Objective To construct and evaluate a screening and diagnostic system based on color fundus images and artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted screening for optic neuritis (ON) and non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION). MethodsA diagnostic test study. From 2016 to 2020, 178 cases 267 eyes of NAION patients (NAION group) and 204 cases 346 eyes of ON patients (ON group) were examined and diagnosed in Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center of Sun Yat-sen University; 513 healthy individuals of 1 160 eyes (the normal control group) with normal fundus by visual acuity, intraocular pressure and optical coherence tomography examination were collected from 2018 to 2020. All 2 909 color fundus images were as the data set of the screening and diagnosis system, including 730, 805, and 1 374 images for the NAION group, ON group, and normal control group, respectively. The correctly labeled color fundus images were used as input data, and the EfficientNet-B0 algorithm was selected for model training and validation. Finally, three systems for screening abnormal optic discs, ON, and NAION were constructed. The subject operating characteristic (ROC) curve, area under the ROC (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and heat map were used as indicators of diagnostic efficacy. ResultsIn the test data set, the AUC for diagnosing the presence of an abnormal optic disc, the presence of ON, and the presence of NAION were 0.967 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.947-0.980], 0.964 (95%CI 0.938-0.979), and 0.979 (95%CI 0.958-0.989), respectively. The activation area of the systems were mainly located in the optic disc area in the decision-making process. ConclusionAbnormal optic disc, ON and NAION, and screening diagnostic systems based on color fundus images have shown accurate and efficient diagnostic performance.
Pathological images of gastric cancer serve as the gold standard for diagnosing this malignancy. However, the recurrence prediction task often encounters challenges such as insignificant morphological features of the lesions, insufficient fusion of multi-resolution features, and inability to leverage contextual information effectively. To address these issues, a three-stage recurrence prediction method based on pathological images of gastric cancer is proposed. In the first stage, the self-supervised learning framework SimCLR was adopted to train low-resolution patch images, aiming to diminish the interdependence among diverse tissue images and yield decoupled enhanced features. In the second stage, the obtained low-resolution enhanced features were fused with the corresponding high-resolution unenhanced features to achieve feature complementation across multiple resolutions. In the third stage, to address the position encoding difficulty caused by the large difference in the number of patch images, we performed position encoding based on multi-scale local neighborhoods and employed self-attention mechanism to obtain features with contextual information. The resulting contextual features were further combined with the local features extracted by the convolutional neural network. The evaluation results on clinically collected data showed that, compared with the best performance of traditional methods, the proposed network provided the best accuracy and area under curve (AUC), which were improved by 7.63% and 4.51%, respectively. These results have effectively validated the usefulness of this method in predicting gastric cancer recurrence.
Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a major cause of vision loss and blindness among premature infants. Timely screening, diagnosis, and intervention can effectively prevent the deterioration of ROP. However, there are several challenges in ROP diagnosis globally, including high subjectivity, low screening efficiency, regional disparities in screening coverage, and severe shortage of pediatric ophthalmologists. The application of artificial intelligence (AI) as an assistive tool for diagnosis or an automated method for ROP diagnosis can improve the efficiency and objectivity of ROP diagnosis, expand screening coverage, and enable automated screening and quantified diagnostic results. In the global environment that emphasizes the development and application of medical imaging AI, developing more accurate diagnostic networks, exploring more effective AI-assisted diagnosis methods, and enhancing the interpretability of AI-assisted diagnosis, can accelerate the improvement of AI policies of ROP and the implementation of AI products, promoting the development of ROP diagnosis and treatment.
Lung cancer is the most threatening tumor disease to human health. Early detection is crucial to improve the survival rate and recovery rate of lung cancer patients. Existing methods use the two-dimensional multi-view framework to learn lung nodules features and simply integrate multi-view features to achieve the classification of benign and malignant lung nodules. However, these methods suffer from the problems of not capturing the spatial features effectively and ignoring the variability of multi-views. Therefore, this paper proposes a three-dimensional (3D) multi-view convolutional neural network (MVCNN) framework. To further solve the problem of different views in the multi-view model, a 3D multi-view squeeze-and-excitation convolution neural network (MVSECNN) model is constructed by introducing the squeeze-and-excitation (SE) module in the feature fusion stage. Finally, statistical methods are used to analyze model predictions and doctor annotations. In the independent test set, the classification accuracy and sensitivity of the model were 96.04% and 98.59% respectively, which were higher than other state-of-the-art methods. The consistency score between the predictions of the model and the pathological diagnosis results was 0.948, which is significantly higher than that between the doctor annotations and the pathological diagnosis results. The methods presented in this paper can effectively learn the spatial heterogeneity of lung nodules and solve the problem of multi-view differences. At the same time, the classification of benign and malignant lung nodules can be achieved, which is of great significance for assisting doctors in clinical diagnosis.
With the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning has been widely used in diagnosis of diseases. It is crucial to conduct diagnostic test accuracy studies and evaluate the performance of models reasonably to improve the accuracy of diagnosis. For machine learning-based diagnostic test accuracy studies, this paper introduces the principles of study design in the aspects of target conditions, selection of participants, diagnostic tests, reference standards and ethics.
Image fusion currently plays an important role in the diagnosis of prostate cancer (PCa). Selecting and developing a good image fusion algorithm is the core task of achieving image fusion, which determines whether the fusion image obtained is of good quality and can meet the actual needs of clinical application. In recent years, it has become one of the research hotspots of medical image fusion. In order to make a comprehensive study on the methods of medical image fusion, this paper reviewed the relevant literature published at home and abroad in recent years. Image fusion technologies were classified, and image fusion algorithms were divided into traditional fusion algorithms and deep learning (DL) fusion algorithms. The principles and workflow of some algorithms were analyzed and compared, their advantages and disadvantages were summarized, and relevant medical image data sets were introduced. Finally, the future development trend of medical image fusion algorithm was prospected, and the development direction of medical image fusion technology for the diagnosis of prostate cancer and other major diseases was pointed out.
The brain-computer interface (BCI) based on motor imagery electroencephalography (MI-EEG) enables direct information interaction between the human brain and external devices. In this paper, a multi-scale EEG feature extraction convolutional neural network model based on time series data enhancement is proposed for decoding MI-EEG signals. First, an EEG signals augmentation method was proposed that could increase the information content of training samples without changing the length of the time series, while retaining its original features completely. Then, multiple holistic and detailed features of the EEG data were adaptively extracted by multi-scale convolution module, and the features were fused and filtered by parallel residual module and channel attention. Finally, classification results were output by a fully connected network. The application experimental results on the BCI Competition IV 2a and 2b datasets showed that the proposed model achieved an average classification accuracy of 91.87% and 87.85% for the motor imagery task, respectively, which had high accuracy and strong robustness compared with existing baseline models. The proposed model does not require complex signals pre-processing operations and has the advantage of multi-scale feature extraction, which has high practical application value.
Protein structure determines function, and structural information is critical for predicting protein thermostability. This study proposes a novel method for protein thermostability prediction by integrating graph embedding features and network topological features. By constructing residue interaction networks (RINs) to characterize protein structures, we calculated network topological features and utilize deep neural networks (DNN) to mine inherent characteristics. Using DeepWalk and Node2vec algorithms, we obtained node embeddings and extracted graph embedding features through a TopN strategy combined with bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) networks. Additionally, we introduced the Doc2vec algorithm to replace the Word2vec module in graph embedding algorithms, generating graph embedding feature vector encodings. By employing an attention mechanism to fuse graph embedding features with network topological features, we constructed a high-precision prediction model, achieving 87.85% prediction accuracy on a bacterial protein dataset. Furthermore, we analyzed the differences in the contributions of network topological features in the model and the differences among various graph embedding methods, and found that the combination of DeepWalk features with Doc2vec and all topological features was crucial for the identification of thermostable proteins. This study provides a practical and effective new method for protein thermostability prediction, and at the same time offers theoretical guidance for exploring protein diversity, discovering new thermostable proteins, and the intelligent modification of mesophilic proteins.
To address the challenges in blood cell recognition caused by diverse morphology, dense distribution, and the abundance of small target information, this paper proposes a blood cell detection algorithm - the "You Only Look Once" model based on hybrid mixing attention and deep over-parameters (HADO-YOLO). First, a hybrid attention mechanism is introduced into the backbone network to enhance the model's sensitivity to detailed features. Second, the standard convolution layers with downsampling in the neck network are replaced with deep over-parameterized convolutions to expand the receptive field and improve feature representation. Finally, the detection head is decoupled to enhance the model's robustness for detecting abnormal cells. Experimental results on the Blood Cell Counting Dataset (BCCD) demonstrate that the HADO-YOLO algorithm achieves a mean average precision of 90.2% and a precision of 93.8%, outperforming the baseline YOLO model. Compared with existing blood cell detection methods, the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art detection performance. In conclusion, HADO-YOLO offers a more efficient and accurate solution for identifying various types of blood cells, providing valuable technical support for future clinical diagnostic applications.
To address the issue of a large number of network parameters and substantial floating-point operations in deep learning networks applied to image segmentation for cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), this paper proposes a lightweight dilated parallel convolution U-Net (DPU-Net) to decrease the quantity of network parameters and the number of floating-point operations. Additionally, a multi-scale adaptation vector knowledge distillation (MAVKD) training strategy is employed to extract latent knowledge from the teacher network, thereby enhancing the segmentation accuracy of DPU-Net. The proposed network adopts a distinctive way of convolutional channel variation to reduce the number of parameters and combines with residual blocks and dilated convolutions to alleviate the gradient explosion problem and spatial information loss that might be caused by the reduction of parameters. The research findings indicate that this network has achieved considerable improvements in reducing the number of parameters and enhancing the efficiency of floating-point operations. When applying this network to the public dataset of the automatic cardiac diagnosis challenge (ACDC), the dice coefficient reaches 91.26%. The research results validate the effectiveness of the proposed lightweight network and knowledge distillation strategy, providing a reliable lightweighting idea for deep learning in the field of medical image segmentation.