MIRAGE: Multimodal foundation model and benchmark for comprehensive retinal OCT image analysis

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a fundamental tool for assisting clinicians in analyzing ophthalmic images, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT). However, developing AI models often requires extensive annotation, and existing models tend to underperform on independent, unseen data. Foundation models (FMs), large AI models trained on vast unlabeled datasets, have shown promise in overcoming these challenges. Nonetheless, available FMs for ophthalmology lack extensive validation, especially for segmentation tasks, and focus on a single imaging modality. In this context, we propose MIRAGE, a novel multimodal FM for the analysis of OCT and scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (SLO) images. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation benchmark with OCT/SLO classification and segmentation tasks. The comparison with general and specialized FMs and segmentation methods shows the superiority of MIRAGE in both types of tasks, highlighting its suitability as a basis for the development of robust AI systems for retinal OCT image analysis. Both MIRAGE and the evaluation benchmark are publicly available: https://github.com/j-morano/MIRAGE.

PyHHMM: A Python Library for Heterogeneous Hidden Markov Models

We introduce PyHHMM, an object-oriented open-source Python implementation of Heterogeneous-Hidden Markov Models (HHMMs). In addition to HMM's basic core functionalities, such as different initialization algorithms and classical observations models, i.e., continuous and multinoulli, PyHHMM distinctively emphasizes features not supported in similar available frameworks: a heterogeneous observation model, missing data inference, different model order selection criterias, and semi-supervised training. These characteristics result in a feature-rich implementation for researchers working with sequential data. PyHHMM relies on the numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, and seaborn Python packages, and is distributed under the Apache-2.0 License. PyHHMM's source code is publicly available on Github (https://github.com/fmorenopino/HeterogeneousHMM) to facilitate adoptions and future contributions. A detailed documentation (https://pyhhmm.readthedocs.io/en/latest), which covers examples of use and models' theoretical explanation, is available. The package can be installed through the Python Package Index (PyPI), via 'pip install pyhhmm'.