Synthetic biparametric MRI (bpMRI) may help alleviate the limited availability of large and representative prostate MRI datasets for deep learning applications. In this work, we present a conditional 3D diffusion framework for anatomy-conditioned synthesis of complete prostate bpMRI from anatomical masks. The framework supports sequential synthesis, in which T2w and diffusion modalities are generated by separately trained models, and joint synthesis, in which all bpMRI modalities are generated simultaneously within a single model. Five configurations were trained using PI-CAI, FastMRI Prostate, and PROSTATEx datasets to investigate different conditioning schemes, target modalities, and synthesis strategies. Evaluation using distribution-based metrics, paired-image similarity, and qualitative assessment demonstrated the feasibility of both synthesis pathways. Joint synthesis achieved competitive distributional fidelity while generating complete bpMRI, whereas direct synthesis of ADC and computed high-b-value DWI outperformed their derivation from synthetic diffusion-weighted images.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31523
During the deep learning era, innovations in remote sensing (RS) vision models primarily focused on optimizing network architectures for specific tasks and conducting end-to-end training. However, with the advent of the Vision-Language Models (VLMs) era, constrained by substantial computational resource demands, the mainstream research paradigm has shifted towards adapting general-purpose VLMs using RS vertical domain data for fine-tuning, rather than modifying their core architectures. This transition marks a change in the innovation pathway from model-centric to data-centric. Despite the increasing importance of data, the academic community still lacks a systematic, data-centric survey to guide researchers in constructing high-quality RS vision-language datasets for various application scenarios and in conducting effective model fine-tuning and performance evaluation based on these datasets. To address this gap, this paper presents a systematic review of the development status of RS datasets tailored for VLMs. It further provides a comprehensive practical guide for RS researchers in the large model era, covering the entire pipeline from data construction to fine-tuning and evaluation. This paper aims to encourage the academic community to build more diverse and higher-quality vision-language datasets for specialized RS sub-fields. Ultimately, the goal is to converge these efforts into a comprehensive RS vision-language corpus that offers extensive task coverage and a wide geographical distribution, thereby laying a solid data foundation for advancing towards general artificial intelligence in RS.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31304
Limited tumour visibility on intra-operative images complicates surgical navigation, including liver hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) targeting on computed tomography (CT) imaging. This makes labelled datasets difficult to curate for deep learning, and transferring pre-operative delineations through registration remains challenging due to intra-operative deformation and lack of paired pre- and intra-operative data. We propose to transfer tumour appearances learned from pre-operative magnetic resonance (MR) images to guide localisation on intra-operative CT through weak supervision. A classifier is trained to classify tumour presence on pre-operative images. This is applied to windows on intra-operative images, and despite the domain gap, it assigns higher tumour-presence probabilities on average to tumour-containing windows. These weak cross-domain signals guide a reinforcement learning agent to localise tumours on intra-operative images. We compare direct transfer, few-shot adaptation and synthetic transfer (trained using unpaired MR and CT), which translates CT into synthetic MR before localisation. On an external HCC cohort, synthetic transfer outperformed other tested methods and CT-only baselines. Our framework enables cross-modality tumour localisation without paired MR-CT training images.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31253
Magnetic resonance imaging involves an inherent trade-off among spatial resolution, acquisition time, and noise. This trade-off contributes to long scan times and high cost. Deep learning has improved image denoising, but cardiac MRI remains difficult because high-resolution, rapid acquisitions generally lack corresponding low-noise ground truth. Self-supervised denoising offers a potential solution by learning from noisy image pairs or even single noisy acquisitions. However, we show that Noise2Void-style blind-spot denoising, which uses a mean squared error (MSE) loss and assumes zero-mean, independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) noise, is poorly suited to MR magnitude images. When applied to short-axis $T2$-weighted and $T1\rho$-weighted cardiac MRI with synthetic Rician noise, it produces biased denoised images and biased parametric maps of $T2$ and $T1\rho$. To address this limitation, we formulate self-supervised denoising as maximum likelihood estimation under a known Rician noise model. This yields unbiased denoisers that are competitive with supervised baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31777
Since the rise of supervised deep learning models, researchers have attempted to solve infrared small target detection using various models like convolutional neural networks, GANs, Transformers, Mixture of Experts and recent graph/hypergraph neural networks. Moreover, these deep neural network methods have surpassed the traditional unsupervised models and the low-rank and sparse decomposition unsupervised models reviewed in "Traditional and Recent Approaches for Infrared Small Target Detection : Overview, Challenges and Perspectives (Part 1)". In this context, the aim of this paper is to provide a complete survey of the deep learning models in infrared small target detection. First, we categorize the different approaches found in the literature in terms of their modeling strategies. Then, we discuss them in terms of the critical situations that they claim to handle. Furthermore, we present the specific performance evaluation protocols. Then, we conclude with several promising directions for future research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18291
Infrared small target detection is often used in different civilian and military applications to detect static or moving targets in scenes like in ground, air and sea surveillance. Research in this field started more than three decades ago, and the last two decades have witnessed very significant publications in this field following the rise of low-rank and sparse decomposition (model-based methods) and deep learning models (data-based methods). Furthermore, several surveys can be found in the literature but none of them addresses an overall review in this field. In this context, the aim of this paper is to provide a complete survey of the traditional and recent approaches in infrared small target detection. First, we categorize the different approaches found in the literature in terms of the modeling models, i.e mathematical models, machine learning models and signal processing models. Then, we have discussed them in terms of the critical situations that they claim to handle. Furthermore, we present the available resources, datasets and libraries. Then, we conclude with several promising directions for future research. For the sake of reading, this survey is divided into two parts: 1) "Traditional and Recent Approaches for Infrared Small Target Detection: Overview, Challenges and Perspectives (Part 1)" about conventional and low-rank and sparse decomposition (model-based methods), and 2) "Traditional and Recent Approaches for Infrared Small Target Detection: Overview, Challenges and Perspectives (Part 2)" about deep learning models (data-based methods).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18276
Deep learning models for chest X-ray anomaly detection remain vulnerable to subtle distributional shifts (e.g., acquisition technique, patient-related factors, and preprocessing). Traditional error analysis often relies on semantic metadata or model embeddings, which can mask low-level signal variations that degrade performance. In this work, we propose a data-centric framework for automated failure mode discovery using spectral analysis. We project images into the frequency domain and extract a compact profile summarizing the distribution of signal energy across frequency bands. By performing unsupervised clustering on these spectral profiles, we demonstrate that model failures are not randomly distributed, but are strongly concentrated within specific spectral clusters. This method effectively isolates "blind spots", enabling the prediction of model reliability and the discovery of performance-degrading data slices without requiring ground-truth failure annotations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29830
Early diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma is critical to preserve access to curative treatment options. The Liver Imaging Reporting and Data System (LI-RADS) provides a standardized framework for non-invasive diagnosis on multiphase computed tomography, based on major visual imaging features. However, these features may be difficult to assess consistently, particularly in small liver lesions. We developed dLI-RADS, an interpretable artificial intelligence method designed to estimate the probability of hepatocellular carcinoma from multiphase computed tomography images of manually segmented liver lesions, while remaining aligned with LI-RADS-related imaging concepts. dLI-RADS combines neural network-derived predictions with handcrafted quantitative imaging measurements reflecting LI-RADS major features and integrates these inputs using logistic regression. In this multicenter retrospective study, patients with multiphase computed tomography and at least one liver lesion were included, while lesions larger than 40 mm were excluded. Histology served as the reference standard for hepatocellular carcinoma, and a composite reference standard was used for non-hepatocellular carcinoma lesions. The lesion-level accuracy of dLI-RADS and LI-RADS were compared on the internal evaluation set using 10,000-repetition bootstrap non-inferiority tests, with 5% margins and significance levels. On the external test set, sensitivities were similarly compared. dLI-RADS was non-inferior to LI-RADS for lesion-level accuracy in the internal evaluation set, achieving 80% accuracy compared with 74% for LI-RADS (p = 0.04)...
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29616
Automated optical inspection of precision components with tiny surface defects remains challenging when different regions of the same component exhibit different defect characteristics and, therefore, different acceptance criteria. This paper presents a region-aware, dual-model inspection framework that combines instance segmentation of localized seat-region defects with image-level classification of global shaft-region anomalies. Rather than treating these two model detections as sufficient evidence for component rejection, a deterministic decision fusion layer that formalizes industrial Standard Operating Procedures is applied to the model outputs to make the final component level decision. A PLC-synchronized imaging system acquires 18 seat and 18 shaft images over a full 360-degree rotation to provide multi-view circumferential coverage. The framework was evaluated on 380 automotive fuel injector needles, covering representative operational defect types, using identical model predictions in all configurations. Direct model-output aggregation via simple union logic (where any single-view detection flags a rejection) identified all 104 non-conforming components but produced a component level false rejection rate of 57.6%. Inclusion of a complete decision layer maintained the observed non-conforming (NOK) recall of 100% while reducing the false rejection rate to 10.9%, corresponding to an 81.1% reduction in false-positive component decisions. The results demonstrate that formalized manufacturing acceptance criteria can complement sensitive visual models by translating frame-level detections into practical and traceable component-level decisions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29398
Infrared small target detection (IRSTD) is a challenging task due to the extremely small size of targets, low signal-to-noise ratios, and heavy background clutter in infrared imagery. While the progress of deep learning has advanced this field, existing methods primarily adopt discriminative paradigms that directly map images to target masks, overlooking the potential of generative modeling. In this paper, we propose DiffIRSTD, a novel generative framework that reformulates infrared small target detection as a background reconstruction problem. Instead of explicitly predicting target regions, we reinterpret small targets as noise-like signals and leverage a diffusion-based model to recover a clean, target-free background from a perturbed input image. The residual between the reconstructed background and the original image is then exploited to highlight candidate target regions, providing explicit cues for subsequent detection. To address the computational cost typically associated with diffusion sampling, we introduce a one-step denoising strategy that enables efficient background reconstruction while maintaining practical inference speed. Furthermore, we present a frequency-guided perception loss to preserve high-frequency background details and focus more on the reconstruction quality of target regions. More importantly, our DiffIRSTD operates as a plug-and-play framework, compatible with existing IRSTD models without increasing the computational complexity of detectors. Extensive experiments on IRSTD-1K, NUAA-SIRST, and NUDT-SIRST datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving state-of-the-art performance across three benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29361
Deep learning based models accurately delineate tumours on dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI), but segmentation masks alone do not provide the rationales or reasoning used by radiologists to assess the lesion suspicion. This limits the explainability as well the clinical integration. We investigate whether clinically relevant descriptors can instead be derived from the segmentation masks and their dynamic contrast-enhancement series. We have used Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) guidelines as a structured framework. Using these guidelines we designed a BI-RADS decision tree with eight quantitative measurements using radiomics, together with the lesion size and component count, that determine the descriptors at eight nodes. Using these descriptors we generate natural-language rationale using a large language model. The model was constrained to express only the derived records from the decision tree. After applying this framework to the expert and automatic masks of each of the 1,506 cases in the MAMA-MIA dataset, we generated a reproducible corpus of 3,012 BI-RADS grounded rationales. We obtained a faithfulness score of 99.98% and a counterfactual accuracy of 99.3%, indicating that the generated rationales faithfully verbalises the measured descriptors and correctly reflects changes in the underlying record. Agreement between the descriptors from expert and automatic masks falls from 0.832 to 0.549 as mask quality falls from Good to Missed. The generated rationales are intended as draft representations for radiologist review and final sign-off rather than autonomous clinical reports.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29358
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).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29141
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29090
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29047
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28974
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
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28508
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28507
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28411
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28410
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27912