Furqan Shaukat

Furqan Shaukat, Syed Muhammad Anwar, Abhijeet Parida et al.

Lung cancer has been one of the major threats to human life for decades. Computer-aided diagnosis can help with early lung nodul detection and facilitate subsequent nodule characterization. Large Visual Language models (VLMs) have been found effective for multiple downstream medical tasks that rely on both imaging and text data. However, lesion level detection and subsequent diagnosis using VLMs have not been explored yet. We propose CADe, for segmenting lung nodules in a zero-shot manner using a variant of the Segment Anything Model called MedSAM. CADe trains on a prompt suite on input computed tomography (CT) scans by using the CLIP text encoder through prefix tuning. We also propose, CADx, a method for the nodule characterization as benign/malignant by making a gallery of radiomic features and aligning image-feature pairs through contrastive learning. Training and validation of CADe and CADx have been done using one of the largest publicly available datasets, called LIDC. To check the generalization ability of the model, it is also evaluated on a challenging dataset, LUNGx. Our experimental results show that the proposed methods achieve a sensitivity of 0.86 compared to 0.76 that of other fully supervised methods.The source code, datasets and pre-processed data can be accessed using the link:

Muniba Noreen, Furqan Shaukat

Lung cancer remains among the deadliest types of cancer in recent decades, and early lung nodule detection is crucial for improving patient outcomes. The limited availability of annotated medical imaging data remains a bottleneck in developing accurate computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. Self-supervised learning can help leverage large amounts of unlabeled data to develop more robust CAD systems. With the recent advent of transformer-based architecture and their ability to generalize to unseen tasks, there has been an effort within the healthcare community to adapt them to various medical downstream tasks. Thus, we propose a novel "LungNodule-SSM" method, which utilizes selfsupervised learning with DINOv2 as a backbone to enhance lung nodule detection and classification without annotated data. Our methodology has two stages: firstly, the DINOv2 model is pre-trained on unlabeled CT scans to learn robust feature representations, then secondly, these features are fine-tuned using transformer-based architectures for lesionlevel detection and accurate lung nodule diagnosis. The proposed method has been evaluated on the challenging LUNA 16 dataset, consisting of 888 CT scans, and compared with SOTA methods. Our experimental results show the superiority of our proposed method with an accuracy of 98.37%, explaining its effectiveness in lung nodule detection. The source code, datasets, and pre-processed data can be accessed using the link:https://github.com/EMeRALDsNRPU/Lung-Nodule-SSM-Self-Supervised-Lung-Nodule-Detection-and-Classification/tree/main

Zulkaif Sajjad, Furqan Shaukat, Junaid Mir

Accurate medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in overall diagnosis and is one of the most essential tasks in the diagnostic pipeline. CNN-based models, despite their extensive use, suffer from a local receptive field and fail to capture the global context. A common approach that combines CNNs with transformers attempts to bridge this gap but fails to effectively fuse the local and global features. With the recent emergence of VLMs and foundation models, they have been adapted for downstream medical imaging tasks; however, they suffer from an inherent domain gap and high computational cost. To this end, we propose U-DFA, a unified DINOv2-Unet encoder-decoder architecture that integrates a novel Local-Global Fusion Adapter (LGFA) to enhance segmentation performance. LGFA modules inject spatial features from a CNN-based Spatial Pattern Adapter (SPA) module into frozen DINOv2 blocks at multiple stages, enabling effective fusion of high-level semantic and spatial features. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Synapse and ACDC datasets with only 33\% of the trainable model parameters. These results demonstrate that U-DFA is a robust and scalable framework for medical image segmentation across multiple modalities.

Hafza Eman, Furqan Shaukat, Muhammad Hamza Zafar et al.

Objective: Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, primarily due to delayed diagnosis and poor early detection. This study aims to develop a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system that leverages large vision-language models (VLMs) for the accurate detection and classification of pulmonary nodules in computed tomography (CT) scans. Methods: We propose an end-to-end CAD pipeline consisting of two modules: (i) a detection module (CADe) based on the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), in which the standard visual prompt is replaced with a text prompt encoded by CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining), and (ii) a diagnosis module (CADx) that calculates similarity scores between segmented nodules and radiomic features. To add clinical context, synthetic electronic medical records (EMRs) were generated using radiomic assessments by expert radiologists and combined with similarity scores for final classification. The method was tested on the publicly available LIDC-IDRI dataset (1,018 CT scans). Results: The proposed approach demonstrated strong performance in zero-shot lung nodule analysis. The CADe module achieved a Dice score of 0.92 and an IoU of 0.85 for nodule segmentation. The CADx module attained a specificity of 0.97 for malignancy classification, surpassing existing fully supervised methods. Conclusions: The integration of VLMs with radiomics and synthetic EMRs allows for accurate and clinically relevant CAD of pulmonary nodules in CT scans. The proposed system shows strong potential to enhance early lung cancer detection, increase diagnostic confidence, and improve patient management in routine clinical workflows.