Accurate segmentation of ground glass nodule (GGN) is important in clinical. But it is a tough work to segment the GGN, as the GGN in the computed tomography images show blur boundary, irregular shape, and uneven intensity. This paper aims to segment GGN by proposing a fully convolutional residual network, i.e., residual network based on atrous spatial pyramid pooling structure and attention mechanism (ResAANet). The network uses atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) structure to expand the feature map receptive field and extract more sufficient features, and utilizes attention mechanism, residual connection, long skip connection to fully retain sensitive features, which is extracted by the convolutional layer. First, we employ 565 GGN provided by Shanghai Chest Hospital to train and validate ResAANet, so as to obtain a stable model. Then, two groups of data selected from clinical examinations (84 GGN) and lung image database consortium (LIDC) dataset (145 GGN) were employed to validate and evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Finally, we apply the best threshold method to remove false positive regions and obtain optimized results. The average dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of the proposed algorithm on the clinical dataset and LIDC dataset reached 83.46%, 83.26% respectively, the average Jaccard index (IoU) reached 72.39%, 71.56% respectively, and the speed of segmentation reached 0.1 seconds per image. Comparing with other reported methods, our new method could segment GGN accurately, quickly and robustly. It could provide doctors with important information such as nodule size or density, which assist doctors in subsequent diagnosis and treatment.
Speech imagery is an emerging brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigm with potential to provide effective communication for individuals with speech impairments. This study designed a Chinese speech imagery paradigm using three clinically relevant words—“Help me”, “Sit up” and “Turn over”—and collected electroencephalography (EEG) data from 15 healthy subjects. Based on the data, a Channel Attention Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network (CAM-Net) decoding algorithm was proposed, which combined multi-scale temporal convolutions with asymmetric spatial convolutions to extract multidimensional EEG features, and incorporated a channel attention mechanism along with a bidirectional long short-term memory network to perform channel weighting and capture temporal dependencies. Experimental results showed that CAM-Net achieved a classification accuracy of 48.54% in the three-class task, outperforming baseline models such as EEGNet and Deep ConvNet, and reached a highest accuracy of 64.17% in the binary classification between “Sit up” and “Turn over”. This work provides a promising approach for future Chinese speech imagery BCI research and applications.
Glioma is a primary brain tumor with high incidence rate. High-grade gliomas (HGG) are those with the highest degree of malignancy and the lowest degree of survival. Surgical resection and postoperative adjuvant chemoradiotherapy are often used in clinical treatment, so accurate segmentation of tumor-related areas is of great significance for the treatment of patients. In order to improve the segmentation accuracy of HGG, this paper proposes a multi-modal glioma semantic segmentation network with multi-scale feature extraction and multi-attention fusion mechanism. The main contributions are, (1) Multi-scale residual structures were used to extract features from multi-modal gliomas magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); (2) Two types of attention modules were used for features aggregating in channel and spatial; (3) In order to improve the segmentation performance of the whole network, the branch classifier was constructed using ensemble learning strategy to adjust and correct the classification results of the backbone classifier. The experimental results showed that the Dice coefficient values of the proposed segmentation method in this article were 0.909 7, 0.877 3 and 0.839 6 for whole tumor, tumor core and enhanced tumor respectively, and the segmentation results had good boundary continuity in the three-dimensional direction. Therefore, the proposed semantic segmentation network has good segmentation performance for high-grade gliomas lesions.
Colorectal polyps are important early markers of colorectal cancer, and their early detection is crucial for cancer prevention. Although existing polyp segmentation models have achieved certain results, they still face challenges such as diverse polyp morphology, blurred boundaries, and insufficient feature extraction. To address these issues, this study proposes a parallel coordinate fusion network (PCFNet), aiming to improve the accuracy and robustness of polyp segmentation. PCFNet integrates parallel convolutional modules and a coordinate attention mechanism, enabling the preservation of global feature information while precisely capturing detailed features, thereby effectively segmenting polyps with complex boundaries. Experimental results on Kvasir-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB demonstrate the outstanding performance of PCFNet across multiple metrics. Specifically, on the Kvasir-SEG dataset, PCFNet achieved an F1-score of 0.897 4 and a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 0.835 8; on the CVC-ClinicDB dataset, it attained an F1-score of 0.939 8 and an mIoU of 0.892 3. Compared with other methods, PCFNet shows significant improvements across all performance metrics, particularly in multi-scale feature fusion and spatial information capture, demonstrating its innovativeness. The proposed method provides a more reliable AI-assisted diagnostic tool for early colorectal cancer screening.
Accurate segmentation of whole slide images is of great significance for the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. However, developing an automatic model is challenging due to the complex content, limited samples, and high sample heterogeneity of pathological images. This paper presented a multi-tissue segmentation model for whole slide images of pancreatic cancer. We introduced an attention mechanism in building blocks, and designed a multi-task learning framework as well as proper auxiliary tasks to enhance model performance. The model was trained and tested with the pancreatic cancer pathological image dataset from Shanghai Changhai Hospital. And the data of TCGA, as an external independent validation cohort, was used for external validation. The F1 scores of the model exceeded 0.97 and 0.92 in the internal dataset and external dataset, respectively. Moreover, the generalization performance was also better than the baseline method significantly. These results demonstrate that the proposed model can accurately segment eight kinds of tissue regions in whole slide images of pancreatic cancer, which can provide reliable basis for clinical diagnosis.
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.
Motor imagery electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are non-stationary time series with a low signal-to-noise ratio. Therefore, the single-channel EEG analysis method is difficult to effectively describe the interaction characteristics between multi-channel signals. This paper proposed a deep learning network model based on the multi-channel attention mechanism. First, we performed time-frequency sparse decomposition on the pre-processed data, which enhanced the difference of time-frequency characteristics of EEG signals. Then we used the attention module to map the data in time and space so that the model could make full use of the data characteristics of different channels of EEG signals. Finally, the improved time-convolution network (TCN) was used for feature fusion and classification. The BCI competition IV-2a data set was used to verify the proposed algorithm. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm could effectively improve the classification accuracy of motor imagination EEG signals, which achieved an average accuracy of 83.03% for 9 subjects. Compared with the existing methods, the classification accuracy of EEG signals was improved. With the enhanced difference features between different motor imagery EEG data, the proposed method is important for the study of improving classifier performance.
The skin is the largest organ of the human body, and many visceral diseases will be directly reflected on the skin, so it is of great clinical significance to accurately segment the skin lesion images. To address the characteristics of complex color, blurred boundaries, and uneven scale information, a skin lesion image segmentation method based on dense atrous spatial pyramid pooling (DenseASPP) and attention mechanism is proposed. The method is based on the U-shaped network (U-Net). Firstly, a new encoder is redesigned to replace the ordinary convolutional stacking with a large number of residual connections, which can effectively retain key features even after expanding the network depth. Secondly, channel attention is fused with spatial attention, and residual connections are added so that the network can adaptively learn channel and spatial features of images. Finally, the DenseASPP module is introduced and redesigned to expand the perceptual field size and obtain multi-scale feature information. The algorithm proposed in this paper has obtained satisfactory results in the official public dataset of the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC 2016). The mean Intersection over Union (mIOU), sensitivity (SE), precision (PC), accuracy (ACC), and Dice coefficient (Dice) are 0.901 8, 0.945 9, 0.948 7, 0.968 1, 0.947 3, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the method in this paper can improve the segmentation effect of skin lesion images, and is expected to provide an auxiliary diagnosis for professional dermatologists.
The conventional fault diagnosis of patient monitors heavily relies on manual experience, resulting in low diagnostic efficiency and ineffective utilization of fault maintenance text data. To address these issues, this paper proposes an intelligent fault diagnosis method for patient monitors based on multi-feature text representation, improved bidirectional gate recurrent unit (BiGRU) and attention mechanism. Firstly, the fault text data was preprocessed, and the word vectors containing multiple linguistic features was generated by linguistically-motivated bidirectional encoder representation from Transformer. Then, the bidirectional fault features were extracted and weighted by the improved BiGRU and attention mechanism respectively. Finally, the weighted loss function is used to reduce the impact of class imbalance on the model. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, this paper uses the patient monitor fault dataset for verification, and the macro F1 value has achieved 91.11%. The results show that the model built in this study can realize the automatic classification of fault text, and may provide assistant decision support for the intelligent fault diagnosis of the patient monitor in the future.
The accurate segmentation of breast ultrasound images is an important precondition for the lesion determination. The existing segmentation approaches embrace massive parameters, sluggish inference speed, and huge memory consumption. To tackle this problem, we propose T2KD Attention U-Net (dual-Teacher Knowledge Distillation Attention U-Net), a lightweight semantic segmentation method combined double-path joint distillation in breast ultrasound images. Primarily, we designed two teacher models to learn the fine-grained features from each class of images according to different feature representation and semantic information of benign and malignant breast lesions. Then we leveraged the joint distillation to train a lightweight student model. Finally, we constructed a novel weight balance loss to focus on the semantic feature of small objection, solving the unbalance problem of tumor and background. Specifically, the extensive experiments conducted on Dataset BUSI and Dataset B demonstrated that the T2KD Attention U-Net outperformed various knowledge distillation counterparts. Concretely, the accuracy, recall, precision, Dice, and mIoU of proposed method were 95.26%, 86.23%, 85.09%, 83.59%and 77.78% on Dataset BUSI, respectively. And these performance indexes were 97.95%, 92.80%, 88.33%, 88.40% and 82.42% on Dataset B, respectively. Compared with other models, the performance of this model was significantly improved. Meanwhile, compared with the teacher model, the number, size, and complexity of student model were significantly reduced (2.2×106 vs. 106.1×106, 8.4 MB vs. 414 MB, 16.59 GFLOPs vs. 205.98 GFLOPs, respectively). Indeedy, the proposed model guarantees the performances while greatly decreasing the amount of computation, which provides a new method for the deployment of clinical medical scenarios.