Yeonju Lee

Min Gu Kwak, Yeonju Lee, Hairong Wang et al.

Brain tumors are among the most clinically significant neurological diseases and remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality due to their aggressive growth and structural heterogeneity. As tumors expand, they induce substantial anatomical deformation that disrupts both local tissue organization and global brain architecture, complicating diagnosis, treatment planning, and surgical navigation. Yet a subject-specific reference of how the brain would appear without tumor-induced changes is fundamentally unobtainable in clinical practice. We present BrainNormalizer, an anatomy-informed diffusion framework that reconstructs pseudo-healthy MRIs directly from tumorous scans by conditioning the generative process on boundary cues extracted from the subject's own anatomy. This boundary-guided conditioning enables anatomically plausible pseudo-healthy reconstruction without requiring paired non-tumorous and tumorous scans. BrainNormalizer employs a two-stage training strategy. The pretrained diffusion model is first adapted through inpainting-based fine-tuning on tumorous and non-tumorous scans. Next, an edge-map-guided ControlNet branch is trained to inject fine-grained anatomical contours into the frozen decoder while preserving learned priors. During inference, a deliberate misalignment strategy pairs tumorous inputs with non-tumorous prompts and mirrored contralateral edge maps, leveraging hemispheric correspondence to guide reconstruction. On the BraTS2020 dataset, BrainNormalizer achieves strong quantitative performance and qualitatively produces anatomically plausible reconstructions in tumor-affected regions while retaining overall structural coherence. BrainNormalizer provides clinically reliable anatomical references for treatment planning and supports new research directions in counterfactual modeling and tumor-induced deformation analysis.

Abigail R. Cohen, Yuming Sun, Zhihao Qin et al.

Efficient nutrient management is critical for crop growth and sustainable resource consumption (e.g., nitrogen, energy). Current approaches require lengthy analyses, preventing real-time optimization; similarly, imaging facilitates rapid phenotyping but can be computationally intensive, preventing deployment under resource constraints. This study proposes a flexible, tiered pipeline for anomaly detection and status estimation (fresh weight, dry mass, and tissue nutrients), including a comprehensive energy analysis of approaches that span the efficiency-accuracy spectrum. Using a nutrient depletion experiment with three treatments (T1-100%, T2-50%, and T3-25% fertilizer strength) and multispectral imaging (MSI), we developed a hierarchical pipeline using an autoencoder (AE) for early warning. Further, we compared two status estimation modules of different complexity for more detailed analysis: vegetation index (VI) features with machine learning (Random Forest, RF) and raw whole-image deep learning (Vision Transformer, ViT). Results demonstrated high-efficiency anomaly detection (73% net detection of T3 samples 9 days after transplanting) at substantially lower energy than embodied energy in wasted nitrogen. The state estimation modules show trade-offs, with ViT outperforming RF on phosphorus and calcium estimation (R2 0.61 vs. 0.58, 0.48 vs. 0.35) at higher energy cost. With our modular pipeline, this work opens opportunities for edge diagnostics and practical opportunities for agricultural sustainability.

Yeonju Lee, Rui Qi Chen, Joseph Oboamah et al.

Accurate interpretation of soil moisture patterns is critical for irrigation scheduling and crop management, yet existing approaches for soil moisture time-series analysis either rely on threshold-based rules or data-hungry machine learning or deep learning models that are limited in adaptability and interpretability. In this study, we introduce SPADE (Soil moisture Pattern and Anomaly DEtection), an integrated framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to jointly detect irrigation patterns and anomalies in soil moisture time-series data. SPADE utilizes ChatGPT-4.1 for its advanced reasoning and instruction-following capabilities, enabling zero-shot analysis without requiring task-specific annotation or fine-tuning. By converting time-series data into a textual representation and designing domain-informed prompt templates, SPADE identifies irrigation events, estimates net irrigation gains, detects, classifies anomalies, and produces structured, interpretable reports. Experiments were conducted on real-world soil moisture sensor data from commercial and experimental farms cultivating multiple crops across the United States. Results demonstrate that SPADE outperforms the existing method in anomaly detection, achieving higher recall and F1 scores and accurately classifying anomaly types. Furthermore, SPADE achieved high precision and recall in detecting irrigation events, indicating its strong capability to capture irrigation patterns accurately. SPADE's reports provide interpretability and usability of soil moisture analytics. This study highlights the potential of LLMs as scalable, adaptable tools for precision agriculture, which is capable of integrating qualitative knowledge and data-driven reasoning to produce actionable insights for accurate soil moisture monitoring and improved irrigation scheduling from soil moisture time-series data.