5 research outputs found
MapFormer: Boosting Change Detection by Using Pre-change Information
Change detection in remote sensing imagery is essential for a variety of
applications such as urban planning, disaster management, and climate research.
However, existing methods for identifying semantically changed areas overlook
the availability of semantic information in the form of existing maps
describing features of the earth's surface. In this paper, we leverage this
information for change detection in bi-temporal images. We show that the simple
integration of the additional information via concatenation of latent
representations suffices to significantly outperform state-of-the-art change
detection methods. Motivated by this observation, we propose the new task of
Conditional Change Detection, where pre-change semantic information is used as
input next to bi-temporal images. To fully exploit the extra information, we
propose MapFormer, a novel architecture based on a multi-modal feature fusion
module that allows for feature processing conditioned on the available semantic
information. We further employ a supervised, cross-modal contrastive loss to
guide the learning of visual representations. Our approach outperforms existing
change detection methods by an absolute 11.7% and 18.4% in terms of binary
change IoU on DynamicEarthNet and HRSCD, respectively. Furthermore, we
demonstrate the robustness of our approach to the quality of the pre-change
semantic information and the absence pre-change imagery. The code will be made
publicly available
Câreactive protein flareâresponse predicts longâterm efficacy to firstâline antiâPDâ1âbased combination therapy in metastatic renal cell carcinoma
Objectives
Immune checkpoint blockade (IO) has revolutionised the treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC). Early C-reactive protein (CRP) kinetics, especially the recently introduced CRP flare-response phenomenon, has shown promising results to predict IO efficacy in mRCC, but has only been studied in second line or later. Here, we aimed to validate the predictive value of early CRP kinetics for 1st-line treatment of mRCC with αPD-1 plus either αCTLA-4 (IO+IO) or tyrosine kinase inhibitor (IO+TKI).
Methods
In this multicentre retrospective study, we investigated the predictive potential of early CRP kinetics during 1st-line IO therapy. Ninety-five patients with mRCC from six tertiary referral centres with either IO+IO (Nâ=â59) or IO+TKI (Nâ=â36) were included. Patients were classified as CRP flare-responders, CRP responders or non-CRP responders as previously described, and their oncological outcome was compared.
Results
Our data validate the predictive potential of early CRP kinetics in 1st-line immunotherapy in mRCC. CRP responders, especially CRP flare-responders, had significantly prolonged progression-free survival (PFS) compared with non-CRP responders (median PFS: CRP flare-responder: 19.2âmonths vs. responders: 16.2 vs. non-CRP responders: 5.6, Pâ<â0.001). In both the IO+IO and IO+TKI subgroups, early CRP kinetics remained significantly associated with improved PFS. CRP flare-response was also associated with long-term response â„â12âmonths.
Conclusions
Early CRP kinetics appears to be a low-cost and easy-to-implement on-treatment biomarker to predict response to 1st-line IO combination therapy. It has potential to optimise therapy monitoring and might represent a new standard of care biomarker for immunotherapy in mRCC