Deep_Learning
-
DGCM-SSFA: Dual-Granularity Cross-Modulation and Sparse Strip Frequency Attention for Efficient 3T-to-7T MRI Synthesis
2026-10-21 03:21:45Zhichun Fan, Zhiqiang Chen, Lanling Liu, Lingjun Liu, Zhonghua XieAbstract
Synthesizing high-fidelity 7T MRI from routinely acquired 3T scans offers a practical pathway to enhanced neuroimaging without the prohibitive cost of ultra-high-field scanners. While existing deep learning approaches have achieved promising results, state-of-the-art methods typically rely on either large-scale architectures exceeding 45 million parameters or computationally intensive ensemble strategies, limiting their practicality in resource-constrained clinical environments. In this work, we propose a compact multi-domain attention framework, termed DGCM-SSFA, that achieves competitive synthesis quality with only 11M parameters. The proposed architecture integrates two complementary modules into a U-Net Transformer backbone. First, a Dual-Granularity Cross-Modulated Feature Modulator (DGCM) is embedded at multiple hierarchical levels to enhance local edge and texture details through Sobel-guided spatial attention and depthwise frequency-aware channel attention with cross-branch gating. Second, a Sparse Strip Frequency Attention (SSFA) module at the bottleneck captures global spatial context via strip-pooled attention with near-linear complexity, while simultaneously performing FFT-based spectral modulation in the frequency domain. These two modules operate synergistically with the backbone's native channel attention, forming a triple-granularity feature refinement pipeline. Extensive experiments on the UNC and BNU 3T-to-7T MRI datasets across T1w and T2w modalities demonstrate that DGCM-SSFA achieves strong structural fidelity, attaining an SSIM of 0.8431 on BNU T2w---approaching the best benchmark value of 0.8624---and 0.8100 on BNU T1w, while using substantially fewer parameters than Transformer-based alternatives such as ResViT (123.4M) and FS-RWKV (45.4M).
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29141
PDF
-
ReSeg: Retraining-free segmentation of abdominal organs via generalizable semantic representation learning
2026-10-21 02:31:19Derong Yu, Guoyan ZhengAbstract
Abdominal organ segmentation is essential in modern medical applications. While existing deep learning approaches demonstrate promising performance, their heavy reliance on large-scale image data raises concerns over generalization capability and privacy risks. This motivates the development of generalizable segmentation training paradigms based on domain-randomized image synthesis, facilitating generalization across unseen real image domains. However, existing paradigms either suffer from limited segmentation performance when applied to abdominal organs, or require dataset-specific finetuning. To address these limitations, we propose ReSeg, a novel two-stage retraining-free framework for domain-agnostic zero-shot abdominal organ segmentation. At the first stage, our organ-agnostic synthetic data-driven pretraining approach exploits semantically and visually diverse synthetic images generated by a dedicated data engine to optimize a Generalizable Semantic Representation Network (GSRNet). The network is thereby capable of learning semantic features robust against variations in anatomical structure, imaging contrast, resolution and spatial context, which provide universal representation capabilities that serve as a foundation for segmentation learning. Subsequently, in the second stage, we continue to train an Organ-specific Encoder-decoder Segmentation Network (OESNet), whose encoder is initialized with the pretrained weights. This training process is facilitated by another dedicated data engine, which generates diversified visual images while strictly retaining the inherent spatial layout of abdominal organs. Comprehensive evaluation on seven abdominal organ segmentation datasets across three different modalities including CT, MRI, and PET demonstrates that ReSeg consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while eliminating the need for real training images.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29090
PDF
-
Augmentation with Reinforcement Transformation for Low-textured Scientific Sketch Image Retrieval
2026-10-21 02:21:27Zhiqiang Wang, Sheri L. Barton, Jennifer H. Johnson, Yi He, Xingquan ZhuAbstract
Low-textured sketch images are widely used in scientific applications, including wildlife conservation, archaeological illustration, and forensic composites. Learning from and retrieving such images is challenging because they lack detailed surface textures and visual variations commonly exploited by modern deep learning models. This paper proposes Augmentation with Reinforcement Transformation (ART) to fine-tune pretrained models to learn effective representations for accurate sketch image retrieval. Our key observation is that sketches are particularly sensitive to image transformations, such as rotation, flipping, zooming, and stretching. While some transformations preserve their structural integrity, others may introduce distortions that hinder representation learning. Instead of randomly choosing transformations to construct fine-tuning views, ART formulates augmentation selection as a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, where transformations are treated as arms and their effectiveness is continuously evaluated through rewards. This enables ART to adaptively construct reward-guided view banks before self-supervised fine-tuning; the subsequent representation loss does not feed back to ART. On Florida manatee sketches provided by Mote Marine Laboratory, ART achieves 71.40% average Top-1 accuracy for transformed-scar retrieval, compared with 68.83% for random augmentation selection, and 55.84% for location-aware sketch retrieval, compared with 18.18% for frozen CLIP.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05408
PDF
-
Weakly Supervised Fish Segmentation through Point-Supervised Tracking and Motion-Informed Language
2026-10-21 01:22:21Vedanth Kallakuri, Katherine A. SkinnerAbstract
Understanding the properties of fish populations is increasingly important. Analyzing fish length, width, and mass is integral to maintaining healthy stock in the aquaculture industry, while counting wild fish populations supports marine conservation and coastal reef restoration efforts. Deep learning-based segmentation models offer a promising means of obtaining such information at scale. Most of these models, however, require costly and time-consuming per-pixel segmentation labels for training, which can take up to two minutes per fish to annotate manually. To address this inefficiency, we propose a weakly supervised segmentation pipeline that requires only point-labeled data (one click per fish) to produce accurate segmentation masks. Our pipeline consists of four stages. First, a point-supervised tracker predicts point annotations for each frame. These points are then converted into motion-informed language expressions, which guide a language-conditioned segmentation model (LMPM++) to capture temporal consistency and produce candidate segmentation masks. Finally, optical flow and background subtraction are applied as post-processing filters to suppress noise from incorrect segmentations. Experiments on the DeepFish dataset show improvement in foreground mean intersection over union (mIoU) as compared to baseline models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29047
PDF
-
TEMPL: A Resource-Efficient and Transparent Model-Free Framework for Pseudo-Label Generation in Material CT Scans
2026-10-20 22:48:06Ashiqur Rahman, Venkata Devesh Reddy Seethi, Austin Yunker, Rajkumar Kettimuthu, Hamed AlhooriAbstract
The scarcity of large annotated datasets limits deep learning (DL) segmentation in material CT analysis. DL-based pseudo-labeling can help, but it is often computationally expensive and hard to interpret. We introduce a multi-stage, model-free framework that generates pseudo-labels directly from grayscale CT scans. It combines thresholding, morphological dilation, and a custom breadth-first search region-growing algorithm to produce polygonal annotations without pre-trained weights, labeled data, or a GPU. We compare it against the zero-shot Segment Anything Model (SAM), a fully supervised 3D U-Net, and classical baselines. On a dendrite dataset with ground truth, our method reaches 63.19% IoU versus 10.74% for zero-shot SAM, with four times the instance recall at 0.5 IoU (33.3% versus 8.3%). The supervised 3D U-Net serves as a reference ceiling that requires expert labels. On a silica sand specimen, YOLO models trained on our labels performed comparably to models trained on SAM labels in a qualitative comparison. Across 1,053 extracted grains, the median equivalent diameter was 163.8 micrometers, near the specimen's known 106 to 150 micrometers sieve range, compared with 219.5 micrometers for SAM, whose labels merge adjacent particles and add spurious detections. A sensitivity analysis shows a stable operating range for the key threshold and a sharp, predictable failure point linked to phase contrast. Our method needs 15s per image on a standard CPU versus 28s for SAM on a GPU. These results support our transparent approach as a tool for annotation bootstrapping and microstructural quantification in resource-limited settings.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28974
PDF
-
Deep Learning-Based Road Lane Quality Assessment from Egocentric Dashcam Video
2026-10-20 16:46:32Shaif Chowdhury, Akhila Yeruvasu, Moshiur Rahman Tonmoy, Ayush Goyal, Dunren CheAbstract
Reliable lane markings are important for both human drivers and automated driving systems, but their condition is still commonly assessed through manual inspection. Existing autonomous-driving datasets primarily support lane detection and scene understanding and usually lack maintenance-oriented labels for lane-marking visibility, continuity, or degradation. In this study, we present a geo-referenced smartphone dashcam dataset and baseline framework for lane-marking quality assessment. The dataset contains 63,839 road-facing frames collected across South Texas using a GPS-enabled dashcam application. A subset of 3,339 frames is matched with OpenStreetMap-derived lane-count labels, which are used as weak supervision for lane-count regression and map-consistency evaluation. We propose three lane-quality measures: Contrast Stability Index (CSI), which captures lane-background contrast using Laplacian responses; Line Continuity Ratio (LCR), which estimates structural continuity using edge and Hough-line evidence; and Regression Lane Confidence Score (RLCS), which measures agreement between predicted and map-derived lane counts on matched frames. The baseline prediction models attained strong performance, with CSI (MAE $0.039$, $R^2=0.97$) and LCR (MAE $0.093$, $R^2=0.84$). Notably, CSI and LCR are no-reference, segmentation-derived quality metrics that can be computed without dense human labels. In a pilot validation using 50 human-ranked images, these proposed lane-specific metrics show stronger rank agreement with human lane-quality ordering (e.g., Spearman's $\rho=0.7316$ and Kendall's $\tau=0.5472$ for LCR) than general image-quality measures such as PSNR, SSIM, BRISQUE, NIQE, and LPIPS. We believe the dataset, metrics, and baseline provide an initial step toward scalable, low-cost, location-aware lane-marking quality assessment. Data and code: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28508
PDF
-
ECG for laboratory values:A comprehensive physiological and technical analysis
Abstract
Laboratory measurements are essential for clinical decision making but typically require invasive blood sampling. Recent research suggests that ECG recordings may contain information beyond cardiac rhythm and provide information related to laboratory values. This thesis investigates NT-proBNP prediction from ECG recordings and patient metadata using a multimodal deep learning framework, while considering the physiological plausibility of ECG-based prediction. It also compares a 1-lead configuration using lead II with the corresponding 12-lead configuration. Additional experiments on glucose, hemoglobin, and potassium are presented in the appendix. Regression, binary classification, and three-class classification experiments were conducted using MIMIC-IV, with the three-class task based on clinically established thresholds. The 12-lead configuration consistently achieved better performance. Regression reached a mean absolute error of 534.98 pg/mL for 1-lead and 514.27 pg/mL for 12-lead. Binary classification achieved AUROCs of 0.849 and 0.876, respectively, while three-class classification achieved macro-averaged AUROCs of 0.738 and 0.752. The results indicate that precise NT-proBNP regression remains challenging, whereas broader concentration ranges can be classified more effectively. The findings are consistent with the physiological hypothesis that ECG characteristics and NT-proBNP concentrations reflect shared cardiovascular processes. ECG-based NT-proBNP prediction may therefore provide complementary information, particularly for classifying broader concentration ranges. However, laboratory measurements remain necessary, and validation on independent datasets is required.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28507
PDF
-
Brain2Vec: A Self-Supervised 3D Foundation Model for Structural Brain MRI
2026-10-20 15:50:35Spiros Maggioros, Guray Erus, Gareth Harman, George Aidinis, Alexander Getka, Aristeidis Sotiras, Christos DavatzikosAbstract
Deep learning models have become essential tools in medical imaging, yet training them end-to-end for diverse tasks remains challenging due to limited labeled data and computational constraints. To address this, we introduce Brain2Vec, a foundation model pre-trained on 74,425 T1-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans pooled from multiple studies. Brain2Vec can serve both as a weight initialization backbone for fine-tuning downstream tasks and as a standalone feature extractor. We evaluated Brain2Vec in three tasks: downstream predictive performance, convergence speed, and embedding quality. Using Brain2Vec's pretrained weights as initialization and fine-tuning on labeled data for a brain age prediction task, results demonstrate improved final accuracy and faster convergence compared to random initialization. Additionally, its frozen embeddings outperform anatomically defined volumetric features on four of five downstream classification tasks and perform competitively with a state-of-the-art foundation model pre-trained on substantially more data. Lastly, we show that Brain2Vec encodes information primarily from a spatially localized and neuroanatomically meaningful set of brain regions, and that manipulating a subset of latent features produces monotonic, region-specific effects on the reconstructed anatomy. Brain2Vec code and trained models are available as an open-source package on this https URL. Users can apply Brain2Vec locally by installing the package, or directly through the NiChart cloud platform this https URL, where Brain2Vec features can be derived without requiring local installation or specialized infrastructure.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28411
PDF
-
A Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Machine Learning with Evidence-based Planning for Medical Image Analysis
2026-10-20 15:49:38Yiqing Shen, Mathias UnberathAbstract
Deep learning has become the default tool for medical image analysis, driven by the open-source movement. However, achieving the best performance on a given task remains difficult, with architecture selection and hyperparameter optimization (HPO) still considered "more of an art than a science". Automated machine learning (AutoML) automates parts of model training, yet helps little in medical imaging: general-purpose approaches lack medical architectures and preprocessing, and medical-focused ones demand engineering expertise and remain confined to narrow tasks such as 3D segmentation. We introduce MedicalMLOmni, a multi-agent AutoML framework that automates model training for diverse single- and multi-modal medical tasks through a natural language interface. Specifically, MedicalMLOmni performs evidence-based planning by retrieving published results to guide model selection and configuration, and employs parallel HPO where multiple agents explore adjustment strategies concurrently. MedicalMLOmni achieves the best score on 19 of 20 benchmarks; PMC-VQA is the exception, where a vision-language model with broader pre-training leads. Backbone-matched controls attribute the gains to the framework, not the backbone. By removing coding requirements, MedicalMLOmni lowers the barrier for domain experts with rich datasets but limited engineering expertise.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28410
PDF
-
ICIBS: Increasing the Context for Ice Boundary Segmentation
2026-10-20 09:25:46Marcel Dreier, Dakota Pyles, Nora Gourmelon, Moritz Koch, Fei Wu, Thorsten Seehaus, Matthias Braun, Andreas Maier, Vincent ChristleinAbstract
Mountain glaciers and ice sheets are undergoing rapid loss of ice mass. To assess their current volume and ice-thickness distribution, and to accurately forecast their future, ground-penetrating radar systems are employed to measure ice thickness. These instruments produce radio-echo sounding data that reveal the internal structure of the ice and its boundaries at the surface and beneath the ice body. However, delineating these interfaces is time-consuming as the surveyed area can span several hundred kilometers. To accelerate the labelling process, automated methods have emerged, but they often struggle to delineate the ice bottom, particularly in temperate glaciers. The high water content inherent in temperate ice increases both scattering and attenuation of the radar signal, resulting in weak and ambiguous reflections at the ice bottom and generally noisier data. As a result, the visual features corresponding to the ice bottom become ambiguous. To address this issue, we propose several extensions to deep learning models that incorporate additional contextual information into the prediction. Specifically, we integrate modifications that incorporate additional spatial and geo-spatial contextual information into the network. With these enhancements, we achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on the IceAnatomy benchmark dataset, with mean errors of 10.9 m for the FAU subset and 43.4 m for the CReSIS subset in a single combined system. We also demonstrate that our method generalises well to previously unseen data, outperforming the baseline by 49.6 % on new campaign data from Patagonia. The model code and the new dataset are available at this https URL and this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27912
PDF
-
Physical-Variable-Informed Deep Learning for Robust Diagnosis in Industrial Fluid Transport Systems
2026-10-20 09:12:32Yu Sha, Junqi Tao, Dixin Zhou, Horst Stoecker, Domagoj Vnucec, Andreas Widl, Kai ZhouAbstract
Industrial fluid transport systems are monitored through heterogeneous sensing streams, but robust fault diagnosis remains difficult because response signals vary with operating conditions and differ from physical variables in sampling rate, observation duration and data granularity. To address these challenges, we propose a physical-variable-informed deep learning framework (PhyNet) for robust fault diagnosis under real-world sampling heterogeneity. PhyNet treats physical variables as global operating constraints and response signals as local diagnostic evidence. Its physical-to-response cross-attention mechanism connects sequence-level physical-variable tokens with a learnable global response token, enabling interaction without strict temporal alignment. Across four benchmarks, including three real-world cavitation datasets and one public two-phase-flow dataset, PhyNet achieves the best performance across all evaluated metrics. Class-wise analyses, together with attention and masking analyses, show improved discrimination of ambiguous states and indicate that physical variables meaningfully constrain local response interpretation. These findings demonstrate a deployment-oriented approach to robust diagnosis in heterogeneous industrial environments.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27891
PDF
-
Inferring continuous cognitive traits from limited neuroimaging data using pairwise convolutional neural networks
2026-10-20 05:32:22Marjan Rashidi, Robert Bain, Craig Stark, Jeffrey Krichmar, Mary Hegarty, Elizabeth ChrastilAbstract
Individual differences in cognitive abilities vary widely, yet the structural brain features supporting these differences remain poorly understood. Traditional brain-behavior analyses rely on predefined metrics such as volume or cortical thickness and typically assume linear relationships with behavior, limiting sensitivity in small datasets. Here, we introduce a pairwise convolutional ranking framework that learns directly from whole-brain T1-weighted MRI by making comparative rather than absolute predictions, which performs well even with small samples (N=108). We tested this method with four small-scale spatial abilities tasks. Regression analysis predicted performance with high accuracy across all tasks, achieving greater predictive power over standard regression and pointwise deep learning baselines. Iterative cortical-region removal (backward elimination) revealed brain regions supporting individual performance common to all four tasks, as well as task-specific regions. These results demonstrate that pairwise learning extracts meaningful behavioral information from structural MRI, providing prediction and interpretable insight into the neuroanatomy of individual differences.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27668
PDF
-
PCXR-Copilot: Device-aware pediatric chest radiographic analysis with segmentation, suppression, and edema-related cues
2026-10-20 03:24:46Xueyang Li, Alec Girten, Peng Zeng, Mingze Jiang, Shaoyang Huang, Gelei Xu, Danny Z. Chen, Yiyu Shi, John N. KheirAbstract
Patients admitted to pediatric ICU and cardiac ICU often require intensive perioperative support and frequent chest radiography to monitor support devices, extravascular lung water, and body-wall edema. Radiographic interpretation and analysis is often difficult due to superimposed anatomic and iatrogenic structures that obscure clinically relevant signals. While deep learning can provide decision support, translation to pediatric radiographs is still limited by high device burden and scarcity of pediatric datasets with clinically grounded device annotations. To address this gap, we first introduce PediaDeviceSeg-1K, a curated dataset of 1,000 anterior-posterior radiographs of pediatric CICU patients with clinically grounded, fine-grained annotations of common ICU devices. To our best knowledge, this is the first publicly available pediatric CICU CXR resource with clinically grounded device annotations for device-focused benchmarking. Building on PediaDeviceSeg-1K, we further present PCXR-Copilot, a device-aware pipeline that outputs lung and device masks, optional device-suppressed views, and edema-related visualization maps and scalar indices. The full pipeline has been integrated and runs in real time within the TWIST platform at Boston Children's Hospital, demonstrating feasibility for real-world clinical deployment.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25486
PDF
-
SynCalib: Breaking Dataset Shortcuts in LiDAR-Camera Calibration via Extrinsic-Controllable Synthesis
2026-10-20 02:59:14Huihua Zhu, Shuyang Zhang, Dongqing Chen, Zhuo Yu, Jianhao Jiao, Yilong Zhu, Siyu Teng, Xiaopin Zhong, Zongze WuAbstract
Online LiDAR-camera calibration remains a fundamental yet challenging task in the field of robotics. Recently, deep learning-based data-driven approaches have emerged, offering high-precision, targetless calibration capabilities. However, existing methods often suffer from a critical dataset shortcut phenomenon due to the lack of extrinsic diversity in their training data. Networks tend to overfit to fixed nominal extrinsic configurations, leading to severe performance degradation and poor generalization in real-world deployments. To address this limitation, we propose a highly generalizable data generation framework tailored for training LiDAR-camera calibration networks. Our framework leverages existing omnidirectional image datasets annotated with depth ground truth to synthesize multi-modal calibration data under rigorous extrinsic constraints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the data generated by our pipeline significantly enhances the generalization and robustness of typical learning-based calibration networks. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive real-world evaluations across various camera-LiDAR configurations, validating the zero-shot transfer capability of models trained exclusively on our synthetic data. To facilitate future research and community use, the code for data generation, the pre-trained models, and online benchmark datasets will be made publicly available.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27547
PDF
-
Test-time Adaptation for Point Cloud Denoising under Unseen Noise
2026-10-20 00:04:09Kun Jiang, Shida Fu, Fanhao Yi, Weiqing Li, Zhiyong SuAbstract
Although deep learning-based point cloud denoising methods have demonstrated impressive results in recent years, their effectiveness usually degrades substantially in real-world scenarios where the noise distribution of test point clouds deviates from that of the training set. To address this challenge, we propose a test-time adaptive denoising (TTAD) framework that enables existing denoising approaches to adapt to unknown noise patterns at test time without relying on additional supervision or retraining from source data. Taking a pre-trained denoising model and a test noisy point cloud as input, TTAD first employs a residual-driven noise modeling (RDNM) module to estimate the sample-specific noise distribution through analyzing the deviation between the noisy input and its pseudo-clean version denoised by the initial model. Then, a noise-aware contrastive adaptation (NACA) module is designed to build sample-specific noisy-noisier test-time training pair from the denoised point cloud, and update the model parameters over a few adaptation steps per sample at test time through contrastive learning. Furthermore, TTAD naturally extends to a continual TTAD (CTTAD) setting, facilitating efficient progressive refinement across sequential test samples with consistent noise distributions, while reducing the computational cost per sample. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the generalization ability of existing denoising models under unseen noise, achieving superior performance across multiple evaluation metrics.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27410
PDF
-
Visual Forensic Detection of Fabricated Bangla News Photocards using Deep Learning
2026-10-19 19:14:13Anindya Kundu, Kabya Mithun Saha, Md. Muhaiminul Islam, Fayek Ahmed, Aminul Kader Bulbul, Muhammad IbrahimAbstract
In Bangladesh, much localized misinformation spreads as photocards: single-image news summaries that imitate the branding of well-known news organizations. Because the misleading message lives in the pixels rather than in machine-readable text, text-based fact-checking tools cannot see it. We recast photocard fake-news detection as visual image forgery detection. We build a dataset of 969 authentic and 1,077 fabricated Bangla photocards scraped from public Facebook pages: authentic cards from the verified pages of seventeen national television broadcasters, fabricated ones from pseudo-broadcaster pages, anonymous profiles, and public groups. Sixteen photometric and morphological transformations per image grow the corpus to 32,736 samples. A fully connected ANN reaches only about 52% accuracy, its loss stuck at ln(2) ~ 0.693, showing that flattening the image destroys the spatial cues forgery detection needs. A compact, fully batch-normalized four-block CNN with 489,954 parameters, about 1,644x smaller than the ANN, is evaluated with leakage-free stratified group five-fold cross-validation, which keeps every augmented version of a card in one fold. Under this protocol the CNN reaches 87.45% +/- 0.53% pooled accuracy from scratch and 88.75% +/- 1.55% when its classifier head is warm-started from the ANN. An ImageNet-pretrained YOLOv8n-cls backbone (1.44M parameters) fine-tuned on the same folds reaches 97.36% +/- 0.42%, marking the headroom above the compact model. We report per-class precision, recall, F1, and pooled confusion matrices, diagnose and fix a one-class collapse caused by an unnormalized classifier head, and give a manual error analysis and bias-variance diagnosis showing that the compact CNNs under-fit.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05403
PDF
-
Deep-Learning Algorithm for Indeterminate Thyroid Nodules: Comparison and Combination with Molecular Testing
2026-10-16 19:40:17Jichen Yang, Jeffrey Ashton, Jikai Zhang, Maciej A. Mazurowski, Benjamin Wildman-TobrinerAbstract
Thyroid nodules with indeterminate cytology (Bethesda III) carry an intermediate risk of malignancy, and molecular testing is widely used to decide between surgery and surveillance, but it is costly and not universally available. We investigated whether a convolutional neural network (CNN) applied to routine ultrasound images can stratify Bethesda III nodules, and how it compares and combines with molecular testing. We retrospectively identified 466 nodule records from 418 patients who underwent molecular testing (Afirma or ThyroSeq). A CNN pre-trained on determinate nodules was adapted to indeterminate nodules with soft labels and transfer learning. After removal of duplicate records, 119 nodules with surgical pathology were used for development and 47 were held out for testing. On the test set, the deep learning (DL) model achieved an AUC of 0.73 (95% CI 0.51-0.94), compared with 0.55 (0.38-0.71) for molecular testing (P = 0.15). At a cut-off inherited from the original algorithm, the DL model was more specific than molecular testing (0.95 vs 0.32; P < 0.001), with a higher positive predictive value (0.67 vs 0.21), a lower sensitivity (0.44 vs 0.78; P = 0.25) and a similar negative predictive value (0.88 vs 0.86). All six DL-positive test nodules were molecular-positive, and the DL output split the molecular-positive nodules into a high-risk (4/6 malignant) and a lower-risk group (3/27 malignant; P = 0.01). Surgical verification was strongly driven by the molecular result (99% of positive vs 19% of negative results), and molecular-test accuracy depended on the platform. A logistic regression of the DL output, nodule size and the molecular result dropped the DL term and did not improve on the DL output alone. Ultrasound DL complemented molecular testing for Bethesda III nodules, in particular by identifying molecular-positive nodules at lower risk of malignancy.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05400
PDF
-
The Collection of a Real-World, Large-Scale Dataset for Automated Skill Evaluation in Central Line Dressing Change
2026-10-16 17:19:09Ummey Tanin (Pam), Shannan K. Hamlin (Pam), Hsin-Mei Chen (Pam), Peizhu (Pam), QianAbstract
Central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) remain a major source of preventable morbidity and mortality in healthcare settings. Proper execution of the central line dressing change (CLDC) procedure is essential for infection prevention, yet current approaches to competency assessment rely primarily on manual ob- servation by clinical educators, making evaluation time-intensive, difficult to scale, and limited in consistency and granularity. These challenges highlight the need for AI-assisted skill evaluation methods that can support more objective, reproducible, and scalable assessment of clinical performance. However, progress in this area has been constrained by the lack of broad-scale, clinically grounded datasets for developing and evaluating such methods. In this work, we present the collection process of a large-scale video dataset for CLDC skill evaluation, comprising 365 recordings of registered nurses collected during the 2026 annual competency exam at Houston Methodist Hospital. Each video is paired with subtask-level temporal annotations and clinical performance assessments spanning 17 subtasks of the procedure. We describe the data collection and curation pipeline, including pilot testing of record- ing configurations, annotation protocol design, and post-collection processing. We further establish the feasibility of video-based skill assessment through benchmark experiments with spatiotemporal deep learning models. This dataset provides a foundation for future research on automated clinical skill assessment, feedback generation, and AI-assisted training in nursing education.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23789
PDF
-
Neural Expansion: A Unified Mechanism for How Deep Neural Networks Generalize
2026-10-16 16:38:02Chashi Mahiul Islam, Samuel Jacob Chacko, Mao Nishino, Canlin Zhang, Xiuwen LiuAbstract
Deep neural networks demonstrate remarkable generalization despite being highly over-parameterized, challenging traditional statistical learning theories. While several theoretical paradigms such as margin-based bounds, PAC-Bayesian analyses, and neural tangent kernels provide global explanations, they often lack mechanistic insight into how generalization emerges from training dynamics. We introduce Neural Expansion, a unified geometric framework that characterizes generalization through the expansion of directionally-selective ray coverage in the input space. Using Generalization Intervals (GIs), we quantify direction-specific regions around training samples where the model's predictions remain stable. Our extensive empirical studies across diverse architectures and datasets reveal that training leads to progressive expansion of ray coverage, particularly along directions with low Jacobian singular values. This mechanism helps explain a large fraction of correctly classified test inputs, adversarial examples, and even mislabeled or out-of-distribution samples through the geometry of ray coverage rather than instance-level memorization. By connecting input-space curvature to predictive behavior, our framework provides a mechanistic foundation that complements existing global theories of deep learning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23716
PDF
-
An Efficient Approach to Beetle Damage Detection of Banana Using Deep Learning
2026-10-16 15:55:23Md. Mehedi Hasan Naeem, Ishtiyak Ahmmad Araf, Md. Arefin Haque Mahir, Tushar Kanti SahaAbstract
Visible surface damage of banana fruits by Basilepta subcostata (the banana fruit scarring beetle) can reduce their market value. Here, manual inspection of Banana fruits is subjective and difficult to scale. This study presents a lightweight framework based on YOLOv8n deep learning model for locating individual bananas and classifying their visible surface condition as healthy or unhealthy. The term beetle damage in the paper title is used operationally for the locally observed scar-like surface condition; the model does not identify a specific beetle species or biological cause. A custom dataset of 2,473 images containing 5,827 annotated banana instances was prepared from local-market imagery in Bangladesh. The reported experiment used an 80/20 protocol with 1,982 training images and 491 test images. A pretrained YOLOv8n model was trained at 640x640 resolution for 50 epochs with a batch size of 4. On the test partition, it achieved 81.36% precision, 74.30% recall, 77.67% F1-score, 87.04% mAP@0.50 and 59.33% mAP@0.50:0.95. A YOLOv8s comparison gave slightly lower F1 and mAP while using a substantially larger checkpoint. The YOLOv8n checkpoint occupied 5.96 MB and required 6.54 ms/image for inference on an NVIDIA Tesla T4. The results support YOLOv8n as a compact baseline for instance-level banana surface inspection within the studied acquisition conditions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23661
PDF
