Data-Efficient Networks for Multi-Contrast MRI Reconstruction based on a Generalized Content/Style Prior

Multi-contrast MR scans contain redundant structural information that can be leveraged during reconstruction and potentially accelerate acquisition times. This idea has inspired end-to-end guided reconstruction models, leveraging one or more contrasts to guide the reconstruction of a different contrast. However, these models require large paired multi-contrast raw datasets for training, limiting their application in low-data regimes. In this work, we propose a modular framework, namely CoSMo-RecNet, for learning guided reconstruction models in the low-data regime. At its core is a reusable multi-contrast representation based on a content/style model, which can be learned from large-scale, publicly accessible, unpaired multi-contrast image datasets, without available k-space data. Using this frozen model as a multi-contrast prior and using a set of reference contrasts, the reconstruction problem reduces to a much simpler refinement problem that can be solved by a lightweight unrolled network and thus learned from small, task-specific reconstruction datasets. We demonstrate the efficacy of CoSMo-RecNet by evaluating it on the low-field 0.3 T M4Raw dataset, showing stable reconstruction quality on decreasing the raw training data budget. CoSMo-RecNet achieved higher reconstruction quality with 5 training subjects or lower compared to a parameter-count-matched MoDL trained on 100 subjects. On a data-limited and severely out-of-distribution ultra-low-field 47 mT Halbach scanner dataset, CoSMo-RecNet was superior to other viable strategies, including classical reconstruction, transfer learning, and zero-shot reconstruction.

Unsupervised Anatomical Feature Learning via Diffusion Models: Enhanced Medical Image Segmentation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Acquiring pixel-level annotations for medical image segmentation is a severe bottleneck. Traditional U-Net architectures, while effective, learn local texture patterns and lack awareness of global anatomical structures, leading to boundary delineation failures in low-data regimes. This research paper proposes utilizing unsupervised Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) to extract anatomical features. We train a DDPM on 21 unlabeled abdominal CT scans to learn structural representations, transferring the encoder weights to a downstream segmentation task evaluated on the BTCV multi-organ dataset. Diffusion pretraining significantly improved liver segmentation: Dice increased from $0.75\pm0.36$ to $0.93\pm0.16$ ($p < 5.33\times10^{-26}$, 0.529 Cohen's d), Average Surface Distance (ASD) decreased by 66%, and 95th-percentile Hausdorff Distance (HD95) reduced by 45%. For kidney segmentation, Dice improved from $0.90\pm0.19$ to $0.95\pm0.10$ ($p < 4.01\times10^{-11}$). Multi-organ pooled performance showed a 68% variance reduction and a 74% improvement in boundary precision (Dice $0.95\pm0.07$). Crucially, frozen encoder models retained > 80% of fine-tuned performance without exposure to segmentation labels, proving the existence of learned anatomical priors. In low-data scenarios, diffusion-pretrained models maintained robust performance with only 50% (Dice: 0.92 liver, 0.94 kidney), 25%, and even 10% (Dice: 0.89 liver, 0.71 kidney) of labeled data. Using unlabeled images for diffusion-based pretraining successfully embeds robust anatomical features prior to human supervision, transforming U-Nets into anatomy-aware systems.

Interpretable EEG biomarkers with bag-of-waves: Spatial and temporal waveform dictionaries for low-data regimes

Electroencephalography (EEG) is widely used to diagnose neurological conditions, but its analysis usually relies on either predefined spectral features or deep neural networks. Predefined features carry a strong bias, since they fix in advance what counts as informative, while deep neural networks and foundation models are hard to interpret and need large amounts of data and compute. We present bag-of-waves, an interpretable framework that learns a small dictionary of recurring EEG waveform templates, called atoms, using shift-invariant k-means without labels. The continuous EEG is then turned into a sequence of atom tokens, whose counts feed a simple downstream classifier or clustering step. We extend this representation in two ways: we add atom-to-atom transitions, which we call n- grams, to capture temporal structure, and we move from single-channel atoms to regional and cross-channel spatial atoms for the multichannel case. We test the method on three complementary datasets, each probing a different aspect: single-channel mouse genotype clustering with only sixteen animals (the low-data and temporal case), resting-state dementia classification (the spatial case), and the TUEV benchmark, a six-way classification of clinical EEG events (a high-data comparison against strong deep and foundation baselines). Across all three datasets, bag-of-waves achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art deep and foundation models. Yet, it operates with a fraction of the parameter count and provides full interpretability: because every atom corresponds to an inspectable waveform, the method explicitly recovers known clinical morphologies that a neurophysiologist can directly validate. Its main advantage is that it works in the low-data regime where heavier models are a poor fit.