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Yujin Oh

Publications and source records attributed to Yujin Oh.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Are Compact Rationales Free? Measuring Tile Selection Headroom in Frozen WSI-MIL

Whole-slide image (WSI) multiple instance learning (MIL) classifiers can achieve strong slide-level AUC while leaving the full-bag prediction opaque. Attention scores are widely reused as post-hoc explanations, but high attention can reflect aggregation preference rather than a compact, model-sufficient rationale. We study post-hoc rationale highlighting for frozen WSI-MIL: given a trained classifier, can its slide-level prediction be recovered from a compact, output-consistent tile subset without retraining the backbone? We instantiate this with Finding Optimal Contextual Instances (FOCI), a lightweight rationale-readout layer over a frozen MIL backbone. FOCI is trained with model-output sufficiency and exclusion objectives over keep/drop tile subsets, evaluated with an insertion-style Sequential Reveal Protocol (SRP) adapted to WSI-MIL, and summarized by the Selection Headroom Index (SHI). Across three WSI benchmarks and seven MIL backbones, FOCI reveals that compact rationales are selection-headroom dependent: transformer and multi-branch attention aggregators can admit compact rationales, near-minimal attention-pooling baselines enter a selection-saturation regime, and hard-selection backbones can conflict with an external readout. For TransMIL, relative to its documented CLS-proxy ranking, FOCI reduces the Minimum Sufficient K (MSK) tile count by 32-56% across benchmarks, while ACMIL+FOCI attains the highest mean SHI (+0.465). Deletion-based perturbation and selected-only downstream evaluation provide complementary checks. These results position FOCI as a model-level interpretability and audit layer: selected tiles are not claims of clinical or pathologist-level diagnostic sufficiency, but candidate rationales that offer a compact, reviewable view of when a frozen MIL prediction can be localized to a small output-consistent subset.

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DuetFair: Coupling Inter- and Intra-Subgroup Robustness for Fair Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation models can perform unevenly across subgroups. Most existing fairness methods focus on improving average subgroup performance, implicitly treating each subgroup as internally homogeneous. However, this can hide difficult cases within a subgroup, where high-loss samples are obscured by the subgroup mean. We call this problem \textbf{intra-group hidden failure}. To solve this, we propose \textbf{DuetFair} mechanism, a dual-axis fairness framework that jointly considers inter-subgroup adaptation and intra-subgroup robustness. Based on DuetFair, we introduce \textbf{FairDRO}, which combines distribution-aware mixture-of-experts (dMoE) with subgroup-conditioned distributionally robust optimization (DRO) loss aggregation. This design allows the model to adapt across subgroups while also reducing hidden failures within each subgroup. We evaluate FairDRO on three medical image segmentation benchmarks with varying degrees of within-group heterogeneity. FairDRO achieves the best equity-scaled performance on Harvard-FairSeg and improves worst-case subgroup performance on HAM10000 under both age- and race-based grouping schemes. On the 3D radiotherapy target cohort, FairDRO further improves worst-group Dice by 3.5 points ($\uparrow 6.0\%$) under the tumor-stage grouping and by 4.1 points ($\uparrow 7.4\%$) under the institution grouping over the strongest baseline.

cs.CV

CoMMa: Contribution-Aware Medical Multi-Agents for Decentralized Oncology Decision Support

Recent multi-agent frameworks have shown promise for oncology decision support, yet most assume centralized data access and rely on prompt-based assignment, limiting their applicability in privacy-sensitive clinical settings. We propose Contribution-Aware Medical Multi-Agents (CoMMa), a decentralized LLM-agent framework where specialists operate on partitioned clinical data streams. Unlike prior approaches that share inputs across agents, CoMMa enforces data decentralization to include stronger role specialization and further enhances this via agent-specific finetuning. To enable reliable and interpretable coordination, we introduce a contribution-aware aggregation mechanism that replaces stochastic, narrative-based reasoning with deterministic embedding projections to approximate each agent's marginal utility. This yields explicit credit assignment over agents, providing a stable and interpretable decision pathway aligned with clinical requirements. We evaluate CoMMa on multiple oncology benchmarks, including real-world multidisciplinary tumor board datasets from large academic hospitals in North America and East Asia, as well as public datasets, demonstrating strong performance and generalization across heterogeneous clinical settings.

cs.AI

Cascaded 3D Diffusion Models for Whole-body 3D 18-F FDG PET/CT synthesis from Demographics

We propose a cascaded 3D diffusion model framework to synthesize high-fidelity 3D PET/CT volumes directly from demographic variables, addressing the growing need for realistic digital twins in oncologic imaging, virtual trials, and AI-driven data augmentation. Unlike deterministic phantoms, which rely on predefined anatomical and metabolic templates, our method employs a two-stage generative process. An initial score-based diffusion model synthesizes low-resolution PET/CT volumes from demographic variables alone, providing global anatomical structures and approximate metabolic activity. This is followed by a super-resolution residual diffusion model that refines spatial resolution. Our framework was trained on 18-F FDG PET/CT scans from the AutoPET dataset and evaluated using organ-wise volume and standardized uptake value (SUV) distributions, comparing synthetic and real data between demographic subgroups. The organ-wise comparison demonstrated strong concordance between synthetic and real images. In particular, most deviations in metabolic uptake values remained within 3-5% of the ground truth in subgroup analysis. These findings highlight the potential of cascaded 3D diffusion models to generate anatomically and metabolically accurate PET/CT images, offering a robust alternative to traditional phantoms and enabling scalable, population-informed synthetic imaging for clinical and research applications.

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Surf2CT: Cascaded 3D Flow Matching Models for Torso 3D CT Synthesis from Skin Surface

We present Surf2CT, a novel cascaded flow matching framework that synthesizes full 3D computed tomography (CT) volumes of the human torso from external surface scans and simple demographic data (age, sex, height, weight). This is the first approach capable of generating realistic volumetric internal anatomy images solely based on external body shape and demographics, without any internal imaging. Surf2CT proceeds through three sequential stages: (1) Surface Completion, reconstructing a complete signed distance function (SDF) from partial torso scans using conditional 3D flow matching; (2) Coarse CT Synthesis, generating a low-resolution CT volume from the completed SDF and demographic information; and (3) CT Super-Resolution, refining the coarse volume into a high-resolution CT via a patch-wise conditional flow model. Each stage utilizes a 3D-adapted EDM2 backbone trained via flow matching. We trained our model on a combined dataset of 3,198 torso CT scans (approximately 1.13 million axial slices) sourced from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the AutoPET challenge. Evaluation on 700 paired torso surface-CT cases demonstrated strong anatomical fidelity: organ volumes exhibited small mean percentage differences (range from -11.1% to 4.4%), and muscle/fat body composition metrics matched ground truth with strong correlation (range from 0.67 to 0.96). Lung localization had minimal bias (mean difference -2.5 mm), and surface completion significantly improved metrics (Chamfer distance: from 521.8 mm to 2.7 mm; Intersection-over-Union: from 0.87 to 0.98). Surf2CT establishes a new paradigm for non-invasive internal anatomical imaging using only external data, opening opportunities for home-based healthcare, preventive medicine, and personalized clinical assessments without the risks associated with conventional imaging techniques.

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OWT: A Foundational Organ-Wise Tokenization Framework for Medical Imaging

Recent advances in representation learning often rely on holistic embeddings that entangle multiple semantic components, limiting interpretability and generalization. These issues are especially critical in medical imaging, where downstream tasks depend on anatomically interpretable features. To address these limitations, we propose an Organ-Wise Tokenization (OWT) framework with a Token Group-based Reconstruction (TGR) training paradigm. Unlike conventional approaches, OWT explicitly disentangles an image into separable token groups, each corresponding to a distinct organ or semantic entity. Our design ensures each token group encapsulates organ-specific information, boosting interpretability, generalization, and efficiency while enabling fine-grained control for targeted clinical applications. Experiments on CT and MRI datasets demonstrate OWT's power: it not only achieves strong performance on standard tasks like image reconstruction and segmentation, but also unlocks novel, high-impact clinical capabilities including organ-specific tumor identification, organ-level retrieval and semantic-level generation, without requiring any additional training. These findings underscore the potential of OWT as a foundational framework for semantically disentangled representation learning, offering broad scalability and a new perspective on how representations can be leveraged.

cs.CV

MAST-Pro: Dynamic Mixture-of-Experts for Adaptive Segmentation of Pan-Tumors with Knowledge-Driven Prompts

Accurate tumor segmentation is crucial for cancer diagnosis and treatment. While foundation models have advanced general-purpose segmentation, existing methods still struggle with: (1) limited incorporation of medical priors, (2) imbalance between generic and tumor-specific features, and (3) high computational costs for clinical adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose MAST-Pro (Mixture-of-experts for Adaptive Segmentation of pan-Tumors with knowledge-driven Prompts), a novel framework that integrates dynamic Mixture-of-Experts (D-MoE) and knowledge-driven prompts for pan-tumor segmentation. Specifically, text and anatomical prompts provide domain-specific priors, guiding tumor representation learning, while D-MoE dynamically selects experts to balance generic and tumor-specific feature learning, improving segmentation accuracy across diverse tumor types. To enhance efficiency, we employ Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), optimizing MAST-Pro with significantly reduced computational overhead. Experiments on multi-anatomical tumor datasets demonstrate that MAST-Pro outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to a 5.20% improvement in average DSC while reducing trainable parameters by 91.04%, without compromising accuracy.

cs.CV

Prediction of Frozen Region Growth in Kidney Cryoablation Intervention Using a 3D Flow-Matching Model

This study presents a 3D flow-matching model designed to predict the progression of the frozen region (iceball) during kidney cryoablation. Precise intraoperative guidance is critical in cryoablation to ensure complete tumor eradication while preserving adjacent healthy tissue. However, conventional methods, typically based on physics driven or diffusion based simulations, are computationally demanding and often struggle to represent complex anatomical structures accurately. To address these limitations, our approach leverages intraoperative CT imaging to inform the model. The proposed 3D flow matching model is trained to learn a continuous deformation field that maps early-stage CT scans to future predictions. This transformation not only estimates the volumetric expansion of the iceball but also generates corresponding segmentation masks, effectively capturing spatial and morphological changes over time. Quantitative analysis highlights the model robustness, demonstrating strong agreement between predictions and ground-truth segmentations. The model achieves an Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.61 and a Dice coefficient of 0.75. By integrating real time CT imaging with advanced deep learning techniques, this approach has the potential to enhance intraoperative guidance in kidney cryoablation, improving procedural outcomes and advancing the field of minimally invasive surgery.

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Developing a PET/CT Foundation Model for Cross-Modal Anatomical and Functional Imaging

In oncology, Positron Emission Tomography-Computed Tomography (PET/CT) is widely used in cancer diagnosis, staging, and treatment monitoring, as it combines anatomical details from CT with functional metabolic activity and molecular marker expression information from PET. However, existing artificial intelligence-driven PET/CT analyses rely predominantly on task-specific models trained from scratch or on limited datasets, limiting their generalizability and robustness. To address this, we propose a foundation model approach specifically designed for multimodal PET/CT imaging. We introduce the Cross-Fraternal Twin Masked Autoencoder (FratMAE), a novel framework that effectively integrates whole-body anatomical and functional or molecular information. FratMAE employs separate Vision Transformer (ViT) encoders for PET and CT scans, along with cross-attention decoders that enable synergistic interactions between modalities during masked autoencoder training. Additionally, it incorporates textual metadata to enhance PET representation learning. By pre-training on PET/CT datasets, FratMAE captures intricate cross-modal relationships and global uptake patterns, achieving superior performance on downstream tasks and demonstrating its potential as a generalizable foundation model.

cs.CV

Distribution-aware Fairness Learning in Medical Image Segmentation From A Control-Theoretic Perspective

Ensuring fairness in medical image segmentation is critical due to biases in imbalanced clinical data acquisition caused by demographic attributes (e.g., age, sex, race) and clinical factors (e.g., disease severity). To address these challenges, we introduce Distribution-aware Mixture of Experts (dMoE), inspired by optimal control theory. We provide a comprehensive analysis of its underlying mechanisms and clarify dMoE's role in adapting to heterogeneous distributions in medical image segmentation. Furthermore, we integrate dMoE into multiple network architectures, demonstrating its broad applicability across diverse medical image analysis tasks. By incorporating demographic and clinical factors, dMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance on two 2D benchmark datasets and a 3D in-house dataset. Our results highlight the effectiveness of dMoE in mitigating biases from imbalanced distributions, offering a promising approach to bridging control theory and medical image segmentation within fairness learning paradigms. The source code will be made available. The source code is available at https://github.com/tvseg/dMoE.

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Improving Factuality of 3D Brain MRI Report Generation with Paired Image-domain Retrieval and Text-domain Augmentation

Acute ischemic stroke (AIS) requires time-critical decision-making, where inaccurate interpretation of neuroimaging findings can lead to irreversible disability. Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are central to detecting acute infarction, yet generating factually reliable radiology reports directly from 3D MRI remains challenging due to the difficulty of learning robust cross-modal alignments between volumetric images and clinical text. We propose paired image-domain retrieval and text-domain augmentation (PIRTA), a retrieval-augmented generation framework that improves report factuality by avoiding explicit image-text alignment. PIRTA retrieves clinically similar 3D DWI/ADC volumes using a pretrained 3D vision encoder and leverages their paired clinician-authored reports to ground large language model (LLM)-based report generation. Experiments on multi-institutional in-house data, a held-out external privacy-preserving cohort, and the public ISLES benchmark demonstrate that PIRTA achieves strong image-domain retrieval performance and consistently improves ischemic-territory accuracy, a clinically grounded surrogate for report factuality, compared to direct image-to-text baselines. These results indicate that retrieval-grounded generation provides a scalable and reliable paradigm for producing factually consistent radiology reports from complex 3D brain MRI. Source code is available at https://github.com/jhlee0619/PIRTA.

cs.CV

Mixture of Multicenter Experts in Multimodal AI for Debiased Radiotherapy Target Delineation

Clinical decision-making reflects diverse strategies shaped by regional patient populations and institutional protocols. However, most existing medical artificial intelligence (AI) models are trained on highly prevalent data patterns, which reinforces biases and fails to capture the breadth of clinical expertise. Inspired by the recent advances in Mixture of Experts (MoE), we propose a Mixture of Multicenter Experts (MoME) framework to address AI bias in the medical domain without requiring data sharing across institutions. MoME integrates specialized expertise from diverse clinical strategies to enhance model generalizability and adaptability across medical centers. We validate this framework using a multimodal target volume delineation model for prostate cancer radiotherapy. With few-shot training that combines imaging and clinical notes from each center, the model outperformed baselines, particularly in settings with high inter-center variability or limited data availability. Furthermore, MoME enables model customization to local clinical preferences without cross-institutional data exchange, making it especially suitable for resource-constrained settings while promoting broadly generalizable medical AI.

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High-Fidelity 3D Lung CT Synthesis in ARDS Swine Models Using Score-Based 3D Residual Diffusion Models

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a severe condition characterized by lung inflammation and respiratory failure, with a high mortality rate of approximately 40%. Traditional imaging methods, such as chest X-rays, provide only two-dimensional views, limiting their effectiveness in fully assessing lung pathology. Three-dimensional (3D) computed tomography (CT) offers a more comprehensive visualization, enabling detailed analysis of lung aeration, atelectasis, and the effects of therapeutic interventions. However, the routine use of CT in ARDS management is constrained by practical challenges and risks associated with transporting critically ill patients to remote scanners. In this study, we synthesize high-fidelity 3D lung CT from 2D generated X-ray images with associated physiological parameters using a score-based 3D residual diffusion model. Our preliminary results demonstrate that this approach can produce high-quality 3D CT images that are validated with ground truth, offering a promising solution for enhancing ARDS management.

cs.CV

OTSeg: Multi-prompt Sinkhorn Attention for Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation

The recent success of CLIP has demonstrated promising results in zero-shot semantic segmentation by transferring muiltimodal knowledge to pixel-level classification. However, leveraging pre-trained CLIP knowledge to closely align text embeddings with pixel embeddings still has limitations in existing approaches. To address this issue, we propose OTSeg, a novel multimodal attention mechanism aimed at enhancing the potential of multiple text prompts for matching associated pixel embeddings. We first propose Multi-Prompts Sinkhorn (MPS) based on the Optimal Transport (OT) algorithm, which leads multiple text prompts to selectively focus on various semantic features within image pixels. Moreover, inspired by the success of Sinkformers in unimodal settings, we introduce the extension of MPS, called Multi-Prompts Sinkhorn Attention (MPSA) , which effectively replaces cross-attention mechanisms within Transformer framework in multimodal settings. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that OTSeg achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with significant gains on Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation (ZS3) tasks across three benchmark datasets.

cs.CV

STAG: Structural Test-time Alignment of Gradients for Online Adaptation

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) adapts pre-trained models using only unlabeled test streams, requiring real-time inference and update without access to source data. We propose StructuralTest-time Alignment of Gradients (STAG), a lightweight plug-in enhancer that exploits an always-available structural signal: the classifier's intrinsic geometry. STAG derives class-wise structural anchors from classifier weights via self-structural entropy, and during adaptation analytically computes the predicted-class entropy gradient from forward-pass quantities, aligning it to the corresponding anchor with a cosine-similarity loss. This closed-form design incurs near-zero memory and latency overhead and requires no additional backpropagation beyond the underlying baseline. Across corrupted image classification and continual semantic segmentation, STAG provides broadly applicable performance gains for strong TTA baselines on both CNN and Transformer architectures regardless of the underlying normalization scheme, with particularly large gains under challenging online regimes such as imbalanced label shifts, single-sample adaptation, mixed corruption streams and long-horizon continual TTA.

cs.CV

End-to-End Breast Cancer Radiotherapy Planning via LMMs with Consistency Embedding

Recent advances in AI foundation models have significant potential for lightening the clinical workload by mimicking the comprehensive and multi-faceted approaches used by medical professionals. In the field of radiation oncology, the integration of multiple modalities holds great importance, so the opportunity of foundational model is abundant. Inspired by this, here we present RO-LMM, a multi-purpose, comprehensive large multimodal model (LMM) tailored for the field of radiation oncology. This model effectively manages a series of tasks within the clinical workflow, including clinical context summarization, radiation treatment plan suggestion, and plan-guided target volume segmentation by leveraging the capabilities of LMM. In particular, to perform consecutive clinical tasks without error accumulation, we present a novel Consistency Embedding Fine-Tuning (CEFTune) technique, which boosts LMM's robustness to noisy inputs while preserving the consistency of handling clean inputs. We further extend this concept to LMM-driven segmentation framework, leading to a novel Consistency Embedding Segmentation (CESEG) techniques. Experimental results including multi-centre validation confirm that our RO-LMM with CEFTune and CESEG results in promising performance for multiple clinical tasks with generalization capabilities.

cs.CV

LLM-driven Multimodal Target Volume Contouring in Radiation Oncology

Target volume contouring for radiation therapy is considered significantly more challenging than the normal organ segmentation tasks as it necessitates the utilization of both image and text-based clinical information. Inspired by the recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) that can facilitate the integration of the textural information and images, here we present a novel LLM-driven multimodal AI, namely LLMSeg, that utilizes the clinical text information and is applicable to the challenging task of target volume contouring for radiation therapy, and validate it within the context of breast cancer radiation therapy target volume contouring. Using external validation and data-insufficient environments, which attributes highly conducive to real-world applications, we demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits markedly improved performance compared to conventional unimodal AI models, particularly exhibiting robust generalization performance and data efficiency. To our best knowledge, this is the first LLM-driven multimodal AI model that integrates the clinical text information into target volume delineation for radiation oncology.

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C-DARL: Contrastive diffusion adversarial representation learning for label-free blood vessel segmentation

Blood vessel segmentation in medical imaging is one of the essential steps for vascular disease diagnosis and interventional planning in a broad spectrum of clinical scenarios in image-based medicine and interventional medicine. Unfortunately, manual annotation of the vessel masks is challenging and resource-intensive due to subtle branches and complex structures. To overcome this issue, this paper presents a self-supervised vessel segmentation method, dubbed the contrastive diffusion adversarial representation learning (C-DARL) model. Our model is composed of a diffusion module and a generation module that learns the distribution of multi-domain blood vessel data by generating synthetic vessel images from diffusion latent. Moreover, we employ contrastive learning through a mask-based contrastive loss so that the model can learn more realistic vessel representations. To validate the efficacy, C-DARL is trained using various vessel datasets, including coronary angiograms, abdominal digital subtraction angiograms, and retinal imaging. Experimental results confirm that our model achieves performance improvement over baseline methods with noise robustness, suggesting the effectiveness of C-DARL for vessel segmentation.

eess.IV