AI 速览：作者构建了覆盖七中心、764例患者的胰腺囊肿MRI公开基准，并提供分割与IPMN风险预测的参考AI模型及联邦学习模拟结果。
Intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMNs) are pancreatic cancer precursors, and guideline-based risk stratification both over-treats indolent lesions and misses progression. We present Cyst-X, a public benchmark of 1,461 T1-weighted (T1W) and T2-weighted (T2W) MRI volumes from 764 patients at seven centers, with expert pancreas masks, risk labels, splits and reference AI risk-prediction models. PanSegNet segmented the pancreas with Dice of 86.34% (T1W) and 89.26% (T2W) on held-out centers. For the primary task, high-risk versus low-risk IPMN, a 3D DenseNet-121 achieved cross-validated AUCs of 74.59% and 73.45%; complementary broad binary and three-class tasks reached 78.67--81.28% and 73.47--75.76%. Because patient images often cannot be pooled across institutions, we also simulated federated learning across the seven centers. On T2W MRI, FedProx was similar to centralized training in center-averaged external AUC (71.00% versus 71.18%) but not in pooled AUC (62.35% versus 77.49%). Radiologist comparisons showed cohort-dependent sensitivity--specificity tradeoffs. Cyst-X supports reproducible method development and identifies within-IPMN risk discrimination and cross-center score comparability as open challenges.
Ziyue Xu, Holger R. Roth, Chester Chen, Peter Cnudde
Federated learning (FL) runtimes standardize aggregation and deployment, but each new study still requires federation formation: selecting task-eligible sites and preparing their local data and task code for federated training or analysis. This preparation recurs when the target changes, while raw records and site-private mappings are excluded from cross-site FL messages. We present FedReady, a system that performs federation formation with bounded LLM agents. Agents propose shared contracts, local adapters, and task code; the runtime owns workflow state and accepts artifacts only after checks tied to their digests. Candidate site discovery prioritizes recall; local eligibility verification checks task support before site admission. Once participating sites and artifacts are fixed, conventional federated training or analysis proceeds without readiness agents. Across 39 simulated retinal sites and four tasks, discovery reaches recall 1.00 at precision 0.65; local eligibility verification removes all 17 false positives without losing an eligible site-task pair. The participating sites supply 45,575 task-record instances and complete four 100-round jobs, including one with a runtime-generated contract. Across ten patient cohorts, preparation supports seven patient populations and holds endpoints at three sources as unsupported. Comparison with manually prepared reference populations and analysis (the manual reference) gives a maximum survival-curve difference of 0.001133. We also analyze 19 development failures, targeted classification ablations, and standalone and heterogeneous agent configurations. These results establish the feasibility of task-specific data preparation before ordinary FL training or analysis.