arXiv:2603.08208v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) detection is critical for autonomous airspace monitoring but remains challenging when integrating sensor streams that differ substantially in resolution, perspective, and field of view. Conventional fusion methods-such as wavelet-, Laplacian-, and decision-level approaches-often fail to preserve spatial correspondence across modalities and suffer from annotation of inconsistencies, limiting their robustness in real-world settings. This study introduces two fusion strategies, Registration-aware Guided Image Fusion (RGIF) and Reliability-Gated Modality-Attention Fusion (RGMAF), designed to overcome these limitations. RGIF employs Enhanced Correlation Coefficient (ECC)-based affine registration combined with guided filtering to maintain thermal saliency while enhancing structural detail. RGMAF integrates affine and optical-flow registration with a reliability-weighted attention mechanism that adaptively balances thermal contrast and visual sharpness. Experiments were conducted on the Multi-Sensor and Multi-View Fixed-Wing (MMFW)-UAV dataset comprising 147,417 annotated air-to-air frames collected from infrared, wide-angle, and zoom sensors. Among single-modality detectors, YOLOv10x demonstrated the most stable cross-domain performance and was selected as the detection backbone for evaluating fused imagery. RGIF improved the visual baseline by 2.13% mAP@50 (achieving 97.65%), while RGMAF attained the highest recall of 98.64%. These findings show that registration-aware and reliability-adaptive fusion provides a robust framework for integrating heterogeneous modalities, substantially enhancing UAV detection performance in multimodal environments.

arXiv:2601.15235v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cervical spine fractures demand rapid and accurate diagnosis for effective clinical management. This study presents an automated, end-to-end pipeline for fracture detection across cervical vertebrae (C1--C7) that assesses the feasibility of fracture recognition from vertebra-level volumes of interest extracted using estimated 3D masks derived from fused orthogonal 2D segmentations. Unlike traditional 3D methods, our approach approximates 3D volumes via optimized 2D axial, sagittal, and coronal projections to reduce input dimensionality of intermediate pre-processing steps while maintaining high diagnostic performance for downstream fracture classification. First, spine regions of interest are localized from multi-view variance projections using a YOLOv8 detector, achieving a 3D mean Intersection over Union of 94.45%. Next, multi-label vertebra segmentation is performed using a DenseNet121-Unet architecture on energy-based sagittal and coronal projections, attaining a mean Dice score of 87.86%. The orthogonal 2D masks are then fused to reconstruct an estimated 3D mask for each vertebra, which is used to extract volumes of interest from the original CT. These extracted vertebra volumes are subsequently analyzed for fractures using an ensemble of 2.5D spatio-sequential CNN-Transformer models, yielding vertebra-level and patient-level F1 scores of 68.15 and 82.26, with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve scores of 91.62 and 83.04, respectively. The framework is further validated through an explainability study using saliency map visualizations and an interobserver variability analysis. Overall, the results indicate that this projection-based strategy delivers clinically relevant performance comparable to expert radiologists, while reducing the dimensionality of intermediate stages, supporting its potential for practical deployment.

arXiv:2510.27315v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Early detection of coronary artery disease (CAD) is critical for reducing mortality and improving patient treatment planning. While angiographic image analysis from X-rays is a common and cost-effective method for identifying cardiac abnormalities, including stenotic coronary arteries, poor image quality can significantly impede clinical diagnosis. We present the Coronary Artery Segmentation and Refinement Network (CASR-Net), a three-stage pipeline comprising image preprocessing, segmentation, and refinement. A novel multichannel preprocessing strategy combining CLAHE and an improved Ben Graham method provides incremental gains, increasing Dice Score Coefficient (DSC) by 0.31-0.89% and Intersection over Union (IoU) by 0.40-1.16% compared with using the techniques individually. The core innovation is a segmentation network built on a UNet with a DenseNet121 encoder and a Self-organized Operational Neural Network (Self-ONN) based decoder, which preserves the continuity of narrow and stenotic vessel branches. A final contour refinement module further suppresses false positives. Evaluated with 5-fold cross-validation on a combination of two public datasets that contain both healthy and stenotic arteries, CASR-Net outperformed several state-of-the-art models, achieving an IoU of 61.43%, a DSC of 76.10%, and clDice of 79.36%. These results highlight a robust approach to automated coronary artery segmentation, offering a valuable tool to support clinicians in diagnosis and treatment planning.

arXiv:2601.15235v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cervical spine fractures are critical medical conditions requiring precise and efficient detection for effective clinical management. This study explores the viability of 2D projection-based vertebra segmentation for vertebra-level fracture detection in 3D CT volumes, presenting an end-to-end pipeline for automated analysis of cervical vertebrae (C1-C7). By approximating a 3D volume through optimized 2D axial, sagittal, and coronal projections, regions of interest are identified using the YOLOv8 model from all views and combined to approximate the 3D cervical spine area, achieving a 3D mIoU of 94.45 percent. This projection-based localization strategy reduces computational complexity compared to traditional 3D segmentation methods while maintaining high performance. It is followed by a DenseNet121-Unet-based multi-label segmentation leveraging variance- and energy-based projections, achieving a Dice score of 87.86 percent. Strategic approximation of 3D vertebral masks from these 2D segmentation masks enables the extraction of individual vertebra volumes. The volumes are analyzed for fractures using an ensemble of 2.5D Spatio-Sequential models incorporating both raw slices and projections per vertebra for complementary evaluation. This ensemble achieves vertebra-level and patient-level F1 scores of 68.15 and 82.26, and ROC-AUC scores of 91.62 and 83.04, respectively. We further validate our approach through an explainability study that provides saliency map visualizations highlighting anatomical regions relevant for diagnosis, and an interobserver variability analysis comparing our model's performance with expert radiologists, demonstrating competitive results.