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Identification and detection of thin-cap fibroatheroma (TCFA) from intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) images is critical for treatment of coronary heart diseases. Recently, deep learning methods have shown promising successes in TCFA identification. However, most methods usually do not effectively utilize multi-view information or incorporate prior domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose a multi-view contour-constrained transformer network (MVCTN) for TCFA identification in IVOCT images. Inspired by the diagnosis process of cardiologists, we use contour constrained self-attention modules (CCSM) to emphasize features corresponding to salient regions (i.e., vessel walls) in an unsupervised manner and enhance the visual interpretability based on class activation mapping (CAM). Moreover, we exploit transformer modules (TM) to build global-range relations between two views (i.e., polar and Cartesian views) to effectively fuse features at multiple feature scales. Experimental results on a semi-public dataset and an in-house dataset demonstrate that the proposed MVCTN outperforms other single-view and multi-view methods. Lastly, the proposed MVCTN can also provide meaningful visualization for cardiologists via CAM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mutant strains of COVID-19 caused a global explosion of infections, including many cities of China. In 2020, a hybrid AI model was proposed by Zheng et al., which accurately predicted the epidemic in Wuhan. As the main part of the hybrid AI model, ISI method makes two important assumptions to avoid over-fitting. However, the assumptions cannot be effectively applied to new mutant strains. In this paper, a more general method, named the multi-weight susceptible-infected model (MSI) is proposed to predict COVID-19 in Chinese Mainland. First, a Gaussian pre-processing method is proposed to solve the problem of data fluctuation based on the quantity consistency of cumulative infection number and the trend consistency of daily infection number. Then, we improve the model from two aspects: changing the grouped multi-parameter strategy to the multi-weight strategy, and removing the restriction of weight distribution of viral infectivity. Experiments on the outbreaks in many places in China from the end of 2021 to May 2022 show that, in China, an individual infected by Delta or Omicron strains of SARS-CoV-2 can infect others within 3–4 days after he/she got infected. Especially, the proposed method effectively predicts the trend of the epidemics in Xi'an, Tianjin, Henan, and Shanghai from December 2021 to May 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale image classification is a challenging task and has recently attracted active research interests. In this paper, a new algorithm is developed to achieve more effective implementation of large-scale image classification by hierarchical learning of large-margin metrics (HLMMs). A hierarchical visual tree is seamlessly integrated with metric learning to learn a set of node-specific/category-specific large-margin metrics. First, a hierarchical visual tree is learned to characterize the inter-category visual correlations effectively and organize large numbers of image categories in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Second, a new algorithm is developed to support hierarchical learning of large-margin metrics by training nearest class mean (NCM) classifiers over our hierarchical visual tree. In addition, we also consider dimensionality reduction as a regularizer for high-dimensional data in our large-margin metric learning. Two top-down approaches are developed for supporting hierarchical learning of large-margin metrics. We focus on learning more discriminative metrics for NCM node classifiers to identify the visually similar sub-nodes (visually similar image categories) under the same parent node over our hierarchical visual tree. A mini-batch stochastic gradient descend method is used to optimize our HLMMs learning algorithm. The experimental results on ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2010 dataset (ILSVRC2010) have demonstrated that our HLMMs learning algorithm is very promising for supporting large-scale image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object detection and semantic segmentation are two fundamental techniques for Intelligent Vehicles (IV) and Advanced Driving Assistance System (ADAS). Motivated by recent studies demonstrating that object detection and semantic segmentation are two highly-correlated tasks, this paper handles the problem of joint object detection and semantic segmentation in traffic scenes. Existing methods perform the joint object detection and semantic segmentation by sharing the same backbone network, but always ignore the interactive connection between the subdividing detection branch and segmentation branch, leading to the insufficient interaction between the two branches. Considering this situation, this paper proposes a joint object detection and semantic segmentation model with the cross-attention and inner-attention mechanisms. The cross-attention mechanism enables to build up the essential interaction between the subdividing detection branch and segmentation branch to fully make use of their correlation. In addition, the inner-attention contributes to strengthening the representations of feature maps in the model. Given an image, an encoder-decoder network is firstly used to extract initial feature maps. Then, the inner-attention mechanism is applied to strengthen the initial feature maps to obtain segmentation feature maps. Subsequently, the cross-attention mechanism utilizes the segmentation feature maps to guide the generation of object detection feature maps. Finally, the semantic segmentation is performed on the segmentation feature maps and object detection is performed on the detection feature maps. In the experiments, two well-known public traffic datasets are used to evaluate our model. Our model achieves the highest performance in comparison with several recently-proposed methods. In addition, some ablation studies are conducted to evaluate the proposed inner-attention and cross-attention mechanisms, and experiment results validate their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a robust echo state network with correntropy induced loss function (CLF) is presented. CLF is robust to outliers through the mechanism of correntropy which is widely applied in information theoretic learning. The proposed method can improve the anti-noise capacity of echo state network and overcome its problem of being sensitive outliers which are prevalent in real-world tasks. The echo state network with CLF inherits the basic architecture of echo state network, but replaces the commonly used mean square error (MSE) criterion with CLF. The stochastic gradient descent method is adopted to optimize the objective function. The proposed method is subsequently verified in nonlinear system identification and chaotic time-series prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is robust to outliers and outperforms the echo state networks with Bayesian regression and Huber loss function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]