q-bio.TO

Human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) are a promising therapy for regenerating myocardium after infarction, but their use is limited by graft-related arrhythmias that frequently occur shortly after transplantation. Experimental studies indicate that these arrhythmias can originate within the graft, which may act as an ectopic pacemaker, yet the mechanisms governing successful excitation of host tissue remain poorly understood. In particular, the role of electrical coupling at the graft-host interface is important, but difficult to measure directly or control. Computer modelling can help here. Here, we present a computational framework that enables systematic investigation of graft-host electrical interactions using a physiologically interpretable parameterisation. We model the graft-host interface as an internal boundary with a defined specific conductance, allowing direct control over coupling strength in units that correspond to measurable tissue properties. We formulate the governing equations and implement the computations using both finite-difference and finite-element discretisations in established cardiac modelling platforms. Using representative anatomical and physiological configurations, we demonstrate how variations in interface conductance influence the ability of spontaneous graft activity to initiate propagating excitation in host tissue. This framework provides a reproducible, mechanistically transparent tool for studying graft-related arrhythmogenesis and lays a foundation for evaluating strategies to mitigate arrhythmic risk in cardiac cell therapy.

Cell invasion and spatial pattern formation are two distinct manifestations of cellular self-organisation in development, regeneration, and disease. Here, we develop and analyse a unified theoretical framework that links these two seemingly different behaviours within a single mechanistic model for adhesion-mediated self-organisation in growing cell populations. Using a multiscale analysis, we show that the balance between cell-cell adhesion, self-diffusion, and proliferation controls the emergence of distinct collective dynamics. We find that for weak adhesion, tissues invade through stable monotone fronts. As adhesion increases, invasion slows, fronts become unstable, leading to aggregates and spatial patterns emerging behind the advancing edge. In two spatial dimensions, these instabilities generate fingering morphologies reminiscent of dysregulated invasion in cancer. Crucially, we show that density-dependent regulation of adhesion suppresses these instabilities and restores cohesive tissue expansion. Together, our results identify adhesion strength and its regulation as key determinants of whether tissues invade cohesively or fragment into patterns, and provide a unified framework for understanding collective migration, morphogenesis, and dysregulated growth.

Accurate detection and segmentation of glomeruli in kidney tissue are essential for diagnostic applications. Traditional deep learning methods primarily rely on semantic segmentation, which often fails to precisely delineate adjacent glomeruli. To address this challenge, we propose a novel glomerulus detection and segmentation model that emphasises boundary separation. Leveraging pathology foundation models, the proposed U-Net-based architecture incorporates a specialised attention decoder designed to highlight critical regions and improve instancelevel segmentation. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both Dice score and Intersection over Union, indicating superior performance in glomerular delineation.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is widely used for studying and diagnosing brain disorders, with functional connectivity (FC) matrices providing powerful representations of large-scale neural interactions. However, existing diagnostic models are trained either on a single site or under full multi-site access, making them unsuitable for real-world scenarios where clinical data arrive sequentially from different institutions. This results in limited generalization and severe catastrophic forgetting. This paper presents the first continual learning framework specifically designed for fMRI-based diagnosis across heterogeneous clinical sites. Our framework introduces a structure-aware variational autoencoder that synthesizes realistic FC matrices for both patient and control groups. Built on this generative backbone, we develop a multi-level knowledge distillation strategy that aligns predictions and graph representations between new-site data and replayed samples. To further enhance efficiency, we incorporate a hierarchical contextual bandit scheme for adaptive replay sampling. Experiments on multi-site datasets for major depressive disorder (MDD), schizophrenia (SZ), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show that the proposed generative model enhances data augmentation quality, and the overall continual learning framework substantially outperforms existing methods in mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our code is available at https://github.com/4me808/FORGE.

Existing deep learning methods for radiology report generation enhance diagnostic efficiency but often overlook physician-informed medical priors. This leads to a suboptimal alignment between the structured explanations and disease manifestations. Eye gaze data provides critical insights into a radiologist's visual attention, enhancing the relevance and interpretability of extracted features while aligning with human decision-making processes. However, despite its promising potential, the integration of eye gaze information into AI-driven medical imaging workflows is impeded by challenges such as the complexity of multimodal data fusion and the high cost of gaze acquisition, particularly its absence during inference, limiting its practical applicability in real-world clinical settings. To address these issues, we introduce Gaze2Report, a framework which leverages a scanpath prediction module and Graph Neural Network (GNN) to generate joint visual-gaze tokens. Combined with instruction and report tokens, these form a multimodal prompt used to fine-tune LoRA layers of large language models (LLMs) for autoregressive report generation. Gaze2Report enhances report quality through eye-gaze-guided visual learning and incorporates on-the-fly scanpath prediction, enabling the model to operate without gaze input during inference.