Language and Attenuation-Driven Network for Robot-Assisted Cholangiocarcinoma Diagnosis From Optical Coherence Tomography

Automatic and accurate classification of cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) using optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is critical for confirming infiltration margins. Considering that the morphological representations in pathology stains can be implicitly captured in OCT imaging, we introduce the optical attenuation coefficient (OAC) and generalized visual-language information to focus on the optical properties of diseased tissue and exploit its inherent textured features. Maintaining the data within the appropriate working range during OCT scanning is crucial for reliable diagnosis. To this end, we propose an autonomous scanning method integrated with novel deep learning architecture to construct an efficient computer-aided system. We develop a cross-modal complementarity model, the language and attenuation-driven network (LA-OCT Net), designed to enhance the interaction between OAC and OCT information and leverage generalized image-text alignment for refined feature representation. The model incorporates a disentangled attenuation selection-based adversarial correlation loss to magnify the discrepancy between cross-modal features while maintaining discriminative consistency. The proposed robot-assisted pipeline ensures precise repositioning of the diseased cross-sectional location, allowing consistent measurements to treatment and precise tumor margin detection. Extensive experiments on a comprehensive clinical dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method. Specifically, our approach not only improves accuracy by 6% compared to state-of-the-art techniques, while also providing new insights into the potential of optical biopsy.