Furen Xiao

Zolnamar Dorjsembe, Hung-Yi Chen, Furen Xiao et al.

MRI provides superior soft tissue contrast without ionizing radiation; however, the absence of electron density information limits its direct use for dose calculation. As a result, current radiotherapy workflows rely on combined MRI and CT acquisitions, increasing registration uncertainty and procedural complexity. Synthetic CT generation enables MRI only planning but remains challenging due to nonlinear MRI-CT relationships and anatomical variability. We propose Parallel Swin Transformer-Enhanced Med2Transformer, a 3D architecture that integrates convolutional encoding with dual Swin Transformer branches to model both local anatomical detail and long-range contextual dependencies. Multi-scale shifted window attention with hierarchical feature aggregation improves anatomical fidelity. Experiments on public and clinical datasets demonstrate higher image similarity and improved geometric accuracy compared with baseline methods. Dosimetric evaluation shows clinically acceptable performance, with a mean target dose error of 1.69%. Code is available at: https://github.com/mobaidoctor/med2transformer.

Zolnamar Dorjsembe, Hsing-Kuo Pao, Furen Xiao

This study introduces Polyp-DDPM, a diffusion-based method for generating realistic images of polyps conditioned on masks, aimed at enhancing the segmentation of gastrointestinal (GI) tract polyps. Our approach addresses the challenges of data limitations, high annotation costs, and privacy concerns associated with medical images. By conditioning the diffusion model on segmentation masks-binary masks that represent abnormal areas-Polyp-DDPM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of image quality (achieving a Frechet Inception Distance (FID) score of 78.47, compared to scores above 83.79) and segmentation performance (achieving an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.7156, versus less than 0.6694 for synthetic images from baseline models and 0.7067 for real data). Our method generates a high-quality, diverse synthetic dataset for training, thereby enhancing polyp segmentation models to be comparable with real images and offering greater data augmentation capabilities to improve segmentation models. The source code and pretrained weights for Polyp-DDPM are made publicly available at https://github.com/mobaidoctor/polyp-ddpm.

Zolnamar Dorjsembe, Hsing-Kuo Pao, Sodtavilan Odonchimed et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, especially in medical imaging, faces challenges due to data scarcity and privacy concerns. Addressing these, we introduce Med-DDPM, a diffusion model designed for 3D semantic brain MRI synthesis. This model effectively tackles data scarcity and privacy issues by integrating semantic conditioning. This involves the channel-wise concatenation of a conditioning image to the model input, enabling control in image generation. Med-DDPM demonstrates superior stability and performance compared to existing 3D brain imaging synthesis methods. It generates diverse, anatomically coherent images with high visual fidelity. In terms of dice score accuracy in the tumor segmentation task, Med-DDPM achieves 0.6207, close to the 0.6531 accuracy of real images, and outperforms baseline models. Combined with real images, it further increases segmentation accuracy to 0.6675, showing the potential of our proposed method for data augmentation. This model represents the first use of a diffusion model in 3D semantic brain MRI synthesis, producing high-quality images. Its semantic conditioning feature also shows potential for image anonymization in biomedical imaging, addressing data and privacy issues. We provide the code and model weights for Med-DDPM on our GitHub repository (https://github.com/mobaidoctor/med-ddpm/) to support reproducibility.

Siang-Ruei Wu, Hao-Yun Chang, Florence T Su et al.

Semantic segmentation of medical images with deep learning models is rapidly developed. In this study, we benchmarked state-of-the-art deep learning segmentation algorithms on our clinical stereotactic radiosurgery dataset, demonstrating the strengths and weaknesses of these algorithms in a fairly practical scenario. In particular, we compared the model performances with respect to their sampling method, model architecture, and the choice of loss functions, identifying the suitable settings for their applications and shedding light on the possible improvements.

Szu-Yeu Hu, Wei-Hung Weng, Shao-Lun Lu et al.

Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), which delivers high doses of irradiation in a single or few shots to small targets, has been a standard of care for brain metastases. While very effective, SRS currently requires manually intensive delineation of tumors. In this work, we present a deep learning approach for automated detection and segmentation of brain metastases using multimodal imaging and ensemble neural networks. In order to address small and multiple brain metastases, we further propose a volume-aware Dice loss which optimizes model performance using the information of lesion size. This work surpasses current benchmark levels and demonstrates a reliable AI-assisted system for SRS treatment planning for multiple brain metastases.

Huan-Chih Wang, Shih-Hao Ho, Furen Xiao et al.

Brain CT has become a standard imaging tool for emergent evaluation of brain condition, and measurement of midline shift (MLS) is one of the most important features to address for brain CT assessment. We present a simple method to estimate MLS and propose a new alternative parameter to MLS: the ratio of MLS over the maximal width of intracranial region (MLS/ICWMAX). Three neurosurgeons and our automated system were asked to measure MLS and MLS/ICWMAX in the same sets of axial CT images obtained from 41 patients admitted to ICU under neurosurgical service. A weighted midline (WML) was plotted based on individual pixel intensities, with higher weighted given to the darker portions. The MLS could then be measured as the distance between the WML and ideal midline (IML) near the foramen of Monro. The average processing time to output an automatic MLS measurement was around 10 seconds. Our automated system achieved an overall accuracy of 90.24% when the CT images were calibrated automatically, and performed better when the calibrations of head rotation were done manually (accuracy: 92.68%). MLS/ICWMAX and MLS both gave results in same confusion matrices and produced similar ROC curve results. We demonstrated a simple, fast and accurate automated system of MLS measurement and introduced a new parameter (MLS/ICWMAX) as a good alternative to MLS in terms of estimating the degree of brain deformation, especially when non-DICOM images (e.g. JPEG) are more easily accessed.