Foundation Models in Dermatopathology: Skin Tissue Classification

The rapid generation of whole-slide images (WSIs) in dermatopathology necessitates automated methods for efficient processing and accurate classification. This study evaluates the performance of two foundation models, UNI and Virchow2, as feature extractors for classifying WSIs into three diagnostic categories: melanocytic, basaloid, and squamous lesions. Patch-level embeddings were aggregated into slide-level features using a mean-aggregation strategy and subsequently used to train multiple machine learning classifiers, including logistic regression, gradient-boosted trees, and random forest models. Performance was assessed using precision, recall, true positive rate, false positive rate, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) on the test set. Results demonstrate that patch-level features extracted using Virchow2 outperformed those extracted via UNI across most slide-level classifiers, with logistic regression achieving the highest accuracy (90%) for Virchow2, though the difference was not statistically significant. The study also explored data augmentation techniques and image normalization to enhance model robustness and generalizability. The mean-aggregation approach provided reliable slide-level feature representations. All experimental results and metrics were tracked and visualized using WandB.ai, facilitating reproducibility and interpretability. This research highlights the potential of foundation models for automated WSI classification, providing a scalable and effective approach for dermatopathological diagnosis while paving the way for future advancements in slide-level representation learning.

Direct Robot Configuration Space Construction using Convolutional Encoder-Decoders

Intelligent robots must be able to perform safe and efficient motion planning in their environments. Central to modern motion planning is the configuration space. Configuration spaces define the set of configurations of a robot that result in collisions with obstacles in the workspace, C-clsn, and the set of configurations that do not, C-free. Modern approaches to motion planning first compute the configuration space and then perform motion planning using the calculated configuration space. Real-time motion planning requires accurate and efficient construction of configuration spaces. We are the first to apply a convolutional encoder-decoder framework for calculating highly accurate approximations to configuration spaces. Our model achieves an average 97.5% F1-score for predicting C-free and C-clsn for 2-D robotic workspaces with a dual-arm robot. Our method limits undetected collisions to less than 2.5% on robotic workspaces that involve translation, rotation, and removal of obstacles. Our model learns highly transferable features between robotic workspaces, requiring little to no fine-tuning to adapt to new transformations of obstacles in the workspace.

Information Retrieval from the Digitized Books

Extracting the relevant information out of a large number of documents is a challenging and tedious task. The quality of results generated by the traditionally available full-text search engine and text-based image retrieval systems is not optimal. Information retrieval (IR) tasks become more challenging with the nontraditional language scripts, as in the case of Indic scripts. The authors have developed OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Search Engine to make an Information Retrieval & Extraction (IRE) system that replicates the current state-of-the-art methods using the IRE and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Here we have presented the study of the methods used for performing search and retrieval tasks. The details of this system, along with the statistics of the dataset (source: National Digital Library of India or NDLI), is also presented. Additionally, the ideas to further explore and add value to research in IRE are also discussed.