Ying Weng

Juexin Zhang, Ying Weng, Ke Chen

This paper introduces a novel approach to synthesize healthy 3D brain tissue from masked input images, specifically focusing on the task of 'ASNR-MICCAI BraTS Local Synthesis of Tissue via Inpainting'. Our proposed method employs a U-Net-based architecture, which is designed to effectively reconstruct the missing or corrupted regions of brain MRI scans. To enhance our model's generalization capabilities and robustness, we implement a comprehensive data augmentation strategy that involves randomly masking healthy images during training. Our model is trained on the BraTS-Local-Inpainting dataset and demonstrates the exceptional performance in recovering healthy brain tissue. The evaluation metrics employed, including Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Mean Squared Error (MSE), consistently yields impressive results. On the BraTS-Local-Inpainting validation set, our model achieved an SSIM score of 0.841, a PSNR score of 23.257, and an MSE score of 0.007. Notably, these evaluation metrics exhibit relatively low standard deviations, i.e., 0.103 for SSIM score, 4.213 for PSNR score and 0.007 for MSE score, which indicates that our model's reliability and consistency across various input scenarios. Our method also secured first place in the challenge.

Juexin Zhang, Qifeng Zhong, Ying Weng et al.

The significant molecular and pathological heterogeneity of glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor, complicates diagnosis and patient stratification. While traditional histopathological assessment remains the standard, deep learning offers a promising path toward objective and automated analysis of whole slide images. For the BraTS-Path 2025 Challenge, we developed a method that fine-tunes a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder with a dedicated classification head on the official training dataset. Our model's performance on the online validation set, evaluated via the Synapse platform, yielded a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.7064 and an F1-score of 0.7676. On the final test set, the model achieved an MCC of 0.6509 and an F1-score of 0.5330, which secured our team second place in the BraTS-Pathology 2025 Challenge. Our results establish a solid baseline for ViT-based histopathological analysis, and future efforts will focus on bridging the performance gap observed on the unseen validation data.

Juexin Zhang, Ying Weng, Ke Chen

Glioblastoma, a highly aggressive brain tumor with diverse molecular and pathological features, poses a diagnostic challenge due to its heterogeneity. Accurate diagnosis and assessment of this heterogeneity are essential for choosing the right treatment and improving patient outcomes. Traditional methods rely on identifying specific features in tissue samples, but deep learning offers a promising approach for improved glioblastoma diagnosis. In this paper, we present our approach to the BraTS-Path Challenge 2024. We leverage a pre-trained model and fine-tune it on the BraTS-Path training dataset. Our model demonstrates poor performance on the challenging BraTS-Path validation set, as rigorously assessed by the Synapse online platform. The model achieves an accuracy of 0.392229, a recall of 0.392229, and a F1-score of 0.392229, indicating a consistent ability to correctly identify instances under the target condition. Notably, our model exhibits perfect specificity of 0.898704, showing an exceptional capacity to correctly classify negative cases. Moreover, a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.255267 is calculated, to signify a limited positive correlation between predicted and actual values and highlight our model's overall predictive power. Our solution also achieves the second place during the testing phase.

Hejia Qiu, Chao Li, Ying Weng et al.

Tensor-power (TP) recurrent model is a family of non-linear dynamical systems, of which the recurrence relation consists of a p-fold (a.k.a., degree-p) tensor product. Despite such the model frequently appears in the advanced recurrent neural networks (RNNs), to this date there is limited study on its memory property, a critical characteristic in sequence tasks. In this work, we conduct a thorough investigation of the memory mechanism of TP recurrent models. Theoretically, we prove that a large degree p is an essential condition to achieve the long memory effect, yet it would lead to unstable dynamical behaviors. Empirically, we tackle this issue by extending the degree p from discrete to a differentiable domain, such that it is efficiently learnable from a variety of datasets. Taken together, the new model is expected to benefit from the long memory effect in a stable manner. We experimentally show that the proposed model achieves competitive performance compared to various advanced RNNs in both the single-cell and seq2seq architectures.