Resource-Efficient Glioma Segmentation on Sub-Saharan MRI

Gliomas are the most prevalent type of primary brain tumors, and their accurate segmentation from MRI is critical for diagnosis, treatment planning, and longitudinal monitoring. However, the scarcity of high-quality annotated imaging data in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) poses a significant challenge for deploying advanced segmentation models in clinical workflows. This study introduces a robust and computationally efficient deep learning framework tailored for resource-constrained settings. We leveraged a 3D Attention UNet architecture augmented with residual blocks and enhanced through transfer learning from pre-trained weights on the BraTS 2021 dataset. Our model was evaluated on 95 MRI cases from the BraTS-Africa dataset, a benchmark for glioma segmentation in SSA MRI data. Despite the limited data quality and quantity, our approach achieved Dice scores of 0.76 for the Enhancing Tumor (ET), 0.80 for Necrotic and Non-Enhancing Tumor Core (NETC), and 0.85 for Surrounding Non-Functional Hemisphere (SNFH). These results demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed model and its potential to support clinical decision making in low-resource settings. The compact architecture, approximately 90 MB, and sub-minute per-volume inference time on consumer-grade hardware further underscore its practicality for deployment in SSA health systems. This work contributes toward closing the gap in equitable AI for global health by empowering underserved regions with high-performing and accessible medical imaging solutions.

Artificial Intelligence in Bone Metastasis Analysis: Current Advancements, Opportunities and Challenges

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely used in medicine, particularly in the analysis of medical imaging, which has been driven by advances in computer vision and deep learning methods. This is particularly important in overcoming the challenges posed by diseases such as Bone Metastases (BM), a common and complex malignancy of the bones. Indeed, there have been an increasing interest in developing Machine Learning (ML) techniques into oncologic imaging for BM analysis. In order to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art and advancements for BM analysis using artificial intelligence, this review is conducted with the accordance with PRISMA guidelines. Firstly, this review highlights the clinical and oncologic perspectives of BM and the used medical imaging modalities, with discussing their advantages and limitations. Then the review focuses on modern approaches with considering the main BM analysis tasks, which includes: classification, detection and segmentation. The results analysis show that ML technologies can achieve promising performance for BM analysis and have significant potential to improve clinician efficiency and cope with time and cost limitations. Furthermore, there are requirements for further research to validate the clinical performance of ML tools and facilitate their integration into routine clinical practice.