Abstract:Accurate segmentation of longitudinal CT scans is important for monitoring tumor progression and evaluating treatment responses. However, existing 3D segmentation models solely focus on spatial information. To address this gap, we propose OmniMamba4D, a novel segmentation model designed for 4D medical images (3D images over time). OmniMamba4D utilizes a spatio-temporal tetra-orientated Mamba block to effectively capture both spatial and temporal features. Unlike traditional 3D models, which analyze single-time points, OmniMamba4D processes 4D CT data, providing comprehensive spatio-temporal information on lesion progression. Evaluated on an internal dataset comprising of 3,252 CT scans, OmniMamba4D achieves a competitive Dice score of 0.682, comparable to state-of-the-arts (SOTA) models, while maintaining computational efficiency and better detecting disappeared lesions. This work demonstrates a new framework to leverage spatio-temporal information for longitudinal CT lesion segmentation.
Abstract:Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) involves chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, with treatment options often burdened by adverse effects. Identifying biomarkers for personalized treatment is crucial. While immune cells play a key role in IBD, accurately identifying ulcer regions in whole slide images (WSIs) is essential for characterizing these cells and exploring potential therapeutics. Multiple instance learning (MIL) approaches have advanced WSI analysis but they lack spatial context awareness. In this work, we propose a weakly-supervised model called DomainGCN that employs a graph convolution neural network (GCN) and incorporates domain-specific knowledge of ulcer features, specifically, the presence of epithelium, lymphocytes, and debris for WSI-level ulcer prediction in IBD. We demonstrate that DomainGCN outperforms various state-of-the-art (SOTA) MIL methods and show the added value of domain knowledge.