An Inception Module CNN Classifiers Fusion Method on Pulmonary Nodule Diagnosis by Signs

A "sign" on a lung CT image refers to a radiologic finding that suggests a pathological progression of some specific disease. Analysis of CT signs is helpful to understand the pathological origin of the lesion. In-depth study of lung nodules classification with different CT signs will help to distinguish benign and malignant nodules more clearly and accurately. To this end, we propose an Inception module-based ensemble classification method for pulmonary nodule diagnosis with different nodule signs. We first construct a Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) classifier adopting Inception modules and pre-train it on ImageNet. We then fine-tune this pre-trained classifier on 10 different lung nodule sign sample sets, and fuse these 10 classifiers with an artificial immune ensemble algorithm. The overall sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of our proposed Artificial Immune Algorithm-based Inception Networks Fusion(AIA-INF) algorithm are 82.22%, 93.17%, and 88.67%, respectively, which are significantly higher than those of the alternative Bagging and Boosting methods. The experimental results show that our Inception-based ensemble classifier offers promising performance, and compared with other CADx systems, this scheme can offer a more detailed reference for diagnosis, and can be valuable for junior radiologist training.

A facile solution phase synthesis of directly ordering monodisperse FePt nanoparticles

The ordered Pt-based intermetallic nanoparticles(NPs)with small size show superior magnetic or catalytic properties,but the synthesis of these NPs still remains a great challenge due to the requirement of high temperature annealing for the formation of the ordered phase,which usually leads to sintering of the NPs.Here,we report a simple approach to directly synthesize monodisperse ordered L1_(0)-FePt NPs with average size 10.7 nm without further annealing or doping the third metal atoms,in which hexadecyltrimethylammonium chloride(CTAC)was found to be the key inducing agent for the thermodynamic growth of the Fe and Pt atoms into the ordered intermetallic structure in the synthetic process.In particular,10.7 nm L1_(0)-FePt NPs synthesized by the proper amount of CTAC show a coercivity of 3.15 kOe and saturation magnetization of 45 emu/g at room temperature.The current CTAC-assisted synthetic strategy makes it possible to deeply understand the formation of the ordered Pt-based intermetallic NP in solution phase synthesis.