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Alsaafin, Areej

0009-0009-4183-8938

Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic

Citations 6

Multimodal learning for scalable representation of high-dimensional medical data
Alsaafin, Areej, Shafique, Abubakr, Alfasly, Saghir , Tizhoosh, H. R., Alsaafin, Areej , Kalari, Krishna R. , Tizhoosh, H. R.

Frontiers in Digital Health | January 27, 2026 | Volume: 7 | Issue: No issue available | Pages: No page available

10.3389/fdgth.2025.1709277 Get It

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) with healthcare data is rapidly transforming medical diagnostics and driving progress toward precision medicine. However, effectively leveraging multimodal data, particularly digital pathology whole slide images (WSIs) and genomic sequencing, remains a significant challenge due to the intrinsic heterogeneity of these modalities and the need for scalable and interpretable frameworks. Existing diagnostic models typically operate on unimodal data, overlooking critical cross-modal interactions that can yield richer clinical insights. We introduce MarbliX (Multimodal Association and Retrieval with Binary Latent Indexed matriX), a self-supervised framework that learns to embed WSIs and immunogenomic profiles into compact, scalable binary codes, termed “monogram.” By optimizing a triplet contrastive objective across modalities, MarbliX captures high-resolution patient similarity in a unified latent space, enabling efficient retrieval of clinically relevant cases and facilitating case-based reasoning. In lung cancer, MarbliX achieves 85%–89% across all evaluation metrics, outperforming histopathology (69%–71%) and immunogenomics (73%–76%). In kidney cancer, real-valued monograms yield the strongest performance (F1: 80%–83%, Accuracy: 87%–90%), with binary monograms slightly lower (F1: 78%–82%).
Search and Retrieval in Dermatology Atlases of Histopathology Images for Risk Stratification of Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma
Alabtah, Ghazal, Alsaafin, Areej , Shafique, Abubakr , Hemati, Sobhan, Choudhary, Anirudh , DiCaudo, David J. , Nelson, Steve A., Stockard, A., Leibovit-Reiben, Zach, Zhang, Nan, Murphree, Dennis H. , Comfere, Nneka I. , Tizhoosh, H. R., Alfasly, Saghir , Iyer, Ravishankar K. , Stockard, Alyssa , Leibovit‐Reiben, Zachary , Kalari, Krishna R. , Mangold, Aaron R.

No container title available | January 7, 2026 | Volume: No volume available | Issue: No issue available | Pages: No page available

10.64898/2026.01.02.26343356 Get It

Abstract Cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) poses significant clinical challenges due to its rising incidence and potential for metastasis. Histopathologic risk stratification is further limited by substantial inter-observer variability. Unsupervised AI approaches based on content-based image retrieval offer scalable and interpretable decision support for diagnostic pathology. The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of image retrieval within histopathology atlases to stratify cSCC tumor differentiation from whole-slide images (WSIs), while comparing different patch selection and feature extraction strategies. This retrospective study included 552 archived WSIs comprising 385 well-differentiated, 102 moderately differentiated, and 66 poorly differentiated cases collected across Mayo Clinic sites in Arizona, Florida, and Minnesota. Image atlases were constructed using multiple patch aggregation strategies (Mosaic, Collage, and Montage) and deep learning encoders (KimiaNet, PathDino, and H-Optimus-0). A leave-one-WSI-out evaluation framework was used to assess differentiation classification performance using accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and F1 score. Mosaic combined with KimiaNet achieved the highest Top-1 accuracy (74.9%) and specificity (92.6%), while Mosaic with H-Optimus-0 yielded the best Top-5 accuracy (79.0%) and macro-F1 score (62.6%). Collage combined with KimiaNet produced the highest Top-5 specificity (99.5%). The generalizability of the evaluated AI models varied across hospitals, reflecting differences in imaging protocols, staining practices, and patient populations. Overall, unsupervised image search and retrieval provides effective, annotation-free support for cSCC differentiation and has the potential to enhance dermatopathology workflows when appropriate combinations of patch selection and feature ex-traction methods are employed.
Rotation-Agnostic Image Representation Learning for Digital Pathology
Alfasly, Saghir , Shafique, Abubakr , Alsaafin, Areej , Alabtah, Ghazal, Nejat, Peyman , Khan, Jibran, Tizhoosh, Hamid R.

2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) | September 16, 2024 | Volume: No volume available | Issue: No issue available | Pages: 11683-11693

10.1109/cvpr52733.2024.01110 Get It

Harmonizing immune cell sequences for computational analysis with large language models
Alsaafin, Areej , Tizhoosh, Hamid R. , Tizhoosh, Hamid R

Biology Methods and Protocols | July 30, 2024 | Volume: 9 | Issue: 1 | Pages: No page available

10.1093/biomethods/bpae055 Get It

Abstract We present SEQuence Weighted Alignment for Sorting and Harmonization (Seqwash), an algorithm designed to process sequencing profiles utilizing large language models. Seqwash harmonizes immune cell sequences into a unified representation, empowering LLMs to embed meaningful patterns while eliminating irrelevant information. Evaluations using immune cell sequencing data showcase Seqwash’s efficacy in standardizing profiles, leading to improved feature quality and enhanced performance in both supervised and unsupervised downstream tasks for sequencing data.
Analysis and Validation of Image Search Engines in Histopathology
Lahr, Isaiah, Alfasly, Saghir , Nejat, Peyman , Kottom, Luke , Kumbhar, Vaishnavi , Alsaafin, Areej , Shafique, Abubakr , Hemati, Sobhan, Alabtah, Ghazal, Comfere, Nneka I. , Murphree, Dennis H. , Mangold, Aaron R. , Yasir, Saba , Meroueh, Chady , Boardman, Lisa, Shah, Vijay H. , García, Joaquín J. , Mangold, A R , Meroueh, Chady , Khan, Jibran, Boardman, Lisa, Tizhoosh, Hamid R.

IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering | July 12, 2024 | Volume: 18 | Issue: No issue available | Pages: 350-367

10.1109/rbme.2024.3425769 Get It

Creating an Atlas of Normal Tissue for Pruning WSI Patching Through Anomaly Detection
Alsaafin, Areej , Alabtah, Ghazal, Comfere, Nneka I. , Murphree, Dennis H. , Zot, Patricija, Yasir, Saba , García, Joaquín J. , Nejat, Peyman , Mangold, Aaron R. , Tizhoosh, Hamid R.

No container title available | October 27, 2023 | Volume: No volume available | Issue: No issue available | Pages: No page available

10.21203/rs.3.rs-3429527/v1 Get It

Abstract Patching whole slide images (WSIs) is an important task in computational pathology. While most of the are designed to classify or detect the presence of pathological lesions in a WSI, the confounding role and redundant nature of normal histology are generally overlooked. In this paper, we propose and validate the concept of an “atlas of normal tissue” solely using samples of WSIs obtained from normal biopsies. Such atlases can be employed to eliminate normal fragments of tissue samples and hence increase the representativeness the remaining patches. We tested our proposed method by establishing a normal atlas using 107 normal skin WSIs and demonstrated how established search engines like Yottixel can be improved. We used 553 WSIs of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma to demonstrate the advantage. We also validated our method applied to an external dataset of 451 breast WSIs. The number of selected WSI patches was reduced by 30% to 50% after utilizing the proposed normal atlas while maintaining the same indexing and search performance in leave-one-patient-out validation for both datasets. We show that the proposed concept of establishing and using a normal atlas shows promise for unsupervised selection of the most representative patches of the abnormal WSI patches.