Background: Recent advances in histology scanning technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer great opportunities to support cancer diagnosis. The inability to interpret the extracted features and model predictions is one of the major issues limiting the acceptance of AI models in clinical practice, and a clear representation of the relevance of the extracted features and model predictions is lacking. Focusing on the problem of prostate cancer (PCa) diagnosis and grading, this study aims to detect which are the most discriminant features for distinguishing malignant from non-malignant tissue and Gleason patterns, leaving the evaluation of models' classification performances as a secondary goal.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Public Health
June 2025
Background: Obesity is a common, serious, and costly chronic disease of adults and children that poses serious long-term health risks. Recent global estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) show that the number of adolescents living with overweight or obesity is now increasing in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in urban settings. Health interventions using information technology (IT), especially diet and activity tracking, can lead to significant reductions in weight status.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Objectives: The detection of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) could aid in the development of objective measures of the infiltration grade and can support decision-making in breast cancer (BC). However, manual quantification of TILs in BC histopathological whole slide images (WSI) is currently based on a visual assessment, thus resulting not standardized, not reproducible, and time-consuming for pathologists. In this work, a novel pathomic approach, aimed to apply high-throughput image feature extraction techniques to analyze the microscopic patterns in WSI, is proposed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlioblastoma multiforme (GBM) typically exhibits substantial intratumoral heterogeneity at both microscopic and radiological resolution scales. Diffusion Weighted Imaging (DWI) and dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are two functional MRI techniques that are commonly employed in clinic for the assessment of GBM tumor characteristics. This work presents initial results aiming at determining if radiomics features extracted from preoperative ADC maps and post-contrast T1 (T1C) images are associated with pathomic features arising from H&E digitized pathology images.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn neural networks literature, there is a strong interest in identifying and defining activation functions which can improve neural network performance. In recent years there has been a renovated interest in the scientific community in investigating activation functions which can be trained during the learning process, usually referred to as trainable, learnable or adaptable activation functions. They appear to lead to better network performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComput Biol Med
May 2016
This paper proposes and discusses the use of text mining techniques for the extraction of information from clinical records written in Italian. However, as it is very difficult and expensive to obtain annotated material for languages different from English, we only consider unsupervised approaches, where no annotated training set is necessary. We therefore propose a complete system that is structured in two steps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStud Health Technol Inform
January 2018
This paper discusses the application of an unsupervised text mining technique for the extraction of information from clinical records in Italian. The approach includes two steps. First of all, a metathesaurus is exploited together with natural language processing tools to extract the domain entities.
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