Quasi-multimodal-based pathophysiological feature learning for retinal disease diagnosis

Retinal diseases spanning a broad spectrum can be effectively identified and diagnosed using complementary signals from multimodal data. However, multimodal diagnosis in ophthalmic practice is typically challenged in terms of data heterogeneity, potential invasiveness, registration complexity, and so on. As such, a unified framework that integrates multimodal data synthesis and fusion is proposed for retinal disease classification and grading. Specifically, the synthesized multimodal data incorporates fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA), multispectral imaging (MSI), and saliency maps that emphasize latent lesions as well as optic disc/cup regions. Parallel models are independently trained to learn modality-specific representations that capture cross-pathophysiological signatures. These features are then adaptively calibrated within and across modalities to perform information pruning and flexible integration according to downstream tasks. The proposed learning system is thoroughly interpreted through visualizations in both image and feature spaces. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrated the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art ones in the tasks of multi-label classification (F1-score: 0.683, AUC: 0.953) and diabetic retinopathy grading (Accuracy:0.842, Kappa: 0.861). This work not only enhances the accuracy and efficiency of retinal disease screening but also offers a scalable framework for data augmentation across various medical imaging modalities.

Automatic Generation of Inference Making Questions for Reading Comprehension Assessments

Inference making is an essential but complex skill in reading comprehension (RC). Some inferences require resolving references across sentences, and some rely on using prior knowledge to fill in the detail that is not explicitly written in the text. Diagnostic RC questions can help educators provide more effective and targeted reading instruction and interventions for school-age students. We introduce a taxonomy of inference types for RC and use it to analyze the distribution of items within a diagnostic RC item bank. Next, we present experiments using GPT-4o to generate bridging-inference RC items for given reading passages via few-shot prompting, comparing conditions with and without chain-of-thought prompts. Generated items were evaluated on three aspects: overall item quality, appropriate inference type, and LLM reasoning, achieving high inter-rater agreements above 0.90. Our results show that GPT-4o produced 93.8% good-quality questions suitable for operational use in grade 3-12 contexts; however, only 42.6% of the generated questions accurately matched the targeted inference type. We conclude that combining automatic item generation with human judgment offers a promising path toward scalable, high-quality diagnostic RC assessments.

Towards an automatic method for generating topical vocabulary test forms for specific reading passages

Background knowledge is typically needed for successful comprehension of topical and domain specific reading passages, such as in the STEM domain. However, there are few automated measures of student knowledge that can be readily deployed and scored in time to make predictions on whether a given student will likely be able to understand a specific content area text. In this paper, we present our effort in developing K-tool, an automated system for generating topical vocabulary tests that measure students' background knowledge related to a specific text. The system automatically detects the topic of a given text and produces topical vocabulary items based on their relationship with the topic. This information is used to automatically generate background knowledge forms that contain words that are highly related to the topic and words that share similar features but do not share high associations to the topic. Prior research indicates that performance on such tasks can help determine whether a student is likely to understand a particular text based on their knowledge state. The described system is intended for use with middle and high school student population of native speakers of English. It is designed to handle single reading passages and is not dependent on any corpus or text collection. In this paper, we describe the system architecture and present an initial evaluation of the system outputs.