College of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China
Abstract:Accurate segmentation of cervical structures in transvaginal ultrasound (TVS) is critical for assessing the risk of spontaneous preterm birth (PTB), yet the scarcity of labeled data limits the performance of supervised learning approaches. This paper introduces the Fetal Ultrasound Grand Challenge (FUGC), the first benchmark for semi-supervised learning in cervical segmentation, hosted at ISBI 2025. FUGC provides a dataset of 890 TVS images, including 500 training images, 90 validation images, and 300 test images. Methods were evaluated using the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Hausdorff Distance (HD), and runtime (RT), with a weighted combination of 0.4/0.4/0.2. The challenge attracted 10 teams with 82 participants submitting innovative solutions. The best-performing methods for each individual metric achieved 90.26\% mDSC, 38.88 mHD, and 32.85 ms RT, respectively. FUGC establishes a standardized benchmark for cervical segmentation, demonstrates the efficacy of semi-supervised methods with limited labeled data, and provides a foundation for AI-assisted clinical PTB risk assessment.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for improving clinical decision support and reducing physician burnout by synthesizing complex, longitudinal cancer Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, their implementation in this critical field faces three primary challenges: the inability to effectively process the extensive length and multilingual nature of patient records for accurate temporal analysis; a heightened risk of clinical hallucination, as conventional grounding techniques such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) do not adequately incorporate process-oriented clinical guidelines; and unreliable evaluation metrics that hinder the validation of AI systems in oncology. To address these issues, we propose CliCARE, a framework for Grounding Large Language Models in Clinical Guidelines for Decision Support over Longitudinal Cancer Electronic Health Records. The framework operates by transforming unstructured, longitudinal EHRs into patient-specific Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) to capture long-range dependencies, and then grounding the decision support process by aligning these real-world patient trajectories with a normative guideline knowledge graph. This approach provides oncologists with evidence-grounded decision support by generating a high-fidelity clinical summary and an actionable recommendation. We validated our framework using large-scale, longitudinal data from a private Chinese cancer dataset and the public English MIMIC-IV dataset. In these diverse settings, CliCARE significantly outperforms strong baselines, including leading long-context LLMs and Knowledge Graph-enhanced RAG methods. The clinical validity of our results is supported by a robust evaluation protocol, which demonstrates a high correlation with assessments made by expert oncologists.