Dual-Branch-UNet: A Dual-Branch Convolutional Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation

In intelligent perception and diagnosis of medical equipment,the visual and morphological changes in retinal vessels are closely related to the severity of cardiovascular diseases(e.g.,diabetes and hypertension).Intelligent auxiliary diagnosis of these diseases depends on the accuracy of the retinal vascular segmentation results.To address this challenge,we design a Dual-Branch-UNet framework,which comprises a Dual-Branch encoder structure for feature extraction based on the traditional U-Net model for medical image segmentation.To be more explicit,we utilize a novel parallel encoder made up of various convolutional modules to enhance the encoder portion of the original U-Net.Then,image features are combined at each layer to produce richer semantic data and the model’s capacity is adjusted to various input images.Meanwhile,in the lower sampling section,we give up pooling and conduct the lower sampling by convolution operation to control step size for information fusion.We also employ an attentionmodule in the decoder stage to filter the image noises so as to lessen the response of irrelevant features.Experiments are verified and compared on the DRIVE and ARIA datasets for retinal vessels segmentation.The proposed Dual-Branch-UNet has proved to be superior to other five typical state-of-the-art methods.

Artificial Intelligence Based Prostate Cancer Classification Model Using Biomedical Images

Medical image processing becomes a hot research topic in healthcare sector for effective decision making and diagnoses of diseases.Magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)is a widely utilized tool for the classification and detection of prostate cancer.Since the manual screening process of prostate cancer is difficult,automated diagnostic methods become essential.This study develops a novel Deep Learning based Prostate Cancer Classification(DTL-PSCC)model using MRI images.The presented DTL-PSCC technique encompasses EfficientNet based feature extractor for the generation of a set of feature vectors.In addition,the fuzzy k-nearest neighbour(FKNN)model is utilized for classification process where the class labels are allotted to the input MRI images.Moreover,the membership value of the FKNN model can be optimally tuned by the use of krill herd algorithm(KHA)which results in improved classification performance.In order to demonstrate the good classification outcome of the DTL-PSCC technique,a wide range of simulations take place on benchmark MRI datasets.The extensive comparative results ensured the betterment of the DTL-PSCC technique over the recent methods with the maximum accuracy of 85.09%.

Artifacts Reduction Using Multi-Scale Feature Attention Network in Compressed Medical Images

Medical image compression is one of the essential technologies to facilitate real-time medical data transmission in remote healthcare applications.In general,image compression can introduce undesired coding artifacts,such as blocking artifacts and ringing effects.In this paper,we proposed a Multi-Scale Feature Attention Network(MSFAN)with two essential parts,which are multi-scale feature extraction layers and feature attention layers to efficiently remove coding artifacts of compressed medical images.Multiscale feature extraction layers have four Feature Extraction(FE)blocks.Each FE block consists of five convolution layers and one CA block for weighted skip connection.In order to optimize the proposed network architectures,a variety of verification tests were conducted using validation dataset.We used Computer Vision Center-Clinic Database(CVC-ClinicDB)consisting of 612 colonoscopy medical images to evaluate the enhancement of image restoration.The proposedMSFAN can achieve improved PSNR gains as high as 0.25 and 0.24 dB on average compared to DnCNNand DCSC,respectively.

A Triple-Channel Encrypted Hybrid Fusion Technique to Improve Security of Medical Images

Assuring medical images protection and robustness is a compulsory necessity nowadays.In this paper,a novel technique is proposed that fuses the wavelet-induced multi-resolution decomposition of the Discrete Wavelet Transform(DWT)with the energy compaction of the Discrete Wavelet Transform(DCT).The multi-level Encryption-based Hybrid Fusion Technique(EbhFT)aims to achieve great advances in terms of imperceptibility and security of medical images.A DWT disintegrated sub-band of a cover image is reformed simultaneously using the DCT transform.Afterwards,a 64-bit hex key is employed to encrypt the host image as well as participate in the second key creation process to encode the watermark.Lastly,a PN-sequence key is formed along with a supplementary key in the third layer of the EbHFT.Thus,the watermarked image is generated by enclosing both keys into DWT and DCT coefficients.The fusions ability of the proposed EbHFT technique makes the best use of the distinct privileges of using both DWT and DCT methods.In order to validate the proposed technique,a standard dataset of medical images is used.Simulation results show higher performance of the visual quality(i.e.,57.65)for the watermarked forms of all types of medical images.In addition,EbHFT robustness outperforms an existing scheme tested for the same dataset in terms of Normalized Correlation(NC).Finally,extra protection for digital images from against illegal replicating and unapproved tampering using the proposed technique.

Two-view attention-guided convolutional neural network for mammographic image classification

Deep learning has been widely used in the field of mammographic image classification owing to its superiority in automatic feature extraction.However,general deep learning models cannot achieve very satisfactory classification results on mammographic images because these models are not specifically designed for mammographic images and do not take the specific traits of these images into account.To exploit the essential discriminant information of mammographic images,we propose a novel classification method based on a convolutional neural network.Specifically,the proposed method designs two branches to extract the discriminative features from mammographic images from the mediolateral oblique and craniocaudal(CC)mammographic views.The features extracted from the two-view mammographic images contain complementary information that enables breast cancer to be more easily distinguished.Moreover,the attention block is introduced to capture the channel-wise information by adjusting the weight of each feature map,which is beneficial to emphasising the important features of mammographic images.Furthermore,we add a penalty term based on the fuzzy cluster algorithm to the cross-entropy function,which improves the generalisation ability of the classification model by maximising the interclass distance and minimising the intraclass distance of the samples.The experimental results on The Digital database for Screening Mammography INbreast and MIAS mammography databases illustrate that the proposed method achieves the best classification performance and is more robust than the compared state-ofthe-art classification methods.

Mixed-decomposed convolutional network:A lightweight yet efficient convolutional neural network for ocular disease recognition

Eye health has become a global health concern and attracted broad attention.Over the years,researchers have proposed many state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks(CNNs)to assist ophthalmologists in diagnosing ocular diseases efficiently and precisely.However,most existing methods were dedicated to constructing sophisticated CNNs,inevitably ignoring the trade-off between performance and model complexity.To alleviate this paradox,this paper proposes a lightweight yet efficient network architecture,mixeddecomposed convolutional network(MDNet),to recognise ocular diseases.In MDNet,we introduce a novel mixed-decomposed depthwise convolution method,which takes advantage of depthwise convolution and depthwise dilated convolution operations to capture low-resolution and high-resolution patterns by using fewer computations and fewer parameters.We conduct extensive experiments on the clinical anterior segment optical coherence tomography(AS-OCT),LAG,University of California San Diego,and CIFAR-100 datasets.The results show our MDNet achieves a better trade-off between the performance and model complexity than efficient CNNs including MobileNets and MixNets.Specifically,our MDNet outperforms MobileNets by 2.5%of accuracy by using 22%fewer parameters and 30%fewer computations on the AS-OCT dataset.

A deep convolutional neural network for diabetic retinopathy detection via mining local and long-range dependence

Diabetic retinopathy(DR),the main cause of irreversible blindness,is one of the most common complications of diabetes.At present,deep convolutional neural networks have achieved promising performance in automatic DR detection tasks.The convolution operation of methods is a local cross-correlation operation,whose receptive field de-termines the size of the local neighbourhood for processing.However,for retinal fundus photographs,there is not only the local information but also long-distance dependence between the lesion features(e.g.hemorrhages and exudates)scattered throughout the whole image.The proposed method incorporates correlations between long-range patches into the deep learning framework to improve DR detection.Patch-wise re-lationships are used to enhance the local patch features since lesions of DR usually appear as plaques.The Long-Range unit in the proposed network with a residual structure can be flexibly embedded into other trained networks.Extensive experimental results demon-strate that the proposed approach can achieve higher accuracy than existing state-of-the-art models on Messidor and EyePACS datasets.

Spinal Vertebral Fracture Detection and Fracture Level Assessment Based on Deep Learning

This paper addresses the common orthopedic trauma of spinal vertebral fractures and aims to enhance doctors’diagnostic efficiency.Therefore,a deep-learning-based automated diagnostic systemwithmulti-label segmentation is proposed to recognize the condition of vertebral fractures.The whole spine Computed Tomography(CT)image is segmented into the fracture,normal,and background using U-Net,and the fracture degree of each vertebra is evaluated(Genant semi-qualitative evaluation).The main work of this paper includes:First,based on the spatial configuration network(SCN)structure,U-Net is used instead of the SCN feature extraction network.The attention mechanismandthe residual connectionbetweenthe convolutional layers are added in the local network(LN)stage.Multiple filtering is added in the global network(GN)stage,and each layer of the LN decoder feature map is filtered separately using dot product,and the filtered features are re-convolved to obtain the GN output heatmap.Second,a network model with improved SCN(M-SCN)helps automatically localize the center-of-mass position of each vertebra,and the voxels around each localized vertebra were clipped,eliminating a large amount of redundant information(e.g.,background and other interfering vertebrae)and keeping the vertebrae to be segmented in the center of the image.Multilabel segmentation of the clipped portion was subsequently performed using U-Net.This paper uses VerSe’19,VerSe’20(using only data containing vertebral fractures),and private data(provided by Guizhou Orthopedic Hospital)for model training and evaluation.Compared with the original SCN network,the M-SCN reduced the prediction error rate by 1.09%and demonstrated the effectiveness of the improvement in ablation experiments.In the vertebral segmentation experiment,the Dice Similarity Coefficient(DSC)index reached 93.50%and the Maximum Symmetry Surface Distance(MSSD)index was 4.962 mm,with accuracy and recall of 95.82%and 91.73%,respectively.Fractured vertebrae were also marked as red and normal vertebrae were marked as white in the experiment,and the semi-qualitative assessment results of Genant were provided,as well as the results of spinal localization visualization and 3D reconstructed views of the spine to analyze the actual predictive ability of the model.It provides a promising tool for vertebral fracture detection.

End-to-End 2D Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Lung Nodule Identification and Abnormal Detection in Cloud

The extent of the peril associated with cancer can be perceivedfrom the lack of treatment, ineffective early diagnosis techniques, and mostimportantly its fatality rate. Globally, cancer is the second leading cause ofdeath and among over a hundred types of cancer;lung cancer is the secondmost common type of cancer as well as the leading cause of cancer-relateddeaths. Anyhow, an accurate lung cancer diagnosis in a timely manner canelevate the likelihood of survival by a noticeable margin and medical imagingis a prevalent manner of cancer diagnosis since it is easily accessible to peoplearound the globe. Nonetheless, this is not eminently efficacious consideringhuman inspection of medical images can yield a high false positive rate. Ineffectiveand inefficient diagnosis is a crucial reason for such a high mortalityrate for this malady. However, the conspicuous advancements in deep learningand artificial intelligence have stimulated the development of exceedinglyprecise diagnosis systems. The development and performance of these systemsrely prominently on the data that is used to train these systems. A standardproblem witnessed in publicly available medical image datasets is the severeimbalance of data between different classes. This grave imbalance of data canmake a deep learning model biased towards the dominant class and unableto generalize. This study aims to present an end-to-end convolutional neuralnetwork that can accurately differentiate lung nodules from non-nodules andreduce the false positive rate to a bare minimum. To tackle the problem ofdata imbalance, we oversampled the data by transforming available images inthe minority class. The average false positive rate in the proposed method isa mere 1.5 percent. However, the average false negative rate is 31.76 percent.The proposed neural network has 68.66 percent sensitivity and 98.42 percentspecificity.

Horizontal Voting Ensemble Based Predictive Modeling System for Colon Cancer

Colon cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in the world.Most colon AdenoCArcinoma(ACA)arises from pre-existing benign polyps in the mucosa of the bowel.Thus,detecting benign at the earliest helps reduce the mortality rate.In this work,a Predictive Modeling System(PMS)is developed for the classification of colon cancer using the Horizontal Voting Ensemble(HVE)method.Identifying different patterns inmicroscopic images is essential to an effective classification system.A twelve-layer deep learning architecture has been developed to extract these patterns.The developedHVE algorithm can increase the system’s performance according to the combined models from the last epochs of the proposed architecture.Ten thousand(10000)microscopic images are taken to test the classification performance of the proposed PMS with the HVE method.The microscopic images obtained from the colon tissues are classified intoACAor benign by the proposed PMS.Results prove that the proposed PMS has∼8%performance improvement over the architecture without using the HVE method.The proposed PMS for colon cancer reduces the misclassification rate and attains 99.2%of sensitivity and 99.4%of specificity.The overall accuracy of the proposed PMS is 99.3%,and without using the HVE method,it is only 91.3%.

Automated Skin Lesion Diagnosis and Classification Using Learning Algorithms

Due to the rising occurrence of skin cancer and inadequate clinical expertise,it is needed to design Artificial Intelligence(AI)based tools to diagnose skin cancer at an earlier stage.Since massive skin lesion datasets have existed in the literature,the AI-based Deep Learning(DL)modelsfind useful to differentiate benign and malignant skin lesions using dermoscopic images.This study develops an Automated Seeded Growing Segmentation with Optimal EfficientNet(ARGS-OEN)technique for skin lesion segmentation and classification.The proposed ASRGS-OEN technique involves the design of an optimal EfficientNet model in which the hyper-parameter tuning process takes place using the Flower Pollination Algorithm(FPA).In addition,Multiwheel Attention Memory Network Encoder(MWAMNE)based classification technique is employed for identifying the appropriate class labels of the dermoscopic images.A comprehensive simulation analysis of the ASRGS-OEN technique takes place and the results are inspected under several dimensions.The simulation results highlighted the supremacy of the ASRGS-OEN technique on the applied dermoscopic images compared to the recently developed approaches.

B^(2)C^(3)NetF^(2):Breast cancer classification using an end‐to‐end deep learning feature fusion and satin bowerbird optimization controlled Newton Raphson feature selection

Currently,the improvement in AI is mainly related to deep learning techniques that are employed for the classification,identification,and quantification of patterns in clinical images.The deep learning models show more remarkable performance than the traditional methods for medical image processing tasks,such as skin cancer,colorectal cancer,brain tumour,cardiac disease,Breast cancer(BrC),and a few more.The manual diagnosis of medical issues always requires an expert and is also expensive.Therefore,developing some computer diagnosis techniques based on deep learning is essential.Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in females with a rapidly growing percentage.It is estimated that patients with BrC will rise to 70%in the next 20 years.If diagnosed at a later stage,the survival rate of patients with BrC is shallow.Hence,early detection is essential,increasing the survival rate to 50%.A new framework for BrC classification is presented that utilises deep learning and feature optimization.The significant steps of the presented framework include(i)hybrid contrast enhancement of acquired images,(ii)data augmentation to facilitate better learning of the Convolutional Neural Network(CNN)model,(iii)a pre‐trained ResNet‐101 model is utilised and modified according to selected dataset classes,(iv)deep transfer learning based model training for feature extraction,(v)the fusion of features using the proposed highly corrected function‐controlled canonical correlation analysis approach,and(vi)optimal feature selection using the modified Satin Bowerbird Optimization controlled Newton Raphson algorithm that finally classified using 10 machine learning classifiers.The experiments of the proposed framework have been carried out using the most critical and publicly available dataset,such as CBISDDSM,and obtained the best accuracy of 94.5%along with improved computation time.The comparison depicts that the presented method surpasses the current state‐ofthe‐art approaches.

Lightweight Transfer Learning Models for Ultrasound-Guided Classification of COVID-19 Patients

Lightweight deep convolutional neural networks(CNNs)present a good solution to achieve fast and accurate image-guided diagnostic procedures of COVID-19 patients.Recently,advantages of portable Ultrasound(US)imaging such as simplicity and safe procedures have attracted many radiologists for scanning suspected COVID-19 cases.In this paper,a new framework of lightweight deep learning classifiers,namely COVID-LWNet is proposed to identify COVID-19 and pneumonia abnormalities in US images.Compared to traditional deep learning models,lightweight CNNs showed significant performance of real-time vision applications by using mobile devices with limited hardware resources.Four main lightweight deep learning models,namely MobileNets,ShuffleNets,MENet and MnasNet have been proposed to identify the health status of lungs using US images.Public image dataset(POCUS)was used to validate our proposed COVID-LWNet framework successfully.Three classes of infectious COVID-19,bacterial pneumonia,and the healthy lung were investigated in this study.The results showed that the performance of our proposed MnasNet classifier achieved the best accuracy score and shortest training time of 99.0%and 647.0 s,respectively.This paper demonstrates the feasibility of using our proposed COVID-LWNet framework as a new mobilebased radiological tool for clinical diagnosis of COVID-19 and other lung diseases.

Fuzzy-Based Automatic Epileptic Seizure Detection Framework

Detection of epileptic seizures on the basis of Electroencephalogram(EEG)recordings is a challenging task due to the complex,non-stationary and non-linear nature of these biomedical signals.In the existing literature,a number of automatic epileptic seizure detection methods have been proposed that extract useful features from EEG segments and classify them using machine learning algorithms.Some characterizing features of epileptic and non-epileptic EEG signals overlap;therefore,it requires that analysis of signals must be performed from diverse perspectives.Few studies analyzed these signals in diverse domains to identify distinguishing characteristics of epileptic EEG signals.To pose the challenge mentioned above,in this paper,a fuzzy-based epileptic seizure detection model is proposed that incorporates a novel feature extraction and selection method along with fuzzy classifiers.The proposed work extracts pattern features along with time-domain,frequencydomain,and non-linear analysis of signals.It applies a feature selection strategy on extracted features to get more discriminating features that build fuzzy machine learning classifiers for the detection of epileptic seizures.The empirical evaluation of the proposed model was conducted on the benchmark Bonn EEG dataset.It shows significant accuracy of 98%to 100%for normal vs.ictal classification cases while for three class classification of normal vs.inter-ictal vs.ictal accuracy reaches to above 97.5%.The obtained results for ten classification cases(including normal,seizure or ictal,and seizure-free or inter-ictal classes)prove the superior performance of proposed work as compared to other state-of-the-art counterparts.

ICA-Unet:An improved U-net network for brown adipose tissue segmentation

Brown adipose tissue(BAT)is a kind of adipose tissue engaging in thermoregulatory thermogenesis,metaboloregulatory thermogenesis,and secretory.Current studies have revealed that BAT activity is negatively correlated with adult body weight and is considered a target tissue for the treatment of obesity and other metabolic-related diseases.Additionally,the activity of BAT presents certain differences between different ages and genders.Clinically,BAT segmentation based on PET/CT data is a reliable method for brown fat research.However,most of the current BAT segmentation methods rely on the experience of doctors.In this paper,an improved U-net network,ICA-Unet,is proposed to achieve automatic and precise segmentation of BAT.First,the traditional 2D convolution layer in the encoder is replaced with a depth-wise overparameterized convolutional(Do-Conv)layer.Second,the channel attention block is introduced between the double-layer convolution.Finally,the image information entropy(IIE)block is added in the skip connections to strengthen the edge features.Furthermore,the performance of this method is evaluated on the dataset of PET/CT images from 368 patients.The results demonstrate a strong agreement between the automatic segmentation of BAT and manual annotation by experts.The average DICE coeffcient(DSC)is 0.9057,and the average Hausdorff distance is 7.2810.Experimental results suggest that the method proposed in this paper can achieve effcient and accurate automatic BAT segmentation and satisfy the clinical requirements of BAT.

Breast Mammogram Analysis and Classification Using Deep Convolution Neural Network

One of the fast-growing disease affecting women’s health seriously is breast cancer.It is highly essential to identify and detect breast cancer in the earlier stage.This paper used a novel advanced methodology than machine learning algorithms such as Deep learning algorithms to classify breast cancer accurately.Deep learning algorithms are fully automatic in learning,extracting,and classifying the features and are highly suitable for any image,from natural to medical images.Existing methods focused on using various conventional and machine learning methods for processing natural and medical images.It is inadequate for the image where the coarse structure matters most.Most of the input images are downscaled,where it is impossible to fetch all the hidden details to reach accuracy in classification.Whereas deep learning algorithms are high efficiency,fully automatic,have more learning capability using more hidden layers,fetch as much as possible hidden information from the input images,and provide an accurate prediction.Hence this paper uses AlexNet from a deep convolution neural network for classifying breast cancer in mammogram images.The performance of the proposed convolution network structure is evaluated by comparing it with the existing algorithms.

Retinal Vessel Segmentation via Adversarial Learning and Iterative Refinement

Retinal vessel segmentation is a challenging medical task owing to small size of dataset,micro blood vessels and low image contrast.To address these issues,we introduce a novel convolutional neural network in this paper,which takes the advantage of both adversarial learning and recurrent neural network.An iterative design of network with recurrent unit is performed to refine the segmentation results from input retinal image gradually.Recurrent unit preserves high-level semantic information for feature reuse,so as to output a sufficiently refined segmentation map instead of a coarse mask.Moreover,an adversarial loss is imposing the integrity and connectivity constraints on the segmented vessel regions,thus greatly reducing topology errors of segmentation.The experimental results on the DRIVE dataset show that our method achieves area under curve and sensitivity of 98.17%and 80.64%,respectively.Our method achieves superior performance in retinal vessel segmentation compared with other existing state-of-the-art methods.