PupiNet: Seamless OCT-OCTA Interconversion Through Wavelet-Driven and Multi-Scale Attention Mechanisms

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCTA) are key diagnostic tools for clinical evaluation and management of retinal diseases. Compared to traditional OCT, OCTA provides richer microvascular information, but its acquisition requires specialized sensors and high-cost equipment, creating significant challenges for the clinical deployment of hardware-dependent OCTA imaging methods. Given the technical complexity of OCTA image acquisition and potential mechanical artifacts, this study proposes a bidirectional image conversion framework called PupiNet, which accurately achieves bidirectional transformation between 3D OCT and 3D OCTA. The generator module of this framework innovatively integrates wavelet transformation and multi-scale attention mechanisms, significantly enhancing image conversion quality. Meanwhile, an Adaptive Discriminator Augmentation (ADA) module has been incorporated into the discriminator to optimize model training stability and convergence efficiency. To ensure clinical accuracy of vascular structures in the converted images, we designed a Vessel Structure Matcher (VSM) supervision module, achieving precise matching of vascular morphology between generated images and target images. Additionally, the Hierarchical Feature Calibration (HFC) module further guarantees high consistency of texture details between generated images and target images across different depth levels. To rigorously validate the clinical effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation on a paired OCT-OCTA image dataset containing 300 eyes with various retinal pathologies. Experimental results demonstrate that PupiNet not only reliably achieves high-quality bidirectional transformation between the two modalities but also shows significant advantages in image fidelity, vessel structure preservation, and clinical usability.

4D-ACFNet: A 4D Attention Mechanism-Based Prognostic Framework for Colorectal Cancer Liver Metastasis Integrating Multimodal Spatiotemporal Features

Postoperative prognostic prediction for colorectal cancer liver metastasis (CRLM) remains challenging due to tumor heterogeneity, dynamic evolution of the hepatic microenvironment, and insufficient multimodal data fusion. To address these issues, we propose 4D-ACFNet, the first framework that synergistically integrates lightweight spatiotemporal modeling, cross-modal dynamic calibration, and personalized temporal prediction within a unified architecture. Specifically, it incorporates a novel 4D spatiotemporal attention mechanism, which employs spatiotemporal separable convolution (reducing parameter count by 41%) and virtual timestamp encoding to model the interannual evolution patterns of postoperative dynamic processes, such as liver regeneration and steatosis. For cross-modal feature alignment, Transformer layers are integrated to jointly optimize modality alignment loss and disentanglement loss, effectively suppressing scale mismatch and redundant interference in clinical-imaging data. Additionally, we design a dynamic prognostic decision module that generates personalized interannual recurrence risk heatmaps through temporal upsampling and a gated classification head, overcoming the limitations of traditional methods in temporal dynamic modeling and cross-modal alignment. Experiments on 197 CRLM patients demonstrate that the model achieves 100% temporal adjacency accuracy (TAA), with performance significantly surpassing existing approaches. This study establishes the first spatiotemporal modeling paradigm for postoperative dynamic monitoring of CRLM. The proposed framework can be extended to prognostic analysis of multi-cancer metastases, advancing precision surgery from "spatial resection" to "spatiotemporal cure."

A Residual Multi-task Network for Joint Classification and Regression in Medical Imaging

Detection and classification of pulmonary nodules is a challenge in medical image analysis due to the variety of shapes and sizes of nodules and their high concealment. Despite the success of traditional deep learning methods in image classification, deep networks still struggle to perfectly capture subtle changes in lung nodule detection. Therefore, we propose a residual multi-task network (Res-MTNet) model, which combines multi-task learning and residual learning, and improves feature representation ability by sharing feature extraction layer and introducing residual connections. Multi-task learning enables the model to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, while the residual module solves the problem of disappearing gradients, ensuring stable training of deeper networks and facilitating information sharing between tasks. Res-MTNet enhances the robustness and accuracy of the model, providing a more reliable lung nodule analysis tool for clinical medicine and telemedicine.

RURANET++: An Unsupervised Learning Method for Diabetic Macular Edema Based on SCSE Attention Mechanisms and Dynamic Multi-Projection Head Clustering

Diabetic Macular Edema (DME), a prevalent complication among diabetic patients, constitutes a major cause of visual impairment and blindness. Although deep learning has achieved remarkable progress in medical image analysis, traditional DME diagnosis still relies on extensive annotated data and subjective ophthalmologist assessments, limiting practical applications. To address this, we present RURANET++, an unsupervised learning-based automated DME diagnostic system. This framework incorporates an optimized U-Net architecture with embedded Spatial and Channel Squeeze & Excitation (SCSE) attention mechanisms to enhance lesion feature extraction. During feature processing, a pre-trained GoogLeNet model extracts deep features from retinal images, followed by PCA-based dimensionality reduction to 50 dimensions for computational efficiency. Notably, we introduce a novel clustering algorithm employing multi-projection heads to explicitly control cluster diversity while dynamically adjusting similarity thresholds, thereby optimizing intra-class consistency and inter-class discrimination. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance across multiple metrics, achieving maximum accuracy (0.8411), precision (0.8593), recall (0.8411), and F1-score (0.8390), with exceptional clustering quality. This work provides an efficient unsupervised solution for DME diagnosis with significant clinical implications.

RetinaRegen: A Hybrid Model for Readability and Detail Restoration in Fundus Images

Fundus image quality is crucial for diagnosing eye diseases, but real-world conditions often result in blurred or unreadable images, increasing diagnostic uncertainty. To address these challenges, this study proposes RetinaRegen, a hybrid model for retinal image restoration that integrates a readability classifi-cation model, a Diffusion Model, and a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Ex-periments on the SynFundus-1M dataset show that the proposed method achieves a PSNR of 27.4521, an SSIM of 0.9556, and an LPIPS of 0.1911 for the readability labels of the optic disc (RO) region. These results demonstrate superior performance in restoring key regions, offering an effective solution to enhance fundus image quality and support clinical diagnosis.

DynSegNet:Dynamic Architecture Adjustment for Adversarial Learning in Segmenting Hemorrhagic Lesions from Fundus Images

The hemorrhagic lesion segmentation plays a critical role in ophthalmic diagnosis, directly influencing early disease detection, treatment planning, and therapeutic efficacy evaluation. However, the task faces significant challenges due to lesion morphological variability, indistinct boundaries, and low contrast with background tissues. To improve diagnostic accuracy and treatment outcomes, developing advanced segmentation techniques remains imperative. This paper proposes an adversarial learning-based dynamic architecture adjustment approach that integrates hierarchical U-shaped encoder-decoder, residual blocks, attention mechanisms, and ASPP modules. By dynamically optimizing feature fusion, our method enhances segmentation performance. Experimental results demonstrate a Dice coefficient of 0.6802, IoU of 0.5602, Recall of 0.766, Precision of 0.6525, and Accuracy of 0.9955, effectively addressing the challenges in fundus image hemorrhage segmentation.[* Corresponding author.]

Hints of Prompt: Enhancing Visual Representation for Multimodal LLMs in Autonomous Driving

In light of the dynamic nature of autonomous driving environments and stringent safety requirements, general MLLMs combined with CLIP alone often struggle to represent driving-specific scenarios accurately, particularly in complex interactions and long-tail cases. To address this, we propose the Hints of Prompt (HoP) framework, which introduces three key enhancements: Affinity hint to emphasize instance-level structure by strengthening token-wise connections, Semantic hint to incorporate high-level information relevant to driving-specific cases, such as complex interactions among vehicles and traffic signs, and Question hint to align visual features with the query context, focusing on question-relevant regions. These hints are fused through a Hint Fusion module, enriching visual representations and enhancing multimodal reasoning for autonomous driving VQA tasks. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of the HoP framework, showing it significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across all key metrics.

Active Fake: DeepFake Camouflage

DeepFake technology has gained significant attention due to its ability to manipulate facial attributes with high realism, raising serious societal concerns. Face-Swap DeepFake is the most harmful among these techniques, which fabricates behaviors by swapping original faces with synthesized ones. Existing forensic methods, primarily based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), effectively expose these manipulations and have become important authenticity indicators. However, these methods mainly concentrate on capturing the blending inconsistency in DeepFake faces, raising a new security issue, termed Active Fake, emerges when individuals intentionally create blending inconsistency in their authentic videos to evade responsibility. This tactic is called DeepFake Camouflage. To achieve this, we introduce a new framework for creating DeepFake camouflage that generates blending inconsistencies while ensuring imperceptibility, effectiveness, and transferability. This framework, optimized via an adversarial learning strategy, crafts imperceptible yet effective inconsistencies to mislead forensic detectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method, highlighting the need for further research in active fake detection.

A Diffusion Model Based Quality Enhancement Method for HEVC Compressed Video

Video post-processing methods can improve the quality of compressed videos at the decoder side. Most of the existing methods need to train corresponding models for compressed videos with different quantization parameters to improve the quality of compressed videos. However, in most cases, the quantization parameters of the decoded video are unknown. This makes existing methods have their limitations in improving video quality. To tackle this problem, this work proposes a diffusion model based post-processing method for compressed videos. The proposed method first estimates the feature vectors of the compressed video and then uses the estimated feature vectors as the prior information for the quality enhancement model to adaptively enhance the quality of compressed video with different quantization parameters. Experimental results show that the quality enhancement results of our proposed method on mixed datasets are superior to existing methods.

Contrastive Multi-FaceForensics: An End-to-end Bi-grained Contrastive Learning Approach for Multi-face Forgery Detection

DeepFakes have raised serious societal concerns, leading to a great surge in detection-based forensics methods in recent years. Face forgery recognition is the conventional detection method that usually follows a two-phase pipeline: it extracts the face first and then determines its authenticity by classification. Since DeepFakes in the wild usually contain multiple faces, using face forgery detection methods is merely practical as they have to process faces in a sequel, i.e., only one face is processed at the same time. One straightforward way to address this issue is to integrate face extraction and forgery detection in an end-to-end fashion by adapting advanced object detection architectures. However, as these object detection architectures are designed to capture the semantic information of different object categories rather than the subtle forgery traces among the faces, the direct adaptation is far from optimal. In this paper, we describe a new end-to-end framework, Contrastive Multi-FaceForensics (COMICS), to enhance multi-face forgery detection. The core of the proposed framework is a novel bi-grained contrastive learning approach that explores effective face forgery traces at both the coarse- and fine-grained levels. Specifically, the coarse-grained level contrastive learning captures the discriminative features among positive and negative proposal pairs in multiple scales with the instruction of the proposal generator, and the fine-grained level contrastive learning captures the pixel-wise discrepancy between the forged and original areas of the same face and the pixel-wise content inconsistency between different faces. Extensive experiments on the OpenForensics dataset demonstrate our method outperforms other counterparts by a large margin (~18.5%) and shows great potential for integration into various architectures.