, an HD95 of 6.1294 mm, and an improvement of 5.46% in true positive rate for stenosis detection compared to3D U-Net. The integrated segmentation-to-stenosis pipeline provides automated, clinically interpretable CAD assessment, bridging deep learning with anatomical prior knowledge for precision medicine. Our code is publicly available at http://github.com/chenzhao2023/MGFA_CCTA

Hai Hu, He Zhou, Zuoyu Tian et al.

Multilingual transformers (XLM, mT5) have been shown to have remarkable transfer skills in zero-shot settings. Most transfer studies, however, rely on automatically translated resources (XNLI, XQuAD), making it hard to discern the particular linguistic knowledge that is being transferred, and the role of expert annotated monolingual datasets when developing task-specific models. We investigate the cross-lingual transfer abilities of XLM-R for Chinese and English natural language inference (NLI), with a focus on the recent large-scale Chinese dataset OCNLI. To better understand linguistic transfer, we created 4 categories of challenge and adversarial tasks (totaling 17 new datasets) for Chinese that build on several well-known resources for English (e.g., HANS, NLI stress-tests). We find that cross-lingual models trained on English NLI do transfer well across our Chinese tasks (e.g., in 3/4 of our challenge categories, they perform as well/better than the best monolingual models, even on 3/5 uniquely Chinese linguistic phenomena such as idioms, pro drop). These results, however, come with important caveats: cross-lingual models often perform best when trained on a mixture of English and high-quality monolingual NLI data (OCNLI), and are often hindered by automatically translated resources (XNLI-zh). For many phenomena, all models continue to struggle, highlighting the need for our new diagnostics to help benchmark Chinese and cross-lingual models. All new datasets/code are released at https://github.com/huhailinguist/ChineseNLIProbing.

Yingce Xia, Peiran Jin, Shufang Xie et al. · microsoft-research

Foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing and artificial intelligence, significantly enhancing how machines comprehend and generate human languages. Inspired by the success of these foundation models, researchers have developed foundation models for individual scientific domains, including small molecules, materials, proteins, DNA, RNA and even cells. However, these models are typically trained in isolation, lacking the ability to integrate across different scientific domains. Recognizing that entities within these domains can all be represented as sequences, which together form the "language of nature", we introduce Nature Language Model (NatureLM), a sequence-based science foundation model designed for scientific discovery. Pre-trained with data from multiple scientific domains, NatureLM offers a unified, versatile model that enables various applications including: (i) generating and optimizing small molecules, proteins, RNA, and materials using text instructions; (ii) cross-domain generation/design, such as protein-to-molecule and protein-to-RNA generation; and (iii) top performance across different domains, matching or surpassing state-of-the-art specialist models. NatureLM offers a promising generalist approach for various scientific tasks, including drug discovery (hit generation/optimization, ADMET optimization, synthesis), novel material design, and the development of therapeutic proteins or nucleotides. We have developed NatureLM models in different sizes (1 billion, 8 billion, and 46.7 billion parameters) and observed a clear improvement in performance as the model size increases.

Huan Huang, Liheng Qiu, Shenmiao Yang et al.

Background: Accurate segmentation of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) lesions is challenging due to their complex patterns in medical imaging. Objective: This study aims to develop a precise segmentation method for DLBCL using 18F-Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) images. Methods: We propose a 3D dual-branch encoder segmentation method using shifted window transformers and a Multi-Scale Information Fusion (MSIF) module. To enhance feature integration, the MSIF module performs multi-scale feature fusion using cross-attention mechanisms with a shifted window framework. A gated neural network within the MSIF module dynamically balances the contributions from each modality. The model was optimized using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) loss function. Additionally, we computed the total metabolic tumor volume (TMTV) and performed statistical analyses. Results: The model was trained and validated on a dataset of 165 DLBCL patients using 5-fold cross-validation, achieving a DSC of 0.7512. Statistical analysis showed a significant improvement over comparative methods (p < 0.05). Additionally, a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.91 and an R^2 of 0.89 were observed when comparing manual annotations to segmentation results for TMTV measurement. Conclusion: This study presents an effective automatic segmentation method for DLBCL that leverages the complementary strengths of PET and CT imaging. Our method has the potential to improve diagnostic interpretations and assist in treatment planning for DLBCL patients.

Fubao Zhu, Zhanyuan Jia, Zhiguo Wang et al.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an irreversible neurodegenerative disorder, and early diagnosis is critical for timely intervention. However, most existing classification frameworks face challenges in multicenter studies, as they often neglect inter-site heterogeneity and lack mechanisms to quantify uncertainty, which limits their robustness and clinical applicability. To address these issues, we proposed Uncertainty-Guided Federated Domain Adaptation (UG-FedDA), a novel multicenter AD classification framework that integrates uncertainty quantification (UQ) with federated domain adaptation to handle cross-site structure magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) heterogeneity under privacy constraints. Our approach extracts multi-template region-of-interest (RoI) features using a self-attention transformer, capturing both regional representations and their interactions. UQ is integrated to guide feature alignment, mitigating source-target distribution shifts by down-weighting uncertain samples. Experiments are conducted on three public datasets: the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle study (AIBL), and the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS). UG-FedDA achieved consistent cross-domain improvements in accuracy, sensitivity, and area under the ROC curve across three classification tasks: AD vs. normal controls (NC), mild cognitive impairment (MCI) vs. AD, and NC vs. MCI. For NC vs. AD, UG-FedDA achieves accuracies of 90.54%, 89.04%, and 77.78% on ADNI, AIBL and OASIS datasets, respectively. For MCI vs. AD, accuracies are 80.20% (ADNI), 71.91% (AIBL), and 79.73% (OASIS). For NC vs. MCI, results are 76.87% (ADNI), 73.91% (AIBL), and 83.73% (OASIS). These results demonstrate that the proposed framework not only adapts efficiently across multiple sites but also preserves strict privacy.

Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang et al.

The advent of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks for English, such as GLUE and SuperGLUE allows new NLU models to be evaluated across a diverse set of tasks. These comprehensive benchmarks have facilitated a broad range of research and applications in natural language processing (NLP). The problem, however, is that most such benchmarks are limited to English, which has made it difficult to replicate many of the successes in English NLU for other languages. To help remedy this issue, we introduce the first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark. CLUE is an open-ended, community-driven project that brings together 9 tasks spanning several well-established single-sentence/sentence-pair classification tasks, as well as machine reading comprehension, all on original Chinese text. To establish results on these tasks, we report scores using an exhaustive set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models (9 in total). We also introduce a number of supplementary datasets and additional tools to help facilitate further progress on Chinese NLU. Our benchmark is released at https://www.CLUEbenchmarks.com