pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Foundation Artificial Intelligence Models for Health Recognition Using Face Photographs (FAHR-Face)
Authors: Fridolin Haugg, Grace Lee, John He, Leonard Nürnberg, Dennis Bontempi, Danielle S. Bitterman, Paul Catalano, Vasco Prudente, Dmitrii Glubokov, Andrew Warrington, Suraj Pai, Dirk De Ruysscher, Christian Guthier, Benjamin H. Kann, Vadim N. Gladyshev, Hugo JWL Aerts, Raymond H. Mak
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation

Background: Facial appearance offers a noninvasive window into health. We built FAHR-Face, a foundation model trained on >40 million facial images and fine-tuned it for two distinct tasks: biological age estimation (FAHR-FaceAge) and survival risk prediction (FAHR-FaceSurvival). Methods: FAHR-FaceAge underwent a two-stage, age-balanced fine-tuning on 749,935 public images; FAHR-FaceSurvival was fine-tuned on 34,389 photos of cancer patients. Model robustness (cosmetic surgery, makeup, pose, lighting) and independence (saliency mapping) was tested extensively. Both models were clinically tested in two independent cancer patient datasets with survival analyzed by multivariable Cox models and adjusted for clinical prognostic factors. Findings: For age estimation, FAHR-FaceAge had the lowest mean absolute error of 5.1 years on public datasets, outperforming benchmark models and maintaining accuracy across the full human lifespan. In cancer patients, FAHR-FaceAge outperformed a prior facial age estimation model in survival prognostication. FAHR-FaceSurvival demonstrated robust prediction of mortality, and the highest-risk quartile had more than triple the mortality of the lowest (adjusted hazard ratio 3.22; P<0.001). These findings were validated in the independent cohort and both models showed generalizability across age, sex, race and cancer subgroups. The two algorithms provided distinct, complementary prognostic information; saliency mapping revealed each model relied on distinct facial regions. The combination of FAHR-FaceAge and FAHR-FaceSurvival improved prognostic accuracy. Interpretation: A single foundation model can generate inexpensive, scalable facial biomarkers that capture both biological ageing and disease-related mortality risk. The foundation model enabled effective training using relatively small clinical datasets.
Optimization-Based Image Restoration under Implementation Constraints in Optical Analog Circuits
Authors: Taisei Kato, Ryo Hayakawa, Soma Furusawa, Kazunori Hayashi, Youji Iiguni
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Restoration, SSIM

Optical analog circuits have attracted attention as promising alternatives to traditional electronic circuits for signal processing tasks due to their potential for low-latency and low-power computations. However, implementing iterative algorithms on such circuits presents challenges, particularly due to the difficulty of performing division operations involving dynamically changing variables and the additive noise introduced by optical amplifiers. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of implementing image restoration algorithms using total variation regularization on optical analog circuits. Specifically, we design the circuit structures for the image restoration with widely used alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and primal dual splitting (PDS). Our design avoids division operations involving dynamic variables and incorporate the impact of additive noise introduced by optical amplifiers. Simulation results show that the effective denoising can be achieved in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) even when the circuit noise at the amplifiers is taken into account.
Breaking the Multi-Enhancement Bottleneck: Domain-Consistent Quality Enhancement for Compressed Images
Authors: Qunliang Xing, Mai Xu, Jing Yang, Shengxi Li
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

Quality enhancement methods have been widely integrated into visual communication pipelines to mitigate artifacts in compressed images. Ideally, these quality enhancement methods should perform robustly when applied to images that have already undergone prior enhancement during transmission. We refer to this scenario as multi-enhancement, which generalizes the well-known multi-generation scenario of image compression. Unfortunately, current quality enhancement methods suffer from severe degradation when applied in multi-enhancement. To address this challenge, we propose a novel adaptation method that transforms existing quality enhancement models into domain-consistent ones. Specifically, our method enhances a low-quality compressed image into a high-quality image within the natural domain during the first enhancement, and ensures that subsequent enhancements preserve this quality without further degradation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method and show that various existing models can be successfully adapted to maintain both fidelity and perceptual quality in multi-enhancement scenarios.
Finding Optimal Kernel Size and Dimension in Convolutional Neural Networks An Architecture Optimization Approach
Authors: Shreyas Rajeev, B Sathish Babu
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, image-classification, Image Classification, Learning Theory, Medical Image Classification, Neural Architecture Search, Traffic Sign Recognition

Kernel size selection in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is a critical but often overlooked design decision that affects receptive field, feature extraction, computational cost, and model accuracy. This paper proposes the Best Kernel Size Estimation Function (BKSEF), a mathematically grounded and empirically validated framework for optimal, layer-wise kernel size determination. BKSEF balances information gain, computational efficiency, and accuracy improvements by integrating principles from information theory, signal processing, and learning theory. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-lite, ChestX-ray14, and GTSRB datasets demonstrate that BKSEF-guided architectures achieve up to 3.1 percent accuracy improvement and 42.8 percent reduction in FLOPs compared to traditional models using uniform 3x3 kernels. Two real-world case studies further validate the approach: one for medical image classification in a cloud-based setup, and another for traffic sign recognition on edge devices. The former achieved enhanced interpretability and accuracy, while the latter reduced latency and model size significantly, with minimal accuracy trade-off. These results show that kernel size can be an active, optimizable parameter rather than a fixed heuristic. BKSEF provides practical heuristics and theoretical support for researchers and developers seeking efficient and application-aware CNN designs. It is suitable for integration into neural architecture search pipelines and real-time systems, offering a new perspective on CNN optimization.
Improving Prostate Gland Segmenting Using Transformer based Architectures
Authors: Shatha Abudalou
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Computational Efficiency

Inter reader variability and cross site domain shift challenge the automatic segmentation of prostate anatomy using T2 weighted MRI images. This study investigates whether transformer models can retain precision amid such heterogeneity. We compare the performance of UNETR and SwinUNETR in prostate gland segmentation against our previous 3D UNet model [1], based on 546 MRI (T2weighted) volumes annotated by two independent experts. Three training strategies were analyzed: single cohort dataset, 5 fold cross validated mixed cohort, and gland size based dataset. Hyperparameters were tuned by Optuna. The test set, from an independent population of readers, served as the evaluation endpoint (Dice Similarity Coefficient). In single reader training, SwinUNETR achieved an average dice score of 0.816 for Reader#1 and 0.860 for Reader#2, while UNETR scored 0.8 and 0.833 for Readers #1 and #2, respectively, compared to the baseline UNets 0.825 for Reader #1 and 0.851 for Reader #2. SwinUNETR had an average dice score of 0.8583 for Reader#1 and 0.867 for Reader#2 in cross-validated mixed training. For the gland size-based dataset, SwinUNETR achieved an average dice score of 0.902 for Reader#1 subset and 0.894 for Reader#2, using the five-fold mixed training strategy (Reader#1, n=53; Reader#2, n=87) at larger gland size-based subsets, where UNETR performed poorly. Our findings demonstrate that global and shifted-window self-attention effectively reduces label noise and class imbalance sensitivity, resulting in improvements in the Dice score over CNNs by up to five points while maintaining computational efficiency. This contributes to the high robustness of SwinUNETR for clinical deployment.
Overcoming Occlusions in the Wild: A Multi-Task Age Head Approach to Age Estimation
Authors: Waqar Tanveer, Laura Fernández-Robles, Eduardo Fidalgo, Víctor González-Castro, Enrique Alegre
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, MORPH

Facial age estimation has achieved considerable success under controlled conditions. However, in unconstrained real-world scenarios, which are often referred to as 'in the wild', age estimation remains challenging, especially when faces are partially occluded, which may obscure their visibility. To address this limitation, we propose a new approach integrating generative adversarial networks (GANs) and transformer architectures to enable robust age estimation from occluded faces. We employ an SN-Patch GAN to effectively remove occlusions, while an Attentive Residual Convolution Module (ARCM), paired with a Swin Transformer, enhances feature representation. Additionally, we introduce a Multi-Task Age Head (MTAH) that combines regression and distribution learning, further improving age estimation under occlusion. Experimental results on the FG-NET, UTKFace, and MORPH datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art techniques for occluded facial age estimation by achieving an MAE of $3.00$, $4.54$, and $2.53$ years, respectively.
Zero-Shot Solving of Imaging Inverse Problems via Noise-Refined Likelihood Guided Diffusion Models
Authors: Zhen Wang, Hongyi Liu, Zhihui Wei
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Denoising

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in imaging inverse problems owing to their powerful generative capabilities. However, existing approaches typically rely on models trained for specific degradation types, limiting their generalizability to various degradation scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a zero-shot framework capable of handling various imaging inverse problems without model retraining. We introduce a likelihood-guided noise refinement mechanism that derives a closed-form approximation of the likelihood score, simplifying score estimation and avoiding expensive gradient computations. This estimated score is subsequently utilized to refine the model-predicted noise, thereby better aligning the restoration process with the generative framework of diffusion models. In addition, we integrate the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) sampling strategy to further improve inference efficiency. The proposed mechanism can be applied to both optimization-based and sampling-based schemes, providing an effective and flexible zero-shot solution for imaging inverse problems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance across multiple inverse problems, particularly in compressive sensing, delivering high-quality reconstructions even at an extremely low sampling rate (5%).
SUSEP-Net: Simulation-Supervised and Contrastive Learning-based Deep Neural Networks for Susceptibility Source Separation
Authors: Min Li, Chen Chen, Zhenghao Li, Yin Liu, Shanshan Shan, Peng Wu, Pengfei Rong, Feng Liu, G. Bruce Pike, Alan H. Wilman, Hongfu Sun, Yang Gao
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) provides a valuable tool for quantifying susceptibility distributions in human brains; however, two types of opposing susceptibility sources (i.e., paramagnetic and diamagnetic), may coexist in a single voxel, and cancel each other out in net QSM images. Susceptibility source separation techniques enable the extraction of sub-voxel information from QSM maps. This study proposes a novel SUSEP-Net for susceptibility source separation by training a dual-branch U-net with a simulation-supervised training strategy. In addition, a contrastive learning framework is included to explicitly impose similarity-based constraints between the branch-specific guidance features in specially-designed encoders and the latent features in the decoders. Comprehensive experiments were carried out on both simulated and in vivo data, including healthy subjects and patients with pathological conditions, to compare SUSEP-Net with three state-of-the-art susceptibility source separation methods (i.e., APART-QSM, \c{hi}-separation, and \c{hi}-sepnet). SUSEP-Net consistently showed improved results compared with the other three methods, with better numerical metrics, improved high-intensity hemorrhage and calcification lesion contrasts, and reduced artifacts in brains with pathological conditions. In addition, experiments on an agarose gel phantom data were conducted to validate the accuracy and the generalization capability of SUSEP-Net.
MoNetV2: Enhanced Motion Network for Freehand 3D Ultrasound Reconstruction
Authors: Mingyuan Luo, Xin Yang, Zhongnuo Yan, Yan Cao, Yuanji Zhang, Xindi Hu, Jin Wang, Haoxuan Ding, Wei Han, Litao Sun, Dong Ni
Date: 2025-06-16 00:00:00

Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound (US) aims to provide sonographers with the spatial relationships of anatomical structures, playing a crucial role in clinical diagnosis. Recently, deep-learning-based freehand 3D US has made significant advancements. It reconstructs volumes by estimating transformations between images without external tracking. However, image-only reconstruction poses difficulties in reducing cumulative drift and further improving reconstruction accuracy, particularly in scenarios involving complex motion trajectories. In this context, we propose an enhanced motion network (MoNetV2) to enhance the accuracy and generalizability of reconstruction under diverse scanning velocities and tactics. First, we propose a sensor-based temporal and multi-branch structure that fuses image and motion information from a velocity perspective to improve image-only reconstruction accuracy. Second, we devise an online multi-level consistency constraint that exploits the inherent consistency of scans to handle various scanning velocities and tactics. This constraint exploits both scan-level velocity consistency, path-level appearance consistency, and patch-level motion consistency to supervise inter-frame transformation estimation. Third, we distill an online multi-modal self-supervised strategy that leverages the correlation between network estimation and motion information to further reduce cumulative errors. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate that MoNetV2 surpasses existing methods in both reconstruction quality and generalizability performance across three large datasets.
ADAgent: LLM Agent for Alzheimer's Disease Analysis with Collaborative Coordinator
Authors: Wenlong Hou, Guangqian Yang, Ye Du, Yeung Lau, Lihao Liu, Junjun He, Ling Long, Shujun Wang
Date: 2025-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Large Language Model, Prognosis

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive and irreversible neurodegenerative disease. Early and precise diagnosis of AD is crucial for timely intervention and treatment planning to alleviate the progressive neurodegeneration. However, most existing methods rely on single-modality data, which contrasts with the multifaceted approach used by medical experts. While some deep learning approaches process multi-modal data, they are limited to specific tasks with a small set of input modalities and cannot handle arbitrary combinations. This highlights the need for a system that can address diverse AD-related tasks, process multi-modal or missing input, and integrate multiple advanced methods for improved performance. In this paper, we propose ADAgent, the first specialized AI agent for AD analysis, built on a large language model (LLM) to address user queries and support decision-making. ADAgent integrates a reasoning engine, specialized medical tools, and a collaborative outcome coordinator to facilitate multi-modal diagnosis and prognosis tasks in AD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADAgent outperforms SOTA methods, achieving significant improvements in accuracy, including a 2.7% increase in multi-modal diagnosis, a 0.7% improvement in multi-modal prognosis, and enhancements in MRI and PET diagnosis tasks.
Predicting Genetic Mutations from Single-Cell Bone Marrow Images in Acute Myeloid Leukemia Using Noise-Robust Deep Learning Models
Authors: Garima Jain, Ravi Kant Gupta, Priyansh Jain, Abhijeet Patil, Ardhendu Sekhar, Gajendra Smeeta, Sanghamitra Pati, Amit Sethi
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

In this study, we propose a robust methodology for identification of myeloid blasts followed by prediction of genetic mutation in single-cell images of blasts, tackling challenges associated with label accuracy and data noise. We trained an initial binary classifier to distinguish between leukemic (blasts) and non-leukemic cells images, achieving 90 percent accuracy. To evaluate the models generalization, we applied this model to a separate large unlabeled dataset and validated the predictions with two haemato-pathologists, finding an approximate error rate of 20 percent in the leukemic and non-leukemic labels. Assuming this level of label noise, we further trained a four-class model on images predicted as blasts to classify specific mutations. The mutation labels were known for only a bag of cell images extracted from a single slide. Despite the tumor label noise, our mutation classification model achieved 85 percent accuracy across four mutation classes, demonstrating resilience to label inconsistencies. This study highlights the capability of machine learning models to work with noisy labels effectively while providing accurate, clinically relevant mutation predictions, which is promising for diagnostic applications in areas such as haemato-pathology.
GM-LDM: Latent Diffusion Model for Brain Biomarker Identification through Functional Data-Driven Gray Matter Synthesis
Authors: Hu Xu, Yang Jingling, Jia Sihan, Bi Yuda, Calhoun Vince
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Denoising

Generative models based on deep learning have shown significant potential in medical imaging, particularly for modality transformation and multimodal fusion in MRI-based brain imaging. This study introduces GM-LDM, a novel framework that leverages the latent diffusion model (LDM) to enhance the efficiency and precision of MRI generation tasks. GM-LDM integrates a 3D autoencoder, pre-trained on the large-scale ABCD MRI dataset, achieving statistical consistency through KL divergence loss. We employ a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based encoder-decoder as the denoising network to optimize generation quality. The framework flexibly incorporates conditional data, such as functional network connectivity (FNC) data, enabling personalized brain imaging, biomarker identification, and functional-to-structural information translation for brain diseases like schizophrenia.
Combining Self-attention and Dilation Convolutional for Semantic Segmentation of Coal Maceral Groups
Authors: Zhenghao Xi, Zhengnan Lv, Yang Zheng, Xiang Liu, Zhuang Yu, Junran Chen, Jing Hu, Yaqi Liu
Date: 2025-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The segmentation of coal maceral groups can be described as a semantic segmentation process of coal maceral group images, which is of great significance for studying the chemical properties of coal. Generally, existing semantic segmentation models of coal maceral groups use the method of stacking parameters to achieve higher accuracy. It leads to increased computational requirements and impacts model training efficiency. At the same time, due to the professionalism and diversity of coal maceral group images sampling, obtaining the number of samples for model training requires a long time and professional personnel operation. To address these issues, We have innovatively developed an IoT-based DA-VIT parallel network model. By utilizing this model, we can continuously broaden the dataset through IoT and achieving sustained improvement in the accuracy of coal maceral groups segmentation. Besides, we decouple the parallel network from the backbone network to ensure the normal using of the backbone network during model data updates. Secondly, DCSA mechanism of DA-VIT is introduced to enhance the local feature information of coal microscopic images. This DCSA can decompose the large kernels of convolutional attention into multiple scales and reduce 81.18% of parameters.Finally, we performed the contrast experiment and ablation experiment between DA-VIT and state-of-the-art methods at lots of evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that DA-VIT-Base achieves 92.14% pixel accuracy and 63.18% mIoU. Params and FLOPs of DA-VIT-Tiny are 4.95M and 8.99G, respectively. All of the evaluation metrics of the proposed DA-VIT are better than other state-of-the-art methods.
Deploying and Evaluating Multiple Deep Learning Models on Edge Devices for Diabetic Retinopathy Detection
Authors: Akwasi Asare, Dennis Agyemanh Nana Gookyi, Derrick Boateng, Fortunatus Aabangbio Wulnye
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diabetic Retinopathy Detection, GPU

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), a leading cause of vision impairment in individuals with diabetes, affects approximately 34.6% of diabetes patients globally, with the number of cases projected to reach 242 million by 2045. Traditional DR diagnosis relies on the manual examination of retinal fundus images, which is both time-consuming and resource intensive. This study presents a novel solution using Edge Impulse to deploy multiple deep learning models for real-time DR detection on edge devices. A robust dataset of over 3,662 retinal fundus images, sourced from the Kaggle EyePACS dataset, was curated, and enhanced through preprocessing techniques, including augmentation and normalization. Using TensorFlow, various Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), such as MobileNet, ShuffleNet, SqueezeNet, and a custom Deep Neural Network (DNN), were designed, trained, and optimized for edge deployment. The models were converted to TensorFlowLite and quantized to 8-bit integers to reduce their size and enhance inference speed, with minimal trade-offs in accuracy. Performance evaluations across different edge hardware platforms, including smartphones and microcontrollers, highlighted key metrics such as inference speed, accuracy, precision, and resource utilization. MobileNet achieved an accuracy of 96.45%, while SqueezeNet demonstrated strong real-time performance with a small model size of 176 KB and latency of just 17 ms on GPU. ShuffleNet and the custom DNN achieved moderate accuracy but excelled in resource efficiency, making them suitable for lower-end devices. This integration of edge AI technology into healthcare presents a scalable, cost-effective solution for early DR detection, providing timely and accurate diagnosis, especially in resource-constrained and remote healthcare settings.