Automated Cellular-Level Dual Global Fusion of Whole-Slide Imaging for Lung Adenocarcinoma Prognosis

Histopathologic whole-slide images (WSI) are generally considered the gold standard for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Survival prediction based on WSI has recently attracted substantial attention. Nevertheless, it remains a central challenge owing to the inherent difficulties of predicting patient prognosis and effectively extracting informative survival-specific representations from WSI with highly compounded gigapixels. In this study, we present a fully automated cellular-level dual global fusion pipeline for survival prediction. Specifically, the proposed method first describes the composition of different cell populations on WSI. Then, it generates dimension-reduced WSI-embedded maps, allowing for efficient investigation of the tumor microenvironment. In addition, we introduce a novel dual global fusion network to incorporate global and inter-patch features of cell distribution, which enables the sufficient fusion of different types and locations of cells. We further validate the proposed pipeline using The Cancer Genome Atlas lung adenocarcinoma dataset. Our model achieves a C-index of 0.675 (±0.05) in the five-fold cross-validation setting and surpasses comparable methods. Further, we extensively analyze embedded map features and survival probabilities. These experimental results manifest the potential of our proposed pipeline for applications using WSI in lung adenocarcinoma and other malignancies.

3D Printed Embedded Metamaterials

The manufacturing of 3D and conformal metamaterials remains a major challenge. The projection micro-stereolithography 3D printing technology combined with the liquid metal filling method is employed here to fabricate the metamaterials, which are characterized with embedded features that can effectively protect the metal resonance layer from external influence, and integrated molding of macro-micro structures and function-structure. To demonstrate the robustness and flexibility of the proposed method, three types of metamaterials are fabricated: 3D orthogonal split-ring resonator metamaterial, bionic compound eye conformal metamaterial, and a five-layer broadband conformal metamaterial in the form of hemispherical moth-eye, which are costly, tedious, and time consuming in conventional fabrication methods. And the layout of the filling channel is optimized and the polydimethylsiloxane coating post-treatment process is applied to smooth the surface roughness caused by the staircase effect of 3D printing to improve the transmission performance of metamaterial devices. The transmission properties are measured using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy system and the experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper makes metamaterial manufacture no longer limited to complex structures, which effectively expands the application range of metamaterials.