In the intelligent medical diagnosis area, Artificial Intelligence (AI)’s trustworthiness, reliability, and interpretability are critical, especially in cancer diagnosis. Traditional neural networks, while excellent at processing natural images, often lack interpretability and adaptability when processing high-resolution digital pathological images. This limitation is particularly evident in pathological diagnosis, which is the gold standard of cancer diagnosis and relies on a pathologist’s careful examination and analysis of digital pathological slides to identify the features and progression of the disease. Therefore, the integration of interpretable AI into smart medical diagnosis is not only an inevitable technological trend but also a key to improving diagnostic accuracy and reliability. In this paper, we introduce an innovative Multi-Scale Multi-Branch Feature Encoder (MSBE) and present the design of the CrossLinkNet Framework. The MSBE enhances the network’s capability for feature extraction by allowing the adjustment of hyperparameters to configure the number of branches and modules. The CrossLinkNet Framework, serving as a versatile image segmentation network architecture, employs cross-layer encoder-decoder connections for multi-level feature fusion, thereby enhancing feature integration and segmentation accuracy. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on two datasets demonstrate that CrossLinkNet, equipped with the MSBE encoder, not only achieves accurate segmentation results but is also adaptable to various tumor segmentation tasks and scenarios by replacing different feature encoders. Crucially, CrossLinkNet emphasizes the interpretability of the AI model, a crucial aspect for medical professionals, providing an in-depth understanding of the model’s decisions and thereby enhancing trust and reliability in AI-assisted diagnostics.

Information steganography has received more and more attention from scholars nowadays, especially in the area of image steganography, which uses image content to transmit information and makes the existence of secret information undetectable. To enhance concealment and security, the Steganography without Embedding (SWE) method has proven effective in avoiding image distortion resulting from cover modification. In this paper, a novel encrypted communication scheme for image SWE is proposed. It reconstructs the image into a multi-linked list structure consisting of numerous nodes, where each pixel is transformed into a single node with data and pointer domains. By employing a special addressing algorithm, the optimal linked list corresponding to the secret information can be identified. The receiver can restore the secret message from the received image using only the list header position information. The scheme is based on the concept of coverless steganography, eliminating the need for any modifications to the cover image. It boasts high concealment and security, along with a complete message restoration rate, making it resistant to steganalysis. Furthermore, this paper proposes linked-list construction schemes within the proposed framework, which can effectively resist a variety of attacks, including noise attacks and image compression, demonstrating a certain degree of robustness. To validate the proposed framework, practical tests and comparisons are conducted using multiple datasets. The results affirm the framework’s commendable performance in terms of message reduction rate, hidden writing capacity, and robustness against diverse attacks.