Search Results (207)

Background/Objectives: Psoriasis is a chronic immune-mediated inflammatory disease increasingly recognized as a systemic disorder associated with significant metabolic and cardiovascular comorbidities. Among these, obesity (defined as BMI > 30 kg/m²) plays a pivotal role, acting both as a risk factor for psoriasis development and as a modifier of disease severity, clinical phenotype, and therapeutic response. The relationship between psoriasis and obesity is bidirectional and sustained by shared inflammatory and metabolic pathways. This review aims to provide a comprehensive and updated synthesis of the epidemiological association between psoriasis and obesity, to elucidate the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms, and to discuss the clinical and therapeutic implications of excess body weight in psoriasis management. Methods: A narrative review of the literature was conducted, including epidemiological studies, mechanistic research, clinical trials, and real-world evidence addressing the interplay between psoriasis and obesity. Relevant data were identified from peer-reviewed publications focusing on inflammatory pathways, metabolic dysfunction, cardiovascular risk, and treatment outcomes in obese patients with psoriasis. The graphical figures included in this manuscript were created with the assistance of a large language model–based image-generation tool, ChatGPT-5 by OpenAI, using author-defined prompts. The prompts requested schematic medical illustrations summarizing the pathophysiological links between obesity and psoriasis, including adipose tissue dysfunction, adipokine imbalance, systemic inflammation, and activation of the IL-23/Th17 axis. For the therapeutic algorithm, the prompt requested a stepwise clinical flowchart for obese patients with psoriasis, including BMI assessment, comorbidity screening, universal weight-management measures, psoriasis severity stratification, obesity-adapted biologic selection, and management of suboptimal response. The generated images were subsequently reviewed, edited, and approved by the authors to ensure scientific accuracy, clarity, and consistency with the manuscript content. Results: Epidemiological evidence consistently demonstrates a higher prevalence of obesity among patients with psoriasis, with obesity independently associated with increased disease severity. Shared mechanisms include adipose tissue–driven cytokine production, dysregulated adipokine secretion, insulin resistance, endothelial dysfunction, and activation of the IL-23/Th17 axis, collectively contributing to systemic inflammation and accelerated atherogenesis. Obesity negatively impacts the efficacy, pharmacokinetics, and long-term drug survival of conventional systemic agents and biologic therapies, leading to suboptimal clinical outcomes. Conclusions: Obesity is a key determinant of psoriasis burden, influencing disease expression, comorbidities, and therapeutic response. Integrating weight reduction strategies into personalized psoriasis management may improve both dermatological outcomes and overall cardiometabolic health, supporting a holistic approach to patient care. Full article

High-resolution thin-slice computed tomography (CT) images are often compressed into lower-quality thick-slice images for long-term storage, necessitating synthesis for medical diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D adversarial diffusion model (3DAD) for high-fidelity synthesis of thin-slice CT from compressed thick-slice CT. 3DAD is composed of a generator and a discriminator for synthesizing denoised thin-slice images from random noise and source images and distinguishing between noised samples from real and denoised synthetic thin-slice images. Specific models were trained on two-slice to six-slice scenarios for abdominal data, using thick-slice CT compressed from real thin-slice CT as the source. 3DAD was evaluated at the time of HCC diagnosis, at the observation and patient levels, using real thin-slice and synthetic thin-slice CT, with DeLong’s test to compare the similarity of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. We further evaluated 3DAD on real-world data with both thin and thick images, with the synthetic image quality assessed by radiologists and in radiomics feature analysis. Based on the external dataset with 548 samples, the achieved mean squared error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) values were 81.374, 29.478, and 0.916, respectively, for the five-slice scenarios at the portal venous phase. The Areas Under Curves (AUCs) achieved were 0.896 on synthetic thin-slice images compared with 0.889 on real thin-slice images at the observation level (p = 0.028) and 0.854 versus 0.846, correspondingly, at the patient level (p = 0.055). For evaluation on the real-world testing dataset after fine-tuning at the portal venous phase, the MSE, PSNR, and SSIM were 70.435, 30.243, and 0.94, respectively. Radiologist evaluation confirmed the high quality of the synthetic image, with no significant difference in the majority of cases across all five parameters, except for radiologist 2, in realistic and consistent situations, under which at least 41 of 43 synthetic images were assessed as equal to or above grade 3. Our 3DAD enabled the synthesis of thick-slice CT images into high-resolution thin-slice images, facilitating high-fidelity volume image application in HCC diagnosis. Full article

Intelligent detection in modern manufacturing, healthcare, process industries, and structural monitoring is fundamentally enabled by heterogeneous sensor systems. Rather than being viewed as a purely image-centered recognition task, intelligent detection is more appropriately formulated as a sensor-driven state inference problem in which sensing physics, signal quality, temporal synchronization, modality availability, and deployment conditions jointly determine what can be reliably detected, localized, interpreted, and acted upon. Against this background, this review provides a structured synthesis of the field through three coupled dimensions, namely methods, systems, and governance, and organizes the literature around four recurring engineering components: signal unification, representation unification, alignment mechanisms, and robustness mechanisms. Using a structured review protocol with explicit source selection, screening, and study coding, the paper traces the methodological evolution from traditional feature-engineering and model-based pipelines to deep learning for visual, temporal, multimodal, generative, and mechanism-constrained sensing, and further to foundation-model-based and multimodal sensor intelligence. Cross-domain evidence is synthesized from industrial defect detection, fault diagnosis, remaining useful life prediction, non-destructive testing, structural health monitoring, medical lesion analysis, and process monitoring. The review argues that recent progress has substantially strengthened learned representations, multimodal interaction, and semantic extensibility, but has not removed persistent constraints arising from domain shift, missing modalities, calibration instability, privacy-preserving collaboration, and edge-side resource limits. Accordingly, the central challenge is no longer how to optimize isolated detection models, but how to build sensor-enabled intelligent systems that remain physically grounded, trustworthy, transferable, and maintainable under real operational conditions. On this basis, the paper concludes by identifying future directions in mechanism-aware modeling, trustworthy evaluation, missing-modality-robust multimodal systems, privacy-preserving cross-site collaboration, and edge-native lifecycle-aware deployment. Full article

Background: Positron emission tomography (PET) provides physiologic information central to oncologic staging and treatment assessment, but its availability is limited by cost, radiation exposure, and scanner access. Synthesizing PET from computed tomography (CT) is attractive but challenging, as tracer uptake is only partially constrained by anatomy, making the mapping inherently one-to-many. Methods: We propose a conditional 3D latent diffusion framework (3D-LDM) for CT-to-PET synthesis in the head–neck and thoracic region. The pipeline localizes anatomy by segmenting lungs in CT and restricting the volume to reduce irrelevant variability. PET volumes are encoded into a compact latent space using a KL-regularized 3D autoencoder, and a conditional 3D diffusion U-Net learns to generate PET latents conditioned on CT via a denoising diffusion process. The model was trained and evaluated on 900 paired PET/CT studies. Performance was assessed in SUV space using MAE, PSNR, and SSIM, and compared against transformer-, CNN-, and GAN-based baselines. Results: On the held-out test cohort, 3D-LDM achieved the best overall quantitative fidelity (MAE = 303.05 ± 22.16 SUV units, PSNR = 32.64 ± 1.79, SSIM = 0.86 ± 0.03), outperforming all baselines with statistically significant differences (p < 0.001). At the lesion level, the model achieved a precision of 0.76 (95% CI: 0.71, 0.81) and recall of 0.76 (95% CI: 0.72, 0.80), detecting an average of 3.19 lesions per scan with a false-positive rate of 0.72/scan. Lesion-wise NMSE was 11.37%, significantly outperforming GAN and transformer baselines. Conclusions: 3D-LDM enables efficient, high-fidelity PET synthesis in the head–neck and thoracic regions, substantially improving lesion-level accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. While it is not a replacement for diagnostic PET, these results support the model’s potential as a clinical decision support tool. Full article

This review comprehensively examines magnetic nanomaterials, ferrofluids, and their integration into ferrogel systems, systematically exploring their structural characteristics, dynamic behaviors, preparation techniques, and applications across medical and engineering fields. Structural characterization reveals that particle size and dispersibility directly influence functional efficiency in fluid and gel matrices, such as SAR (specific absorption rate) values in hyperthermia applications. For ferrofluids and magnetic gels, macroscopic behaviors and microscopic mechanisms are governed by key parameters like the magnetic Bond number. Preparation encompasses green synthesis, chemical reagent synthesis, and the cross-linking of these nanoparticles into hydrogel networks. Applications span diverse areas: in medicine, these include targeted hyperthermia, pH-responsive magnetic gel drug delivery, and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging); in engineering, applications range from efficient extraction and triboelectric power generation to magnetically regulated heat transfer and soft gel robotics. The paper also discusses current challenges, including material stability and unclear micro–macro correlations in complex fluid–gel systems, outlining future research directions for multifunctional magnetic materials. Full article

Automated brain tumor classification from MRI scans requires optimized CNN architectures deployable on embedded FPGA platforms. This paper presents an integrated approach combining the Multi-Chaotic Enhanced HEOA (MC-HEOA) for automatic CNN architecture discovery with deployment validation on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGA. A CEC2023 benchmark across 10 test functions evaluates 6 chaotic maps and selects the Tent map as the optimal diversity generator. The NAS search space spans a massive combinatorial space of $1.31 \times {10}^{16}$ configurations encoding architectural choices (layers, convolutions, channels, pooling) under a strict constraint of fewer than one million parameters for FPGA compatibility. The optimal discovered architecture, trained and evaluated using single-channel grayscale input (224 × 224 × 1)—the natural representation for intrinsically monochromatic MRI data— achieves 91.33% test accuracy and 92.44% validation accuracy with 724,200 parameters on the 4-class Brain Tumor MRI dataset (glioma, meningioma, pituitary, no tumor). HLS synthesis on the Zynq-7000 (xc7z020clg484-1) validates embedded deployment feasibility, with DSP utilization of 16%, LUT utilization of 57%, FF utilization of 28%, and an inference latency of 374 ms at 100 MHz. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of MC-HEOA for discovering compact, high-performing CNN architectures compatible with FPGA deployment, opening new perspectives for real-time embedded medical diagnosis. Full article

Heart disease remains a leading cause of mortality worldwide, and timely and accurate diagnosis is crucial for improving patient outcomes. Medical imaging plays a pivotal role in this process, yet traditional diagnostic methods often suffer from limitations, including dependency on manual interpretation, susceptibility to observer variability, and inefficiency in handling large-scale data. Deep learning has emerged as an innovative technology in medical imaging, providing unparalleled advancements in feature extraction, segmentation, classification, and prediction tasks. Despite its proven potential, comprehensive reviews of deep learning methods specifically targeted at cardiac imaging remain scarce. This review paper seeks to bridge this gap by analyzing the state-of-the-art deep learning applications for heart disease diagnosis, covering the period from 2015 to 2025. Employing a well-structured methodology, this review categorizes and examines studies based on imaging modalities: Ultrasound (US), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), X-ray, Computed Tomography (CT), and Electrocardiography (ECG). For each modality, the analysis focuses on utilized datasets, processing techniques (e.g., extraction, segmentation and classification), and paradigms (e.g., transfer learning, federated learning, explainability, interpretability, and uncertainty quantification). Additionally, the types of heart disease addressed and prediction accuracy metrics are also scrutinized. These findings point toward future opportunities, including the study of data quality, optimization, transfer learning, uncertainty quantification and model explainability or interpretability. Furthermore, exploring advanced techniques such as recurrent expansion, transformers, and other architectures may unlock new pathways in cardiac imaging research. This review is a critical synthesis offering a roadmap for researchers and practitioners to advance the application of deep learning in heart disease diagnosis. Full article

Obtaining multiple MRI contrasts for each patient prolongs scan acquisition time, increases healthcare costs, and may not always be feasible due to patient specific constraints. Deep learning-based MRI contrast synthesis offers a potential solution, yet most existing approaches are evaluated on preprocessed public benchmarks that do not reflect real-world clinical variability. In this study, we propose a fusion U-Net transformer framework for bidirectional T1-weighted ↔ T2-weighted brain MRI synthesis trained and evaluated exclusively on retrospectively acquired clinical data. The proposed architecture integrates multiscale convolutional feature extraction with axial attention mechanisms and a transformer bottleneck for efficient global context modeling. A fusion refinement block is incorporated to mitigate skip connection artifacts. An adversarial training strategy with the least squares GAN objective and a hybrid loss combining L1 reconstruction and structural similarity (SSIM) is employed to promote both pixel-level accuracy and perceptual fidelity. The model is evaluated using SSIM and PSNR metrics alongside qualitative expert assessment conducted by two board-certified radiologists. For both synthesis directions, the framework achieves competitive quantitative performance against baseline models under the challenging conditions of clinical data. Expert evaluation confirms high anatomical fidelity and clinically acceptable image quality across both synthesis directions. These results indicate that the proposed framework represents a promising approach for multi-contrast MRI synthesis in clinically heterogeneous data environments. Full article

In recent years, the integration of advanced methods in medical imaging has become a major topic of interest due to its potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy, improve clinical efficiency, and increase specialists’ confidence in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based decision-making. This paper explores the synthesis of Explainable AI (XAI) and Generative AI (GAI) in medical imaging, highlighting the advantages and challenges of these emerging technologies. The objective of this paper is to explore how the combined use of XAI and GAI contributes both to interpretability and to diagnostic accuracy. This research represents a systematic literature review conducted in accordance with PRISMA 2020, based on searches carried out in the PubMed, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, MDPI and ScienceDirect databases. Thus, a comprehensive overview of the integration of XAI and GAI in medical imaging is presented, based on recent studies and validated clinical applications. The advantages of combining transparency and data amplification in diagnostic models are highlighted, demonstrating their complementary roles in improving diagnosis using medical imaging. Ongoing challenges in clinical adoption are also emphasised, including interpretability and the need for validated assessment metrics. Beyond technological benefits, the paper also underlines the importance of ethical and legal considerations in the use of XAI and GAI in medical imaging. Based on the detailed analysis of the investigated studies, the paper also proposes a visual and architectural system concept intended for medical imaging, oriented towards research into the development of a unified system capable of detecting multiple types of pathologies. This research provides a detailed perspective on how XAI and GAI can revolutionise medical imaging by optimising data interpretation, enhancing human-AI collaboration, and increasing patient safety. Full article

This narrative critical review addresses class imbalance in medical imaging, particularly within the context of multi-sensor and multi-modal environments, poses a critical challenge to developing reliable AI diagnostic systems. The integration of heterogeneous data from sources like CT, MRI, and PET presents a unique opportunity to address data scarcity for rare conditions through fusion techniques. This review provides a structured analysis of strategies to tackle class imbalance, categorizing them into data-centric (e.g., advanced resampling like SMOTE-ENC for mixed data types, GAN-based synthesis) and model-centric (e.g., loss function engineering, transfer learning, and ensemble methods) approaches. Crucially, we highlight how multi-sensor feature fusion and decision-level fusion paradigms can inherently enrich representations for minority classes, offering a powerful frontier beyond single-modality learning. We evaluate each method’s merits, clinical viability, and compliance considerations (e.g., FDA). Finally, we identify emerging trends where imbalance-aware learning synergizes with multi-sensor fusion frameworks, federated learning, and explainable AI, charting a roadmap toward robust, equitable, and clinically deployable diagnostic tools. Our quantitative synthesis shows that data-centric strategies can improve minority class recall by 12–35% in datasets with imbalance ratios (majority:minority) ≥10:1, while model-centric strategies achieve an average AUC improvement of 0.08–0.21 in multi-sensor medical imaging tasks with sample sizes ranging from 50 to 50,000. Full article

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a widely adopted modality in clinical practice, enables the acquisition of multi-contrast images from the same anatomical structure, commonly referred to as multimodal images. Integrating these diverse modalities is crucial for enhancing model performance across a variety of medical image analysis tasks. However, in real-world clinical scenarios, it is often impractical to acquire all MRI modalities simultaneously due to factors such as patient discomfort, time constraints, and scanning costs. As a result, synthesizing missing modalities from available ones has emerged as an effective solution. To address these challenges, we propose HMF-MambaINR, a hierarchical multi-scale feature fusion network for cross-modality MRI synthesis. The model integrates Mamba-based Selective State Space Modeling (SSM) and implicit neural representation (INR) to capture long-range dependencies and enable continuous spatial reconstruction. A Multi-Feature Extraction Block (MFEB) captures local and global representations via multi-scale receptive fields, while a Modulation Fusion Module (MFM) adaptively fuses multi-modal features with dynamic weighting. Extensive experiments show that HMF-MambaINR surpasses state-of-the-art CNN-, Transformer-, and Mamba-based methods in synthesizing missing MRI modalities. Notably, the synthesized MRI images received positive feedback from radiologists in terms of image quality, contrast, and structural contour accuracy, highlighting the potential of the proposed method as a practical tool for clinical applications. Full article

Background: The generation of synthetic CT images from MRI scans represents a crucial step toward enabling MRI-only clinical workflows and supporting multi-modal integration in medical imaging, particularly in radiotherapy planning. Despite significant advancements in deep learning models, many current methods still struggle to reconstruct high-density structures, especially bone, and exhibit limited accuracy in density values. This shortcoming is largely attributed to the passage of excessive or noisy features through skip connections in the traditional U-Net architecture, which degrade the quality of information transmitted to the decoder, negatively impacting the clarity of anatomical boundaries and the pixel-wise accuracy of the resulting synthetic image. Methods: In this work, we propose an enhanced 3D U-Net architecture in which the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is systematically integrated within each skip connection. The CBAM sequentially applies channel and spatial attention to adaptively reweight encoder feature maps before fusion with the decoder, thereby emphasizing anatomically relevant structures while suppressing irrelevant feature propagation. The model was trained and evaluated on the SynthRAD2023 (Task 1—Brain) MRI–CT dataset. To rigorously assess the contribution of the attention mechanism, a dedicated ablation study was conducted comparing three variants: 3D U-Net with Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE), Coordinate Attention (CA), and the proposed CBAM module. Performance was evaluated using Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC). Results: The ablation study demonstrated that the CBAM-enhanced model consistently outperformed both SE- and CA-based variants across all quantitative metrics. Specifically, the proposed method achieved an MAE of $38.2\pm 5.4$ HU and an RMSE of $51.0\pm 12.0$ HU, representing the lowest reconstruction errors among the evaluated models. In addition, it obtained a PSNR of $29.45\pm 2.10$ dB, SSIM of $0.940\pm 0.031$, and NCC of $0.967\pm 0.015$, indicating superior structural preservation and strong voxel-wise correspondence between synthesized and reference CT volumes. These results confirm that the sequential integration of channel and spatial attention provides a statistically and practically meaningful improvement for high-fidelity MRI-to-CT synthesis. Conclusions: Generating high-resolution brain CT images from brain MRI scans using a 3D U-Net network enhanced with a CBAM module can contribute to supporting the clinical workflow by providing additional diagnostic data without the need for extra radiological examinations, thereby enhancing diagnostic efficiency and reducing radiation exposure. This technique helps reduce patient exposure to radiation and improves accessibility in resource-limited settings. Furthermore, this method is valuable for retrospective studies, surgical planning, and image-guided therapy, where complete multi-modal data may not always be available. Full article

Background: Chronic cocaine exposure is increasingly associated with persistent brain alterations, yet it remains unclear whether these changes reflect reversible neuroadaptation, accelerated brain ageing, or a degeneration-like trajectory in a vulnerable subgroup. This Perspective proposes a neuroprogressive vulnerability framework—referred to as cocaine-specific encephalopathy/cerebropathy only in a heuristic sense—to organise heterogeneous evidence without implying a distinct neurodegenerative disease entity. Methods: We conducted a structured, critical synthesis of peer-reviewed human and preclinical literature (PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science; inception to December 2025), integrating neuroimaging (MRI/DTI/fMRI/PET/SPECT), neuropathology/post-mortem findings, neurochemical and molecular mechanisms, and neuropsychological outcomes, with explicit attention to confounders (polysubstance use, psychiatric and medical comorbidity, HIV, vascular risk, abstinence duration). Results: Convergent evidence supports a multi-hit vulnerability model in which chronic stimulant exposure may weaken neural resilience through dopaminergic dysregulation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, neuroinflammatory signalling, and putative α-synuclein–related mechanisms. Human imaging studies consistently implicate fronto–striato–limbic circuits and suggest possible cerebellar involvement, but findings are heterogeneous and often cross-sectional; direct evidence of progressive neuronal loss or disease-defining proteinopathies attributable to cocaine remains limited. Conclusions: Rather than asserting cocaine-induced classic neurodegeneration, we outline an exploratory framework in which chronic cocaine exposure may increase susceptibility to neuroprogressive impairment in a subset of biologically vulnerable individuals. Longitudinal multimodal studies combining advanced imaging, biomarkers, and phenotypic stratification are needed to clarify causality, temporal progression, and reversibility with sustained abstinence. Full article

This work investigates the extension of StyleGAN2-ADA to three-dimensional prostate T2-weighted (T2W) MRI generation. The architecture is adapted to operate on 3D anisotropic volumes, enabling stable training at a clinically relevant resolution of $256\times 256\times 24$, where a baseline 3D-StyleGAN fails to converge. Quantitative evaluation using Fréchet Inception Distance (FID), Kernel Inception Distance (KID), and generative Precision–Recall metrics demonstrates substantial improvements over a 3D-StyleGAN baseline. Specifically, FID decreased from 114.2 to 27.3, while generative Precision increased from 0.22 to 0.82, indicating markedly improved fidelity and alignment with the real data distribution. Beyond generative metrics, the synthetic volumes were evaluated through radiomic feature analysis and downstream prostate segmentation. Synthetic data augmentation resulted in segmentation performance comparable to real-data training, supporting that volumetric generation preserves anatomically relevant structures, while multivariate radiomic analyses showed strong global feature alignment between real and synthetic volumes. These findings indicate that a 3D extension of StyleGAN2-ADA enables stable high-resolution volumetric prostate MRI synthesis while preserving anatomically coherent structure and global radiomic characteristics. Full article

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is portable and radiation-free, but its clinical reliability is constrained by operator-dependent image acquisition and the limited scalability of expert quality assurance (QA) review. As handheld devices proliferate faster than mentorship capacity, trainees increasingly rely on heterogeneous free open access medical education (FOAMed) resources that rarely provide real-time psychomotor feedback. We conducted a structured narrative review (MEDLINE, Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science; last searched on 23 February 2026), with searches performed by H.H. and independently checked by J.J.P. (both POCUS-trained clinicians). After screening, 31 studies were included. We synthesized evidence on artificial intelligence (AI) systems that support bedside image acquisition and automate QA. The primary synthesis centered on key prospective or comparative clinical evaluations of AI-guided acquisition across echocardiography, focused assessment with sonography in trauma, abdominal aortic aneurysm screening, and lung ultrasound, complemented by peer-reviewed studies of FOAMed appraisal tools and online resource quality. These evaluations suggest that real-time probe guidance, view recognition, anatomy labeling, and automated capture may enable novices, after brief training, to acquire diagnostically adequate images for narrowly defined tasks. Early reports of automated QA scoring and program-level triage for expert review suggest potential to reduce expert workload and shorten feedback cycles, but external validation, generalizability across devices and patient habitus, and patient-centered outcomes remain limited. Acquisition-focused AI may therefore serve as an upstream “digital mentor” to improve novice image acquisition. We propose a practical pathway that integrates curated FOAMed resources and simulation with AI-guided bedside acquisition and continuous QA governance for safe deployment. Full article