Jingyun Chen

Jinpeng Lu, Jingyun Chen, Linghan Cai et al.

Positron emission tomography (PET) combined with computed tomography (CT) imaging is routinely used in cancer diagnosis and prognosis by providing complementary information. Automatically segmenting tumors in PET/CT images can significantly improve examination efficiency. Traditional multi-modal segmentation solutions mainly rely on concatenation operations for modality fusion, which fail to effectively model the non-linear dependencies between PET and CT modalities. Recent studies have investigated various approaches to optimize the fusion of modality-specific features for enhancing joint representations. However, modality-specific encoders used in these methods operate independently, inadequately leveraging the synergistic relationships inherent in PET and CT modalities, for example, the complementarity between semantics and structure. To address these issues, we propose a Hierarchical Adaptive Interaction and Weighting Network termed H2ASeg to explore the intrinsic cross-modal correlations and transfer potential complementary information. Specifically, we design a Modality-Cooperative Spatial Attention (MCSA) module that performs intra- and inter-modal interactions globally and locally. Additionally, a Target-Aware Modality Weighting (TAMW) module is developed to highlight tumor-related features within multi-modal features, thereby refining tumor segmentation. By embedding these modules across different layers, H2ASeg can hierarchically model cross-modal correlations, enabling a nuanced understanding of both semantic and structural tumor features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of H2ASeg, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on AutoPet-II and Hecktor2022 benchmarks. The code is released at https://github.com/JinPLu/H2ASeg.

Jingyun Chen, Yading Yuan

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training among medical centers without sharing private data. However, traditional FL risks on server failures and suboptimal performance on local data due to the nature of centralized model aggregation. To address these issues, we present Gossip Mutual Learning (GML), a decentralized framework that uses Gossip Protocol for direct peer-to-peer communication. In addition, GML encourages each site to optimize its local model through mutual learning to account for data variations among different sites. For the task of tumor segmentation using 146 cases from four clinical sites in BraTS 2021 dataset, we demonstrated GML outperformed local models and achieved similar performance as FedAvg with only 25% communication overhead.

Taixi Chen, Jingyun Chen, Nancy Guo

Inspired by the recent success of the Mamba architecture in vision and language domains, we introduce a Unified Attention-Mamba (UAM) backbone. Unlike previous hybrid approaches that integrate Attention and Mamba modules in fixed proportions, our unified design flexibly combines their capabilities within a single cohesive architecture, eliminating the need for manual ratio tuning and improving encode capability. We develop two UAM variants to comprehensively evaluate the benefits of this unified structure. Building on this backbone, we further propose a multimodal UAM framework that jointly performs cell-level classification and image segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that UAM achieves state-of-the-art performance across both tasks on public benchmarks, surpassing leading image-based foundation models. It improves cell classification accuracy from 74\% to 78\% ($n$=349,882 cells), and tumor segmentation precision from 75\% to 80\% ($n$=406 patches).

Jingyun Chen, Linghan Cai, Zhikang Wang et al.

Analyzing whole-slide images (WSIs) requires an iterative, evidence-driven reasoning process that parallels how pathologists dynamically zoom, refocus, and self-correct while collecting the evidence. However, existing computational pipelines often lack this explicit reasoning trajectory, resulting in inherently opaque and unjustifiable predictions. To bridge this gap, we present PathAgent, a training-free, large language model (LLM)-based agent framework that emulates the reflective, stepwise analytical approach of human experts. PathAgent can autonomously explore WSI, iteratively and precisely locating significant micro-regions using the Navigator module, extracting morphology visual cues using the Perceptor, and integrating these findings into the continuously evolving natural language trajectories in the Executor. The entire sequence of observations and decisions forms an explicit chain-of-thought, yielding fully interpretable predictions. Evaluated across five challenging datasets, PathAgent exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, surpassing task-specific baselines in both open-ended and constrained visual question-answering tasks. Moreover, a collaborative evaluation with human pathologists confirms PathAgent's promise as a transparent and clinically grounded diagnostic assistant.

Jingyun Chen, Yading Yuan

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising strategy for collaboratively training complicated machine learning models from different medical centers without the need of data sharing. However, the traditional FL relies on a central server to orchestrate the global model training among clients. This makes it vulnerable to the failure of the model server. Meanwhile, the model trained based on the global data property may not yield the best performance on the local data of a particular site due to the variations of data characteristics among them. To address these limitations, we proposed Gossip Mutual Learning(GML), a decentralized collaborative learning framework that employs Gossip Protocol for direct peer-to-peer communication and encourages each site to optimize its local model by leveraging useful information from peers through mutual learning. On the task of tumor segmentation on PET/CT images using HECKTOR21 dataset with 223 cases from five clinical sites, we demonstrated GML could improve tumor segmentation performance in terms of Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) by 3.2%, 4.6% and 10.4% on site-specific testing cases as compared to three baseline methods: pooled training, FedAvg and individual training, respectively. We also showed GML has comparable generalization performance as pooled training and FedAvg when applying them on 78 cases from two out-of-sample sites where no case was used for model training. In our experimental setup, GML showcased a sixfold decrease in communication overhead compared to FedAvg, requiring only 16.67% of the total communication overhead.