AI-Powered Biomedical Image Analysis

A special issue of Algorithms (ISSN 1999-4893). This special issue belongs to the section "Algorithms and Mathematical Models for Computer-Assisted Diagnostic Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2026 | Viewed by 490

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA), UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
Interests: cancer analysis (histopathology WSIs, multimodal); MRI data analysis

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a transformative force in biomedical image analysis, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance disease diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning. With the rapid evolution of deep learning, AI-driven approaches have demonstrated superior performance in extracting clinically relevant patterns from complex imaging data, highlighting their promise for future precision medicine.

Biomedical imaging encompasses diverse modalities, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), ultrasound, and whole-slide pathology images. Each modality captures unique biological and structural information, enabling tasks such as lesion detection, organ segmentation, disease classification, image registration, and quantitative biomarker extraction. AI not only accelerates these processes but also improves reproducibility and reduces observer variability, thereby facilitating more reliable clinical decision-making.

Recent advancements are driving the next wave of innovation. Self-supervised learning enables effective model training with limited annotations, while foundation models trained on massive datasets provide strong generalization across imaging modalities and clinical tasks. Large language models (LLMs) and vision–language models (VLMs) are opening new opportunities for medical image captioning, report generation, and cross-modal reasoning, bridging the gap between imaging data and clinical narratives. Multimodal learning further integrates imaging with genomics, electronic health records, and other biomedical signals, enabling a holistic understanding of disease processes. Together, these approaches are pushing biomedical image analysis toward more robust, scalable, and clinically meaningful solutions.

This Special Issue aims to showcase cutting-edge research on AI-powered biomedical image analysis, spanning novel algorithms, innovative applications, and translational studies bridging the gap between computational advances and clinical practice. By bringing together interdisciplinary contributions, the issue seeks to highlight both technical innovations and their implications for real-world healthcare.

Dr. Lei Fan
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • biomedical image analysis
  • artificial intelligence
  • medical imaging data
  • CT/MRI
  • whole slide image

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

20 pages, 4501 KB  
Article
Improving Prostate Cancer Segmentation on T2-Weighted MRI Using Prostate Detection and Cascaded Networks
by Nikolay Nefediev, Nikolay Staroverov and Roman Davydov
Algorithms 2026, 19(1), 85; https://doi.org/10.3390/a19010085 - 19 Jan 2026
Viewed by 248
Abstract
Prostate cancer is one of the most lethal cancers in the male population, and accurate localization of intraprostatic lesions on MRI remains challenging. In this study, we investigated methods for improving prostate cancer segmentation on T2-weighted pelvic MRI using cascaded neural networks. We [...] Read more.
Prostate cancer is one of the most lethal cancers in the male population, and accurate localization of intraprostatic lesions on MRI remains challenging. In this study, we investigated methods for improving prostate cancer segmentation on T2-weighted pelvic MRI using cascaded neural networks. We used an anonymized dataset of 400 multiparametric MRI scans from two centers, in which experienced radiologists had delineated the prostate and clinically significant cancer on the T2 series. Our baseline approach applies 2D and 3D segmentation networks (UNETR, UNET++, Swin-UNETR, SegResNetDS, and SegResNetVAE) directly to full MRI volumes. We then introduce additional stages that filter slices using DenseNet-201 classifiers (cancer/no-cancer and prostate/no-prostate) and localize the prostate via a YOLO-based detector to crop the 3D region of interest before segmentation. Using Swin-UNETR as the backbone, the prostate segmentation Dice score increased from 71.37% for direct 3D segmentation to 76.09% when using prostate detection and cropped 3D inputs. For cancer segmentation, the final cascaded pipeline—prostate detection, 3D prostate segmentation, and 3D cancer segmentation within the prostate—improved the Dice score from 55.03% for direct 3D segmentation to 67.11%, with an ROC AUC of 0.89 on the test set. These results suggest that cascaded detection- and segmentation-based preprocessing of the prostate region can substantially improve automatic prostate cancer segmentation on MRI while remaining compatible with standard segmentation architectures. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI-Powered Biomedical Image Analysis)
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