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Summary: Cervical lesions pose a significant threat to women’s health worldwide. Colposcopy is essential for screening and treating cervical lesions, but its effectiveness depends on the doctor’s experience. Artificial intelligence-based solutions via colposcopy images have shown great potential in cervical lesions screening. However, some challenges still need to be addressed, such as low algorithm performance and lack of high-quality multi-modal datasets. Here, we established a multi-modal colposcopy dataset of 2,273 HPV+ patients, comprising original colposcopy images, acetic acid reactions at 60s and 120s, iodine staining, diagnostic reports, and pathological results. Utilizing this dataset, we developed CerviFusionNet, a hybrid architecture that merges convolutional neural networks and vision transformers to learn robust representations. We designed a temporal module to capture dynamic changes in acetic acid sequences, which can boost the model performance without sacrificing inference speed. Compared with several existing methods, CerviFusionNet demonstrated excellent accuracy and efficiency.

The interconnectivity of advanced biological systems is essential for their proper functioning. In modern connectomics, biological entities such as proteins, genes, RNA, DNA, and metabolites are often represented as nodes, while the physical, biochemical, or functional interactions between them are represented as edges. Among these entities, metabolites are particularly significant as they exhibit a closer relationship to an organism’s phenotype compared to genes or proteins. Moreover, the metabolome has the ability to amplify small proteomic and transcriptomic changes, even those from minor genomic changes. Metabolic networks, which consist of complex systems comprising hundreds of metabolites and their interactions, play a critical role in biological research by mediating energy conversion and chemical reactions within cells. This review provides an introduction to common metabolic network models and their construction methods. It also explores the diverse applications of metabolic networks in elucidating disease mechanisms, predicting and diagnosing diseases, and facilitating drug development. Additionally, it discusses potential future directions for research in metabolic networks. Ultimately, this review serves as a valuable reference for researchers interested in metabolic network modeling, analysis, and their applications.