Toufiq Musah

Prince Ebenezer Adjei, Joshua Teye Tettey, Toufiq Musah et al.

CARE-link is an open-source, web-based clinical support platform designed to improve the management of gestational diabetes by linking clinicians and patients through an LLM-mediated workflow. The system aggregates patient-generated data outside the hospital, summarizes relevant clinical information, and delivers context-aware decision support to clinicians. For patients, CARE-link provides clear explanations of management plans and delivers timely lifestyle guidance through a WhatsApp interface. The integrated dual-facing design aims to promote continuous monitoring, support individualized care, and reduce the burden of in-clinic follow-ups. Built with a modular architecture, the platform can be adapted to other chronic conditions requiring longitudinal tracking and behavioral support. CARE-link has the potential to enhance clinical oversight, promote patient compliance, and strengthen continuity of care particularly in resource-constrained settings.

Toufiq Musah, Salvatore Calcagno, Federica Proietto Salanitri et al.

Ultra-low-field (ULF) MRI offers portable and accessible neuroimaging but suffers from reduced signal-to-noise ratio and limited spatial resolution compared to high-field (HF) systems. Acquiring paired ULF-HF data for supervised enhancement is often difficult, particularly in resource-limited settings. We introduce ULF-Synth, a framework that combines: (i) acquisition-based synthesis of realistic ULF images from HF volumes to create large-scale paired training data, (ii) a spatial-frequency domain objective that prioritizes recovery of high-frequency anatomical detail. This formulation is architecture-agnostic, consistently improving structural similarity and perceptual fidelity across encoder-decoder, adversarial, and diffusion-based translation models. When trained exclusively on synthetic data, the resulting models generalize effectively to real 64mT ULF acquisitions, improving downstream multiclass brain segmentation and achieving higher radiologist preference and diagnostic acceptability in a blinded reader study. These findings demonstrate that synthetic paired supervision provides a practical and scalable pathway for enhancing ULF MRI without requiring real paired acquisitions. Code, Models and Dataset: https://github.com/toufiqmusah/ULF-Synth

Marawan Elbatel, Mohamed Ghonim, Jiaji Mao et al.

Automated segmentation of liver lesions on non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) is clinically important but fundamentally challenging, particularly in low-resource settings across Africa and Asia where contrast agents are frequently unavailable. Progress has been limited by the absence of annotated NCCT benchmarks. Here we describe the TriALS challenge for automated liver lesion segmentation under contrast-limited conditions, supported by a multi-centre dataset of 150 cases with four-phase CT acquisitions (600 volumes) from Egyptian and Chinese institutions. Algorithms were evaluated on 70 cases from three institutions, including an independent external cohort. The top-performing method achieved a mean venous-phase Dice of 0.754, consistent with human-level performance, yet dropped to 0.57 on NCCT. On external validation, the leading method outperformed off-the-shelf models by up to 28% in Dice on NCCT. Algorithm performance was most strongly predicted by training data scale and pre-training strategy. A cross-year comparison exposed a persistent perceptual barrier on NCCT that scaling pre-training alone cannot overcome. Data, annotations, and code are available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/TriALS.

Claudia Takyi Ankomah, Livingstone Eli Ayivor, Ireneaus Nyame et al.

Brain tumors, particularly gliomas, pose significant chall-enges due to their complex growth patterns, infiltrative nature, and the variability in brain structure across individuals, which makes accurate diagnosis and monitoring difficult. Deep learning models have been developed to accurately delineate these tumors. However, most of these models were trained on relatively homogenous high-resource datasets, limiting their robustness when deployed in underserved regions. In this study, we performed segmentation-aware offline data augmentation on the BraTS-Africa dataset to increase the data sample size and diversity to enhance generalization. We further constructed an ensemble of three distinct architectures, MedNeXt, SegMamba, and Residual-Encoder U-Net, to leverage their complementary strengths. Our best-performing model, MedNeXt, was trained on 1000 epochs and achieved the highest average lesion-wise dice and normalized surface distance scores of 0.86 and 0.81 respectively. However, the ensemble model trained for 500 epochs produced the most balanced segmentation performance across the tumour subregions. This work demonstrates that a combination of advanced augmentation and model ensembling can improve segmentation accuracy and robustness on diverse and underrepresented datasets. Code available at: https://github.com/SPARK-Academy-2025/SPARK-2025/tree/main/SPARK2025_BraTs_MODELS/SPARK_NeuroAshanti

Toufiq Musah, Chinasa Kalaiwo, Maimoona Akram et al.

Automated segmentation of BUS images is important for precise lesion delineation and tumor characterization, but is challenged by inherent artifacts and dataset inconsistencies. In this work, we evaluate the use of a modified Residual Encoder U-Net for breast ultrasound segmentation, with a focus on uncertainty quantification. We identify and correct for data duplication in the BUSI dataset, and use a deduplicated subset for more reliable estimates of generalization performance. Epistemic uncertainty is quantified using Monte Carlo dropout, deep ensembles, and their combination. Models are benchmarked on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets to demonstrate how they generalize to unseen cross-domain data. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy on the Breast-Lesion-USG dataset with in-distribution validation, and provides calibrated uncertainty estimates that effectively signal regions of low model confidence. Performance declines and increased uncertainty observed in out-of-distribution evaluation highlight the persistent challenge of domain shift in medical imaging, and the importance of integrated uncertainty modeling for trustworthy clinical deployment. \footnote{Code available at: https://github.com/toufiqmusah/nn-uncertainty.git}

Toufiq Musah

Accurate breast tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) is important for downstream tasks such as pathological complete response (pCR) assessment. In this work, we address both segmentation and pCR classification using the large-scale MAMA-MIA DCE-MRI dataset. We employ a large-kernel MedNeXt architecture with a two-stage training strategy that expands the receptive field from 3x3x3 to 5x5x5 kernels using the UpKern algorithm. This approach allows stable transfer of learned features to larger kernels, improving segmentation performance on the unseen validation set. An ensemble of large-kernel models achieved a Dice score of 0.67 and a normalized Hausdorff Distance (NormHD) of 0.24. For pCR classification, we trained a self-normalizing network (SNN) on radiomic features extracted from the predicted segmentations and first post-contrast DCE-MRI, reaching an average balanced accuracy of 57\%, and up to 75\% in some subgroups. Our findings highlight the benefits of combining larger receptive fields and radiomics-driven classification while motivating future work on advanced ensembling and the integration of clinical variables to further improve performance and generalization. Code: https://github.com/toufiqmusah/caladan-mama-mia.git

Toufiq Musah, Prince Ebenezer Adjei, Kojo Obed Otoo

Stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide, and is increasingly prevalent in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Timely interventions can significantly influence stroke survivability and the quality of life after treatment. However, the standard and most widely available imaging method for confirming strokes and their sub-types, the NCCT, is more challenging and time-consuming to employ in cases of ischemic stroke. For this reason, we developed an automated method for ischemic stroke lesion segmentation in NCCTs using the nnU-Net frame work, aimed at enhancing early treatment and improving the prognosis of ischemic stroke patients. We achieved Dice scores of 0.596 and Intersection over Union (IoU) scores of 0.501 on the sampled dataset. After adjusting for outliers, these scores improved to 0.752 for the Dice score and 0.643 for the IoU. Proper delineation of the region of infarction can help clinicians better assess the potential impact of the infarction, and guide treatment procedures.