Point Cloud Classification Using Content-Based Transformer via Clustering in Feature Space

Recently, there have been some attempts of Transformer in 3D point cloud classification. In order to reduce computations, most existing methods focus on local spatial attention,but ignore their content and fail to establish relationships between distant but relevant points. To overcome the limitation of local spatial attention, we propose a point content-based Transformer architecture, called PointConT for short. It exploits the locality of points in the feature space(content-based), which clusters the sampled points with similar features into the same class and computes the self-attention within each class, thus enabling an effective trade-off between capturing long-range dependencies and computational complexity. We further introduce an inception feature aggregator for point cloud classification, which uses parallel structures to aggregate high-frequency and low-frequency information in each branch separately. Extensive experiments show that our PointConT model achieves a remarkable performance on point cloud shape classification. Especially, our method exhibits 90.3% Top-1 accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectN N. Source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/yahuiliu99/PointC onT.

Intrahepatic portal venous systems in adult patients with cavernous transformation of portal vein: Imaging features and a new classification

Background: Cavernous transformation of the portal vein(CTPV) due to portal vein obstruction is a rare vascular anomaly defined as the formation of multiple collateral vessels in the hepatic hilum. This study aimed to investigate the imaging features of intrahepatic portal vein in adult patients with CTPV and establish the relationship between the manifestations of intrahepatic portal vein and the progression of CTPV. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 14 CTPV patients in Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital. All patients underwent both direct portal venography(DPV) and computed tomography angiography(CTA) to reveal the manifestations of the portal venous system. The vessels measured included the left portal vein(LPV), right portal vein(RPV), main portal vein(MPV) and the portal vein bifurcation(PVB). Results: Nine males and 5 females, with a median age of 40.5 years, were included in the study. No significant difference was found in the diameters of the LPV or RPV measured by DPV and CTA. The visualization in terms of LPV, RPV and PVB measured by DPV was higher than that by CTA. There was a significant association between LPV/RPV and PVB/MPV in term of visibility revealed with DPV( P = 0.01), while this association was not observed with CTA. According to the imaging features of the portal vein measured by DPV, CTPV was classified into three categories to facilitate the diagnosis and treatment. Conclusions: DPV was more accurate than CTA for revealing the course of the intrahepatic portal vein in patients with CTPV. The classification of CTPV, that originated from the imaging features of the portal vein revealed by DPV, may provide a new perspective for the diagnosis and treatment of CTPV.

Effect of health education based on information-motivationbehavioral skills model on patients with unilateral vestibular dysfunction

BACKGROUND Vestibular dysfunction(VH)is a common concomitant symptom of late peri-pheral vestibular lesions,which can be trauma,poisoning,infection,heredity,and neurodegeneration,but about 50%of the causes are unknown.The study uses the information-motivation-behavioral skills(IMB)model for health education,effectively improve the quality of life,increase their self-confidence,reduce anxiety and depression,and effectively improve the psychological state of patients.AIM To explore the effect of health education based on the IMB model on the degree of vertigo,disability,anxiety and depression in patients with unilateral vestibular hypofunction.METHODS The clinical data of 80 patients with unilateral vestibular hypofunction from January 2019 to December 2021 were selected as the retrospective research objects,and they were divided into the control group and the observation group with 40 cases in each group according to different nursing methods.Among them,the control group was given routine nursing health education and guidance,and the observation group was given health education and guidance based on the IMB model.The changes in self-efficacy,anxiety and depression,and quality of life of patients with unilateral VH were compared between the two groups.RESULTS There was no significant difference in General Self-Efficacy Scale(GSES)scale scores between the two groups of patients before nursing(P>0.05),which was comparable;after nursing,the GSES scale scores of the two groups were higher than those before nursing.The nursing group was higher than the control group,and the difference was statistically significant(P<0.05).There was no significant difference in the scores of Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale(HADS)and anxiety and depression subscales between the two groups before nursing(P>0.05).After nursing,the HADS score,anxiety,and depression subscale scores of the two groups of patients were lower than those before nursing,and the nursing group was lower than the control group,and the difference was statistically significant(P<0.05).After nursing,the Dizziness Handicap Inventory(DHI)scale and DHI-P,DHI-E and DHI-F scores in the two groups were decreased,and the scores in the nursing group were lower than those in the control group,and the difference was statistically significant(P<0.05).CONCLUSION Health education based on the IMB model can effectively improve patients'quality of life,increase self-efficacy of patients with unilateral vestibular hypofunction,enhance patients'confidence,enable patients to resume normal work and life as soon as possible,reduce patients'anxiety and depression,and effectively improve patients'psychological status.

Challenges of Bioethics Education in Pediatric Basic Nursing Education: A Faculty Perspective

In the field of pediatric nursing, in the perinatal period, numerous ethical issues arise alongside the advancement of medical technology. However, sufficient education on bioethics is not provided in the pediatric nursing domain of basic nursing education. The purpose of this research is to examine the current status of bioethics education in the pediatric nursing domain of basic nursing education and explore the challenges perceived by the pediatric nursing faculty regarding bioethics education. The research method was a questionnaire survey on 100 randomly selected pediatric nursing faculty members from nursing universities across Japan. The results revealed that although bioethics issues were considered important, the emphasis remained primarily on addressing bioethics as part of nursing that respects children’s rights. Furthermore, respondents expressed difficulties regarding teaching methods and content related to bioethics.

Flexner's legacy and the future of medical education:Embracing challenge and opportunity

This editorial comments on the article by Alzerwi.We focus on the development course,present challenges,and future perspectives of medical education.Modern medical education is gradually undergoing significant and profound changes worldwide.The emergence of new ideas,methodologies,and techniques has created opportunities for medical education developments and brought new concerns and challenges,ultimately promoting virtuous progress in medical education reform.The sustainable development of medical education needs joint efforts and support from governments,medical colleges,hospitals,researchers,administrators,and educators.

Transforming education:Developing a practice-ready workforce

The well-known question,why do people keep doing the same thing but expect a different result,applies to nursing education.Healthcare delivery systems are in constant evolution yet much of nursing education operates with traditional teaching approaches expecting to produce graduates suitable for rapidly changing healthcare delivery systems.Nursing is a practice-based discipline with its own body of knowledge situated within the context of dy-namic nursing practice.It is the responsibility of nursing academia to prepare graduates suitable for practice.If we are to change prac-tice,we must rethink education.The impact and interruptions of the global COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to questions on best prac-tices to guide nursing education into the future.

Classification of Sailboat Tell Tail Based on Deep Learning

The tell tail is usually placed on the triangular sail to display the running state of the air flow on the sail surface.It is of great significance to make accurate judgement on the drift of the tell tail of the sailboat during sailing for the best sailing effect.Normally it is difficult for sailors to keep an eye for a long time on the tell sail for accurate judging its changes,affected by strong sunlight and visual fatigue.In this case,we adopt computer vision technology in hope of helping the sailors judge the changes of the tell tail in ease with ease.This paper proposes for the first time a method to classify sailboat tell tails based on deep learning and an expert guidance system,supported by a sailboat tell tail classification data set on the expert guidance system of interpreting the tell tails states in different sea wind conditions,including the feature extraction performance.Considering the expression capabilities that vary with the computational features in different visual tasks,the paper focuses on five tell tail computing features,which are recoded by an automatic encoder and classified by a SVM classifier.All experimental samples were randomly divided into five groups,and four groups were selected from each group as the training set to train the classifier.The remaining one group was used as the test set for testing.The highest resolution value of the ResNet network was 80.26%.To achieve better operational results on the basis of deep computing features obtained through the ResNet network in the experiments.The method can be used to assist the sailors in making better judgement about the tell tail changes during sailing.

Empowering Diagnosis: Cutting-Edge Segmentation and Classification in Lung Cancer Analysis

Lung cancer is a leading cause of global mortality rates.Early detection of pulmonary tumors can significantly enhance the survival rate of patients.Recently,various Computer-Aided Diagnostic(CAD)methods have been developed to enhance the detection of pulmonary nodules with high accuracy.Nevertheless,the existing method-ologies cannot obtain a high level of specificity and sensitivity.The present study introduces a novel model for Lung Cancer Segmentation and Classification(LCSC),which incorporates two improved architectures,namely the improved U-Net architecture and the improved AlexNet architecture.The LCSC model comprises two distinct stages.The first stage involves the utilization of an improved U-Net architecture to segment candidate nodules extracted from the lung lobes.Subsequently,an improved AlexNet architecture is employed to classify lung cancer.During the first stage,the proposed model demonstrates a dice accuracy of 0.855,a precision of 0.933,and a recall of 0.789 for the segmentation of candidate nodules.The suggested improved AlexNet architecture attains 97.06%accuracy,a true positive rate of 96.36%,a true negative rate of 97.77%,a positive predictive value of 97.74%,and a negative predictive value of 96.41%for classifying pulmonary cancer as either benign or malignant.The proposed LCSC model is tested and evaluated employing the publically available dataset furnished by the Lung Image Database Consortium and Image Database Resource Initiative(LIDC-IDRI).This proposed technique exhibits remarkable performance compared to the existing methods by using various evaluation parameters.

Comprehensive understanding of glioblastoma molecular phenotypes:classification,characteristics,and transition

Among central nervous system-associated malignancies,glioblastoma(GBM)is the most common and has the highest mortality rate.The high heterogeneity of GBM cell types and the complex tumor microenvironment frequently lead to tumor recurrence and sudden relapse in patients treated with temozolomide.In precision medicine,research on GBM treatment is increasingly focusing on molecular subtyping to precisely characterize the cellular and molecular heterogeneity,as well as the refractory nature of GBM toward therapy.Deep understanding of the different molecular expression patterns of GBM subtypes is critical.Researchers have recently proposed tetra fractional or tripartite methods for detecting GBM molecular subtypes.The various molecular subtypes of GBM show significant differences in gene expression patterns and biological behaviors.These subtypes also exhibit high plasticity in their regulatory pathways,oncogene expression,tumor microenvironment alterations,and differential responses to standard therapy.Herein,we summarize the current molecular typing scheme of GBM and the major molecular/genetic characteristics of each subtype.Furthermore,we review the mesenchymal transition mechanisms of GBM under various regulators.

Computing Science in Transdisciplinary Education

Transdisciplinary collaboration has achieved remarkable results in many fields,and many global challenges also require transdisciplinary collaboration.Therefore,transdisciplinary education and research is one of the inevitable trends in the future development of universities.In this context,HKUST has made innovative changes in transdisciplinary education and research.First,we set three missions for the development of HKUST in transdisciplinary education and research.Second,we established the HKUST Guangzhou Campus to carry out a new revolution in transdisciplinary education and research.In addition,Big Data,AI,and computer science play a vital role in transdisciplinary research and collaboration,and we also need to rethink the role of computer science and how to better refer to supporting interdisciplinary collaboration.

Curve Classification Based onMean-Variance Feature Weighting and Its Application

The classification of functional data has drawn much attention in recent years.The main challenge is representing infinite-dimensional functional data by finite-dimensional features while utilizing those features to achieve better classification accuracy.In this paper,we propose a mean-variance-based(MV)feature weighting method for classifying functional data or functional curves.In the feature extraction stage,each sample curve is approximated by B-splines to transfer features to the coefficients of the spline basis.After that,a feature weighting approach based on statistical principles is introduced by comprehensively considering the between-class differences and within-class variations of the coefficients.We also introduce a scaling parameter to adjust the gap between the weights of features.The new feature weighting approach can adaptively enhance noteworthy local features while mitigating the impact of confusing features.The algorithms for feature weighted K-nearest neighbor and support vector machine classifiers are both provided.Moreover,the new approach can be well integrated into existing functional data classifiers,such as the generalized functional linear model and functional linear discriminant analysis,resulting in a more accurate classification.The performance of the mean-variance-based classifiers is evaluated by simulation studies and real data.The results show that the newfeatureweighting approach significantly improves the classification accuracy for complex functional data.

Ultrasound Scanning Competencies in Midwifery Education in Zambia: Findings from a Desk Review and Needs Assessment

Introduction: Ultrasound is an essential component of antenatal care. Midwives provide most of the antenatal care but they do not perform ultrasound as it has been beyond their scope of practice. This leaves many women in Low and Middle-Income Countries without access to ultrasound scanning. The aim of this study was to identify competencies in ultrasound scanning in midwifery education. Methods: A desk review and needs assessment were conducted between July and October 2023. Articles and curricula on the internet, Google scholar and PubMed were searched for content on ultrasound scanning competencies. A Google form consisting of 20 questions was administered via email and WhatsApp to 135 participants. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse data. Results: The desk review showed that it is feasible to train midwives in ultrasound scanning. The training programs for midwives in obstetric ultrasound were conducted for 1 week to 3 months with most of them running for 4 weeks. Content included introduction to general principles of ultrasound, physics, basic knowledge in embryology, obstetrics, anatomy, measuring foetal biometry, estimating amniotic fluid and gestational age. Experts like sonographers trained midwives. Theory and hands on were the teaching methods used. Written and practical assessments were conducted. Needs assessment revealed that majority of participants 71 (53%) knew about basic ultrasound training for midwives. All participants (100%) said it is necessary to train midwives in basic ultrasound scan in Zambia. Some content should include, anatomy, measuring foetal biometry, assessing amniotic fluid level, and gestational age determination. Most participants 91 (67%) suggested that the appropriate duration of training is 4 - 6 weeks. Conclusion: Empowering every midwife with ultrasound scanning skills will enable early detection of any abnormality among pregnant women and prompt intervention to save lives.

A Robust Approach for Multi Classification-Based Intrusion Detection through Stacking Deep Learning Models

Intrusion detection is a predominant task that monitors and protects the network infrastructure.Therefore,many datasets have been published and investigated by researchers to analyze and understand the problem of intrusion prediction and detection.In particular,the Network Security Laboratory-Knowledge Discovery in Databases(NSL-KDD)is an extensively used benchmark dataset for evaluating intrusion detection systems(IDSs)as it incorporates various network traffic attacks.It is worth mentioning that a large number of studies have tackled the problem of intrusion detection using machine learning models,but the performance of these models often decreases when evaluated on new attacks.This has led to the utilization of deep learning techniques,which have showcased significant potential for processing large datasets and therefore improving detection accuracy.For that reason,this paper focuses on the role of stacking deep learning models,including convolution neural network(CNN)and deep neural network(DNN)for improving the intrusion detection rate of the NSL-KDD dataset.Each base model is trained on the NSL-KDD dataset to extract significant features.Once the base models have been trained,the stacking process proceeds to the second stage,where a simple meta-model has been trained on the predictions generated from the proposed base models.The combination of the predictions allows the meta-model to distinguish different classes of attacks and increase the detection rate.Our experimental evaluations using the NSL-KDD dataset have shown the efficacy of stacking deep learning models for intrusion detection.The performance of the ensemble of base models,combined with the meta-model,exceeds the performance of individual models.Our stacking model has attained an accuracy of 99%and an average F1-score of 93%for the multi-classification scenario.Besides,the training time of the proposed ensemble model is lower than the training time of benchmark techniques,demonstrating its efficiency and robustness.

Analysis on the Way of Integrating Educational Drama into Patriotism Education for Primary School Students

In the process of patriotism education for primary school students,educational drama can play a very important role.However,the premise is that educational drama should be successfully integrated into the process of patriotism education of primary school students,instead of simply and mechanically stuffing educational drama into patriotism education of primary school students.As far as the integration mode of educational drama is concerned,educational drama can be divided into three kinds,namely,discipline-oriented drama education,infiltration-oriented drama education and activity-oriented drama.Therefore,the integration methods are also divided into three categories,namely,setting up educational drama courses,using educational drama to infiltrate patriotic education into other disciplines and carrying out activity-oriented drama education.

Depression Intensity Classification from Tweets Using Fast Text Based Weighted Soft Voting Ensemble

Predicting depression intensity from microblogs and social media posts has numerous benefits and applications,including predicting early psychological disorders and stress in individuals or the general public.A major challenge in predicting depression using social media posts is that the existing studies do not focus on predicting the intensity of depression in social media texts but rather only perform the binary classification of depression and moreover noisy data makes it difficult to predict the true depression in the social media text.This study intends to begin by collecting relevant Tweets and generating a corpus of 210000 public tweets using Twitter public application programming interfaces(APIs).A strategy is devised to filter out only depression-related tweets by creating a list of relevant hashtags to reduce noise in the corpus.Furthermore,an algorithm is developed to annotate the data into three depression classes:‘Mild,’‘Moderate,’and‘Severe,’based on International Classification of Diseases-10(ICD-10)depression diagnostic criteria.Different baseline classifiers are applied to the annotated dataset to get a preliminary idea of classification performance on the corpus.Further FastText-based model is applied and fine-tuned with different preprocessing techniques and hyperparameter tuning to produce the tuned model,which significantly increases the depression classification performance to an 84%F1 score and 90%accuracy compared to baselines.Finally,a FastText-based weighted soft voting ensemble(WSVE)is proposed to boost the model’s performance by combining several other classifiers and assigning weights to individual models according to their individual performances.The proposed WSVE outperformed all baselines as well as FastText alone,with an F1 of 89%,5%higher than FastText alone,and an accuracy of 93%,3%higher than FastText alone.The proposed model better captures the contextual features of the relatively small sample class and aids in the detection of early depression intensity prediction from tweets with impactful performances.

Classification and rating of disintegrated dolomite strata for slope stability analysis

Although disintegrated dolomite,widely distributed across the globe,has conventionally been a focus of research in underground engineering,the issue of slope stability issues in disintegrated dolomite strata is gaining increasing prominence.This is primarily due to their unique properties,including low strength and loose structure.Current methods for evaluating slope stability,such as basic quality(BQ)and slope stability probability classification(SSPC),do not adequately account for the poor integrity and structural fragmentation characteristic of disintegrated dolomite.To address this challenge,an analysis of the applicability of the limit equilibrium method(LEM),BQ,and SSPC methods was conducted on eight disintegrated dolomite slopes located in Baoshan,Southwest China.However,conflicting results were obtained.Therefore,this paper introduces a novel method,SMRDDS,to provide rapid and accurate assessment of disintegrated dolomite slope stability.This method incorporates parameters such as disintegrated grade,joint state,groundwater conditions,and excavation methods.The findings reveal that six slopes exhibit stability,while two are considered partially unstable.Notably,the proposed method demonstrates a closer match with the actual conditions and is more time-efficient compared with the BQ and SSPC methods.However,due to the limited research on disintegrated dolomite slopes,the results of the SMRDDS method tend to be conservative as a safety precaution.In conclusion,the SMRDDS method can quickly evaluate the current situation of disintegrated dolomite slopes in the field.This contributes significantly to disaster risk reduction for disintegrated dolomite slopes.

Learning feature alignment and dual correlation for few‐shot image classification

Few‐shot image classification is the task of classifying novel classes using extremely limited labelled samples.To perform classification using the limited samples,one solution is to learn the feature alignment(FA)information between the labelled and unlabelled sample features.Most FA methods use the feature mean as the class prototype and calculate the correlation between prototype and unlabelled features to learn an alignment strategy.However,mean prototypes tend to degenerate informative features because spatial features at the same position may not be equally important for the final classification,leading to inaccurate correlation calculations.Therefore,the authors propose an effective intraclass FA strategy that aggregates semantically similar spatial features from an adaptive reference prototype in low‐dimensional feature space to obtain an informative prototype feature map for precise correlation computation.Moreover,a dual correlation module to learn the hard and soft correlations was developed by the authors.This module combines the correlation information between the prototype and unlabelled features in both the original and learnable feature spaces,aiming to produce a comprehensive cross‐correlation between the prototypes and unlabelled features.Using both FA and cross‐attention modules,our model can maintain informative class features and capture important shared features for classification.Experimental results on three few‐shot classification benchmarks show that the proposed method outperformed related methods and resulted in a 3%performance boost in the 1‐shot setting by inserting the proposed module into the related methods.

Research on Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Network Algorithm Based on Brain Tumor Medical Image Classification

Gliomas have the highest mortality rate of all brain tumors.Correctly classifying the glioma risk period can help doctors make reasonable treatment plans and improve patients’survival rates.This paper proposes a hierarchical multi-scale attention feature fusion medical image classification network(HMAC-Net),which effectively combines global features and local features.The network framework consists of three parallel layers:The global feature extraction layer,the local feature extraction layer,and the multi-scale feature fusion layer.A linear sparse attention mechanism is designed in the global feature extraction layer to reduce information redundancy.In the local feature extraction layer,a bilateral local attention mechanism is introduced to improve the extraction of relevant information between adjacent slices.In the multi-scale feature fusion layer,a channel fusion block combining convolutional attention mechanism and residual inverse multi-layer perceptron is proposed to prevent gradient disappearance and network degradation and improve feature representation capability.The double-branch iterative multi-scale classification block is used to improve the classification performance.On the brain glioma risk grading dataset,the results of the ablation experiment and comparison experiment show that the proposed HMAC-Net has the best performance in both qualitative analysis of heat maps and quantitative analysis of evaluation indicators.On the dataset of skin cancer classification,the generalization experiment results show that the proposed HMAC-Net has a good generalization effect.

Explainable AI-Based DDoS Attacks Classification Using Deep Transfer Learning

In the era of the Internet of Things(IoT),the proliferation of connected devices has raised security concerns,increasing the risk of intrusions into diverse systems.Despite the convenience and efficiency offered by IoT technology,the growing number of IoT devices escalates the likelihood of attacks,emphasizing the need for robust security tools to automatically detect and explain threats.This paper introduces a deep learning methodology for detecting and classifying distributed denial of service(DDoS)attacks,addressing a significant security concern within IoT environments.An effective procedure of deep transfer learning is applied to utilize deep learning backbones,which is then evaluated on two benchmarking datasets of DDoS attacks in terms of accuracy and time complexity.By leveraging several deep architectures,the study conducts thorough binary and multiclass experiments,each varying in the complexity of classifying attack types and demonstrating real-world scenarios.Additionally,this study employs an explainable artificial intelligence(XAI)AI technique to elucidate the contribution of extracted features in the process of attack detection.The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method,achieving a recall of 99.39%by the XAI bidirectional long short-term memory(XAI-BiLSTM)model.

A Bitcoin Address Multi-Classification Mechanism Based on Bipartite Graph-Based Maximization Consensus

Bitcoin is widely used as the most classic electronic currency for various electronic services such as exchanges,gambling,marketplaces,and also scams such as high-yield investment projects.Identifying the services operated by a Bitcoin address can help determine the risk level of that address and build an alert model accordingly.Feature engineering can also be used to flesh out labeled addresses and to analyze the current state of Bitcoin in a small way.In this paper,we address the problem of identifying multiple classes of Bitcoin services,and for the poor classification of individual addresses that do not have significant features,we propose a Bitcoin address identification scheme based on joint multi-model prediction using the mapping relationship between addresses and entities.The innovation of the method is to(1)Extract as many valuable features as possible when an address is given to facilitate the multi-class service identification task.(2)Unlike the general supervised model approach,this paper proposes a joint prediction scheme for multiple learners based on address-entity mapping relationships.Specifically,after obtaining the overall features,the address classification and entity clustering tasks are performed separately,and the results are subjected to graph-basedmaximization consensus.The final result ismade to baseline the individual address classification results while satisfying the constraint of having similarly behaving entities as far as possible.By testing and evaluating over 26,000 Bitcoin addresses,our feature extraction method captures more useful features.In addition,the combined multi-learner model obtained results that exceeded the baseline classifier reaching an accuracy of 77.4%.