Cross-Modality Masked Learning for Survival Prediction in ICI Treated NSCLC Patients

Accurate prognosis of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients undergoing immunotherapy is essential for personalized treatment planning, enabling informed patient decisions, and improving both treatment outcomes and quality of life. However, the lack of large, relevant datasets and effective multi-modal feature fusion strategies pose significant challenges in this domain. To address these challenges, we present a large-scale dataset and introduce a novel framework for multi-modal feature fusion aimed at enhancing the accuracy of survival prediction. The dataset comprises 3D CT images and corresponding clinical records from NSCLC patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), along with progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) data. We further propose a cross-modality masked learning approach for medical feature fusion, consisting of two distinct branches, each tailored to its respective modality: a Slice-Depth Transformer for extracting 3D features from CT images and a graph-based Transformer for learning node features and relationships among clinical variables in tabular data. The fusion process is guided by a masked modality learning strategy, wherein the model utilizes the intact modality to reconstruct missing components. This mechanism improves the integration of modality-specific features, fostering more effective inter-modality relationships and feature interactions. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in multi-modal integration for NSCLC survival prediction, surpassing existing methods and setting a new benchmark for prognostic models in this context.

MCA-RG: Enhancing LLMs with Medical Concept Alignment for Radiology Report Generation

Despite significant advancements in adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) for radiology report generation (RRG), clinical adoption remains challenging due to difficulties in accurately mapping pathological and anatomical features to their corresponding text descriptions. Additionally, semantic agnostic feature extraction further hampers the generation of accurate diagnostic reports. To address these challenges, we introduce Medical Concept Aligned Radiology Report Generation (MCA-RG), a knowledge-driven framework that explicitly aligns visual features with distinct medical concepts to enhance the report generation process. MCA-RG utilizes two curated concept banks: a pathology bank containing lesion-related knowledge, and an anatomy bank with anatomical descriptions. The visual features are aligned with these medical concepts and undergo tailored enhancement. We further propose an anatomy-based contrastive learning procedure to improve the generalization of anatomical features, coupled with a matching loss for pathological features to prioritize clinically relevant regions. Additionally, a feature gating mechanism is employed to filter out low-quality concept features. Finally, the visual features are corresponding to individual medical concepts, and are leveraged to guide the report generation process. Experiments on two public benchmarks (MIMIC-CXR and CheXpert Plus) demonstrate that MCA-RG achieves superior performance, highlighting its effectiveness in radiology report generation.

Fine-grained Appearance Transfer with Diffusion Models

Image-to-image translation (I2I), and particularly its subfield of appearance transfer, which seeks to alter the visual appearance between images while maintaining structural coherence, presents formidable challenges. Despite significant advancements brought by diffusion models, achieving fine-grained transfer remains complex, particularly in terms of retaining detailed structural elements and ensuring information fidelity. This paper proposes an innovative framework designed to surmount these challenges by integrating various aspects of semantic matching, appearance transfer, and latent deviation. A pivotal aspect of our approach is the strategic use of the predicted $x_0$ space by diffusion models within the latent space of diffusion processes. This is identified as a crucial element for the precise and natural transfer of fine-grained details. Our framework exploits this space to accomplish semantic alignment between source and target images, facilitating mask-wise appearance transfer for improved feature acquisition. A significant advancement of our method is the seamless integration of these features into the latent space, enabling more nuanced latent deviations without necessitating extensive model retraining or fine-tuning. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through extensive experiments, which showcase its ability to adeptly handle fine-grained appearance transfers across a wide range of categories and domains. We provide our code at https://github.com/babahui/Fine-grained-Appearance-Transfer