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AI and Intelligent Sensors for Medical Imaging

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensing and Imaging".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2026) | Viewed by 1248

Special Issue Editors

Department of Electronic Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300350, China
Interests: healthcare AI; medical imaging; deep learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Weijin Road 92, Tianjin 300072, China
Interests: sample information assessment; AI and object detection

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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK
Interests: machine learning; deep learning; computer vision; human motion analysis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Anomaly detection in medical imaging faces significant challenges, including small lesion sizes, high morphological diversity, and the difficulty in interpreting complex medical data. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies play a pivotal role in medical image analysis, the limitations of prevailing AI paradigms become increasingly apparent when confronting complex clinical scenarios. For instance, their decision-making processes often lack clinical interpretability, failing to provide a transparent rationale for physicians' diagnoses and thus undermining the clinical trust in their outputs. Furthermore, model development heavily relies on large-scale annotated data, which stands in stark contrast to the real-world challenges of the scarcity and inaccessibility of medical data, thereby severely compromising their generalization ability and robustness. Concurrently, the mainstream research paradigm, which typically focuses on single sources of information, is misaligned with the practical clinical workflow that necessitates decision-making based on the synthesis of multi-source information. The core of this Special Issue is to systematically address the core scientific challenges of interpretability, unsupervised/weakly supervised learning, domain generalization, and multi-modal fusion. Its significance lies in overcoming the application bottlenecks of current AI technologies and providing genuine support for clinical decision-making. Therefore, we encourage submissions that place a strong emphasis on how their proposed methods address the clinical realities, clearly articulating their contributions to enhancing model trustworthiness, robustness, and data efficiency.

Scope:

  • Explainable AI and Clinical Trust
  • Data-Efficient Learning Paradigms
  • Model Robustness: Domain Adaptation and Generalization
  • Multi-modal Fusion for Precision Diagnosis
  • Fine-grained Analysis: Detection, Segmentation and Quantification
  • AI for Intelligent Sensors and Novel Imaging
  • Generative AI in Medical Imaging
  • Privacy-Preserving and Collaborative Learning
  • Longitudinal Analysis and Disease Progression Modeling

Dr. Shuai Xiao
Dr. Zhuo Zhang
Prof. Dr. Qinggang Meng
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • artificial intelligence
  • anomaly detection
  • medical imaging
  • deep learning
  • computer-aided diagnosis
  • object detection
  • intelligent sensors
  • unsupervised learning

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

31 pages, 6805 KB  
Article
Evaluation Framework for Bruise Detection: Systematic ALS/White-Light Training and Skin-Tone Balancing with Deep Learning
by Kiyarash Aminfar, Katherine Scafide, Janusz Wojtusiak and David Lattanzi
Sensors 2026, 26(10), 3215; https://doi.org/10.3390/s26103215 - 19 May 2026
Viewed by 421
Abstract
Accurate and consistent forensic bruise assessment is critical in ensuring positive clinical and legal outcomes for victims of violence. In this study, a framework for automated bruise detection is presented that, for the first time, integrates narrowband alternate-light-source (ALS) forensic imaging and ambient [...] Read more.
Accurate and consistent forensic bruise assessment is critical in ensuring positive clinical and legal outcomes for victims of violence. In this study, a framework for automated bruise detection is presented that, for the first time, integrates narrowband alternate-light-source (ALS) forensic imaging and ambient white light imaging. This evaluation framework is designed to address long-standing issues with respect to equitable performance across skin tones and lighting scenarios via a combination of novel model diagnostic strategies. In particular, skin-tone balancing during training and testing, threshold-sensitivity analysis, and embedding-similarity partitioning are employed to quantify the model robustness and deployment trade-offs that arise in forensic image analysis. Models were implemented with ImageNet-pretrained backbones and trained on a unique, multi-annotator full-consensus dataset comprising both white-light and ALS (415 nm and 450 nm) images. The protocol emphasizes three axes of operational relevance: (1) illumination composition in training (W/ALS ratio); (2) subgroup fairness via targeted balancing; and (3) model operating-point selection (confidence and IoU thresholds) informed by confidence-stability metrics and bootstrapped uncertainty estimates. Systematic W/ALS ratio sweeps indicate peak accuracy under ALS-dominant training and declining performance as the proportion of white-light images increases within the training set. Skin-tone balancing reduced failure rates for darker skin tones but increased overprediction in some demographic subgroups. Embedding-similarity and seen/unseen injury analyses demonstrate inflated generalization under image-level partitioning. Ultimately, the findings suggest that future researchers and developers should employ injury-level data partitioning and ensure a weighted balance of ALS images during training. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI and Intelligent Sensors for Medical Imaging)
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18 pages, 3239 KB  
Article
LPA-Tuning CLIP: An Improved CLIP-Based Classification Model for Intestinal Polyps
by Zumin Wang, Jun Gao, Wenhao Ping, Jing Qin and Changqing Ji
Sensors 2026, 26(6), 1764; https://doi.org/10.3390/s26061764 - 11 Mar 2026
Viewed by 457
Abstract
Background and Objective: Accurate classification of intestinal polyps is crucial for preventing colorectal cancer but is hindered by visual similarity among subtypes and endoscopic variability. While deep learning aids in diagnosis, single-modal models face efficiency–accuracy trade-offs and ignore pathological semantics. We propose a [...] Read more.
Background and Objective: Accurate classification of intestinal polyps is crucial for preventing colorectal cancer but is hindered by visual similarity among subtypes and endoscopic variability. While deep learning aids in diagnosis, single-modal models face efficiency–accuracy trade-offs and ignore pathological semantics. We propose a multimodal framework that integrates endoscopic images with structured pathological descriptions to bridge this gap. Methods: We propose LPA-Tuning CLIP, which incorporates three key innovations: replacing CLIP’s instance-level contrastive loss with cross-modal projection matching (CMPM) with ID loss to explicitly optimize intraclass compactness and interclass separation through label-aware image-text similarity matrices; introducing structured clinical semantic templates that encode WHO diagnostic criteria into hierarchical text prompts for consistent pathology annotations; and developing medical-aware augmentation that preserves lesion features while reducing domain shifts. Results: The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves an accuracy of 85.8% and an F1 score of 0.862 on the internal test set, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance for intestinal polyp classification. Conclusions: This study proposes a multimodal polyp classification paradigm that achieves 85.8% accuracy on three-subtype classification via endoscopic image-pathology text joint representation learning, outperforming unimodal baselines by 8.7% and a multimodal baseline by 4.3%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI and Intelligent Sensors for Medical Imaging)
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