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The transformer-based encoder-decoder framework is becoming popular in scene text recognition, largely because it naturally integrates recognition clues from both visual and semantic domains. However, recent studies show that the two kinds of clues are not always well registered and therefore, feature and character might be misaligned in difficult text (e.g., with a rare shape). As a result, constraints such as character position are introduced to alleviate this problem. Despite certain success, visual and semantic are still separately modeled and they are merely loosely associated. In this paper, we propose a novel module called multi-domain character distance perception (MDCDP) to establish a visually and semantically related position embedding. MDCDP uses the position embedding to query both visual and semantic features following the cross-attention mechanism. The two kinds of clues are fused into the position branch, generating a content-aware embedding that well perceives character spacing and orientation variants, character semantic affinities, and clues tying the two kinds of information. They are summarized as the multi-domain character distance. We develop CDistNet that stacks multiple MDCDPs to guide a gradually precise distance modeling. Thus, the feature-character alignment is well build even though various recognition difficulties are presented. We verify CDistNet on ten challenging public datasets and two series of augmented datasets created by ourselves. The experiments demonstrate that CDistNet performs highly competitively. It not only ranks top-tier in standard benchmarks, but also outperforms recent popular methods by obvious margins on real and augmented datasets presenting severe text deformation, poor linguistic support, and rare character layouts. In addition, the visualization shows that CDistNet achieves proper information utilization in both visual and semantic domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/simplify23/CDistNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting signet ring cells on histopathologic images is a critical computer-aided diagnostic task that is highly relevant to cancer grading and patients' survival rates. However, the cells are densely distributed and exhibit diverse and complex visual patterns in the image, together with the commonly observed incomplete annotation issue, posing a significant barrier to accurate detection. In this article, we propose to mitigate the detection difficulty from a model reinforcement point of view. Specifically, we devise a Classification Reinforcement Detection Network (CRDet). It is featured by adding a dedicated Classification Reinforcement Branch (CRB) on top of the architecture of Cascade RCNN. The proposed CRB consists of a context pooling module to perform a more robust feature representation by fully making use of context information, and a feature enhancement classifier to generate a superior feature by leveraging the deconvolution and attention mechanism. With the enhanced feature, the small-sized cell can be better characterized and CRDet enjoys a more accurate signet ring cell identification. We validate our proposal on a large-scale real clinical signet ring cell data set. It is shown that CRDet outperforms several popular convolutional neural network-based object detection models on this particular task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An efficient and effective model is proposed for multi-scale scene text detection. • A grouped pyramid module is used to group basic layers for more accurate detection. • The pyramid module includes a top-down partition and a bottom-up group. • PyrBoxes achieves the state-of-the-art performance with a significantly faster speed. • The generality of PyrBoxes is verified by a newly constructed Chinese text dataset. Scene text detection has attracted many researches due to its importance to various applications. However, current approaches could not keep a good balance between accuracy and speed, i.e., a high-performance accuracy but with a low processing speed, or vice-versa. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named PyrBoxes, for efficient and effective multi-scale scene text detection. PyrBoxes consists of an SSD-based backbone that utilizes deep layers with strong semantics to detect texts in various sizes, and a proposed grouped pyramid module that leverages basic layers to append detailed locations into detection. Most existing detectors discard features from the basic layers due to the efficiency issue. We argue these layers contain fine-grained information, which is complementary to high-level semantics. Based on this, the grouped pyramid module combines the basic layers recursively into a detection layer via a top-down partition and a bottom-up group. Extensive experiments on both horizontal and oriented benchmarks, including ICDAR2013 Focused Scene Text, ICDAR2015 Incidental Text and COCO-Text, demonstrate that PyrBoxes achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance compared with baselines, while runs significantly faster at inference. Furthermore, by experimenting on another ChiTVText dataset, PyrBoxes shows great generality to Chinese and long text lines. By visualizing some qualitative results, as expected, PyrBoxes provides more accurate locations and reduces the rate of missed detections, especially for small-sized texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes methods for automatically associating faces detected from multimedia documents with their names presented in the surrounding metadata. We consider the task in the image matching (IM) framework, where external Web facial images are automatically retrieved as the gallery face set of the names in advance, and a detected face is assigned to one of the names, or none of them, according to the association score between the two kinds of faces and constraints. Several important issues are investigated within the IM framework. In collecting Web facial images, beyond the basic scheme that use a celebrity name purely as the query to crawl facial images, a context-assisted image search method is proposed to enhance the relevance and discriminability of the retrieved faces. In constraint formulation, we propose an assigning-thresholding (AT) pipeline to uniformly ensure that the name-face correspondence is strictly one-to-one, and set low confidence associations as null assignments. In association score computation, we propose methods that jointly consider IM with the well-established graph-based association (GA) method at different stages, aiming at producing more accurate scores to benefit the association. Based on these efforts, an Accu-IM method performing the association as accurate as possible and a Fast-IM method performing the association in real-time are respective proposed. Extensive experiments on datasets of captioned News images and Web videos both demonstrate the advantages of the proposed efforts individually and jointly, which consistently provide improvement gains under different settings when compared with state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadcast news video has been playing an increasingly important role in our daily life. However, how to effectively segment a broadcast news video into meaningful semantic story units is still a challenge issue. In this paper, we propose a novel unified video structure parsing approach, named multiple style exploration-based news story segmentation (MSE-NSS), to segment broadcast news videos into semantic story units. In MSE-NSS, we first investigate the appropriate methods to explore multiple kinds of style information inherent in broadcast news videos, including temporal style inferred from caption texts, boundary style represented by a wealth of multi-modal visual-audio features, and structural style known as the spanning duration of story units. Then the above multiple style information is integrated together and the task of story unit segmentation is accomplished through the following three steps: temporal style-based pre-location, boundary style-based description, and boundary-structural style-based segmentation, where the segmentation process is composed of a SVM-based detector and a dynamic programming-based refiner that considers the boundary style and the structural style collectively. Parallel to this, a news-oriented broadcast management system-NOBMs is implemented on top of the proposed MSE-NSS. Encouraging experimental results on a large broadcast news video dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MSE-NSS, as well as its superiority over traditional story unit segmentation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the study of various retinal diseases, an accurate quantitative analysis of the retinal layer is essential for assessing the severity of the disease and diagnosing the progression of the disease. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) images can clearly show each layer of the retinal structure and detect subtle early lesions, thus providing a gold standard for the diagnosis of retinal diseases. In this article, we propose a coarse-to-fine retinal layer boundary segmentation method based on the embedded residual recurrent network (ERR-Net) and the graph search (GS). Considering the integrity of information transmission and the dependence of features, we first design a novel end-to-end residual recurrent network to roughly segment the retinal layer boundaries. The proposed ERR-Net not only solves the gradient problem brought by the depth but also fully captures the global spatial structure of the image. Second, we employ a GS algorithm for boundary continuous to make the layer boundary segmentation results more accurate. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on three publicly available datasets and compare it with the state-of-the-art methods on each dataset. The quantitative results and visual effects show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in the segmentation of retinal layer boundaries in OCT images. Moreover, the results also show that the proposed method has good algorithm stability on three datasets with different sizes, characteristics, and segmentation difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iatrogenic radial nerve injures are a common complication during the placement of external fixator pins at the lateral aspect of the humeral shaft. This study uses a three-dimensional measurement technique to locate a safe entry point for humeral pins when externally fixating the elbow. Methods: We fixed a guide wire to the radial nerve by a suture string, and used computed tomography (CT) to scan the upper limbs of cadaver specimens. Then, we measured the deviation angles of the radial nerve on the CT scans, and the distance from the radial nerve to the "elbow rotation center" (ERC). Result: The average distance from the radial nerve to the ERC was 87.3 ± 8.5 mm (range: 68–100 mm), 58.3 ± 11.3 mm (range: 32.12–82.84 mm), 106.3 ± 5.8 mm (range: 86.93–115.08 mm), and 113.9 ± 4.8 mm (range: 97.93–120.22 mm) at radial nerve deviation angles of 0°, –30°, 30°, and 45°, respectively. The average radial nerve deviation angle was –37.7° ± 7.7° and 123.9° ± 19.9° at 50 and 150 mm, respectively. Relative to 0°, the distance between the radial nerve and the ERC at radial nerve deviation angles of –30°, 30°, and 45° showed a significant difference (t = 18.20, p < 0.05; Z = 6.07, p < 0.001; Z = 6.40, p < 0.001, respectively). Conclusions: Pins inserted into the proximal humerus should be about 150 mm from the ERC with a radial nerve deviation angle of 30° anteriorly, and 50 mm from the ERC with a deviation angle of 30°–45° posteriorly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lumbar decompressive surgery is the gold standard treatment for lumbar spinal stenosis. Minimally invasive surgical techniques have been introduced with the aim of reducing the morbidity associated with open surgery. The purpose of the present study was to systematically search the literature and perform a meta-analysis of studies comparing the outcomes between biportal endoscopic technique and microscopic technique for lumbar canal stenosis decompression. A comprehensive search of the PubMed, Google Scholar, Web of Science, Embase and the Cochrane Library databases was performed to identify relevant articles up to 15th of December 2019. Eligible studies were retrieved, data were extracted by two authors independently and risks of bias were assessed. A total of six studies involving 438 patients were selected for review. The results of the pooled analysis indicated similar operative times [mean difference (MD), -3.41; 95% CI, -10.78-3.96; P<0.36], similar complications (MD, 0.70; 95% CI, 0.33-1.46; P=0.34), similar visual analogue scale scores for back and leg pain at the time of the final follow-up and similar Oswestry disability indexes (MD, -0.28; 95% CI, -1.25-0.69; P=0.58) for the two procedures. In conclusion, biportal endoscopic technique is a viable alternative to microscopic technique for lumbar canal stenosis decompression with similar operative time, clinical outcomes and complications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Backgrounds: Traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine combination (TCM-WMC) increased the complexity of compounds ingested. Objective: To develop a method for screening hepatotoxic compounds in TCM-WMC based on chemical structures using artificial intelligence (AI) methods. Methods: Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) data was collected from the public databases and published literatures. The total dataset formed by DILI data was randomly divided into training set and test set at a ratio of 3:1 approximately. Machine learning models of SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent), kNN (k-Nearest Neighbor), SVM (Support Vector Machine), NB (Naive Bayes), DT (Decision Tree), RF (Random Forest), ANN (Artificial Neural Network), AdaBoost, LR (Logistic Regression) and one deep learning model (deep belief network, DBN) were adopted to construct models for screening hepatotoxic compounds. Result: Dataset of 2035 hepatotoxic compounds was collected in this research, in which 1505 compounds were as training set and 530 compounds were as test set. Results showed that RF obtained 0.838 of classification accuracy (CA), 0.827 of F1-score, 0.832 of Precision, 0.838 of Recall, 0.814 of area under the curve (AUC) on the training set and 0.767 of CA, 0.731 of F1, 0.739 of Precision, 0.767 of Recall, 0.739 of AUC on the test set, which was better than other eight machine learning methods. The DBN obtained 82.2% accuracy on the test set, which was higher than any other machine learning models on the test set. Conclusion: The DILI AI models were expected to effectively screen hepatotoxic compounds in TCM-WMC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retinal blood vessel segmentation in fundus images plays an important role in the early diagnosis and treatment of retinal diseases. In recent years, the segmentation methods based on deep neural networks have attracted the attention of experts and scholars. However, due to the complexity of the distribution of blood vessels in fundus images and the imbalance between blood vessels and background, retinal blood vessel segmentation remains challenging. In this paper, we present a retinal blood vessel segmentation method using deep neural networks. Firstly, we propose a novel deep network architecture named Bridge-net to make use of the context of the retinal blood vessels efficiently. Specifically, the architecture incorporates a recurrent neural network (RNN) into a convolutional neural network (CNN) to deliver the context and then to produce the probability map of the retinal blood vessels. Secondly, we propose a patch-based loss weight mapping by considering the distributions of different types of blood vessels to correct the imbalance, since there are large morphological differences between thick and thin blood vessels. Finally, we evaluate our method on three publicly datasets STARE, DRIVE, and CHASE _ DB1, and compare the results to eighteen state-of-the-art approaches. We also compare our method with some existing approaches on a high-resolution dataset, i.e., HRF. The results show that our method achieves better/comparable performances when compared to the existing approaches. The results on various datasets also verify the effectiveness and stability of the proposed method. • We present a novel automatic method for the segmentation of retinal blood vessels. • We propose Bridge-net by joint learning context-involved and non-context features. • We develop a patch-based loss weight mapping to correct the imbalance of the image. • We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on four public datasets. • The results have verified the effectiveness and stability of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Backgrounds: Traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine combination (TCM-WMC) increased the complexity of compounds ingested. Objective: To develop a method for screening hepatotoxic compounds in TCM-WMC based on chemical structures using artificial intelligence (AI) methods. Methods: Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) data was collected from the public databases and published literatures. The total dataset formed by DILI data was randomly divided into training set and test set at a ratio of 3:1 approximately. Machine learning models of SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent), kNN (k-Nearest Neighbor), SVM (Support Vector Machine), NB (Naive Bayes), DT (Decision Tree), RF (Random Forest), ANN (Artificial Neural Network), AdaBoost, LR (Logistic Regression) and one deep learning model (deep belief network, DBN) were adopted to construct models for screening hepatotoxic compounds. Result: Dataset of 2035 hepatotoxic compounds was collected in this research, in which 1505 compounds were as training set and 530 compounds were as test set. Results showed that RF obtained 0.838 of classification accuracy (CA), 0.827 of F1-score, 0.832 of Precision, 0.838 of Recall, 0.814 of area under the curve (AUC) on the training set and 0.767 of CA, 0.731 of F1, 0.739 of Precision, 0.767 of Recall, 0.739 of AUC on the test set, which was better than other eight machine learning methods. The DBN obtained 82.2% accuracy on the test set, which was higher than any other machine learning models on the test set. Conclusion: The DILI AI models were expected to effectively screen hepatotoxic compounds in TCM-WMC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Factors influencing the impact toughness of two impact polypropylene copolymers (IPC) with almost the same ethylene content, molecular weight and molecular weight distribution were studied by temperature gradient extraction fractionation (TGEF), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The results indicate that poor interfacial adhesion between the disperse phase and the continuous matrix, larger dimensions and non-uniform distribution of disperse phases are main reasons for the low impact toughness of IPC B that possesses of a low content of ethylene–propylene segmented copolymer with long crystallizable PE and PP sequences as a compatibilizer between the disperse phase and the matrix. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The outbreak and rapid spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had a huge impact on the lives and safety of people around the world. Chest CT is considered an effective tool for the diagnosis and follow-up of COVID-19. For faster examination, automatic COVID-19 diagnostic techniques using deep learning on CT images have received increasing attention. However, the number and category of existing datasets for COVID-19 diagnosis that can be used for training are limited, and the number of initial COVID-19 samples is much smaller than the normal's, which leads to the problem of class imbalance. It makes the classification algorithms difficult to learn the discriminative boundaries since the data of some classes are rich while others are scarce. Therefore, training robust deep neural networks with imbalanced data is a fundamental challenging but important task in the diagnosis of COVID-19. In this paper, we create a challenging clinical dataset (named COVID19-Diag) with category diversity and propose a novel imbalanced data classification method using deep supervised learning with a self-adaptive auxiliary loss (DSN-SAAL) for COVID-19 diagnosis. The loss function considers both the effects of data overlap between CT slices and possible noisy labels in clinical datasets on a multi-scale, deep supervised network framework by integrating the effective number of samples and a weighting regularization item. The learning process jointly and automatically optimizes all parameters over the deep supervised network, making our model generally applicable to a wide range of datasets. Extensive experiments are conducted on COVID19-Diag and three public COVID-19 diagnosis datasets. The results show that our DSN-SAAL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and is effective for the diagnosis of COVID-19 in varying degrees of data imbalance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Osteoporosis (OP) is a systemic bone disease characterized by decreased bone mass, destruction of the bone tissue microstructure, increased bone brittleness and an increased risk of fracture. OP has a high incidence rate and long disease course and is associated with serious complications. Yigu decoction (YGD) is a compound prescription in traditional Chinese medicine that is used to treat OP. However, its mechanism in OP is not clear. This study used a tandem mass tag (TMT)quantitative proteomics method to explore the potential bone-protective mechanism of YGD in an osteoporotic rat model. Materials and methods: A rat model of OP was established by ovariectomy. Eighteen 12-week-old specific-pathogen-free female Wistar rats weighing 220 ± 10 g were selected. The eighteen rats were randomly divided into 3 groups (n = 6 in each group): the normal, model and YGD groups. The right femurs from each group were subjected to quantitative biological analysis. TMT quantitative proteomics was used to analyze the proteins extracted from the bone tissue of rats in the model and YGD groups, and the differentially expressed proteins after intervention with YGD were identified as biologically relevant proteins of interest. Functional annotation correlation analysis was also performed to explore the biological function and mechanism of YGD. Result: Compared with the model group, the YGD group showed significant upregulation of 26 proteins (FC > 1.2, P < 0.05) and significant downregulation of 39 proteins (FC < 0.833, P < 0.05). Four important targets involved in OP and 5 important signaling pathways involved in bone metabolism were identified. Conclusions: YGD can significantly increase the bone mineral density (BMD) of osteoporotic rats and may play a therapeutic role by regulating target proteins involved in multiple signaling pathways. Therefore, these results improve the understanding of the OP mechanism and provide an experimental basis for the clinical application of YGD in OP treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, deep convolutional features have been applied to discriminative correlation filters-based methods, which have achieved impressive performance in tracking. Most of them utilize hierarchical features from a certain layer. However, this is not always sufficient to learn target appearance changes and to suppress the background interference in complicated interfering factors (e.g., deformation, fast motion, low resolution, and rotations). In this paper, we propose an adaptive multi-branch correlation filter tracking method, by constructing multi-branch models and using an adaptive selection strategy to improve the accuracy and robustness of visual tracking. Specially, the multi-branch models are introduced to tolerate temporal changes of the object, which can serve different circumstances. In addition, the adaptive selection strategy incorporates both foreground and background information to learn background suppression. To further improve the tracking performance, we propose a measurement method to handle tracking failures from unreliable samples. Extensive experiments on OTB-2013, OTB-2015, and VOT-2016 datasets show that the proposed tracker has comparable performance compared to state-of-the-art tracking methods. Especially, on the OTB-2015, our method significantly improves the baseline with a gain of 5.5% in overlap precision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We propose an improved dataset for research on image privacy. • We build a knowledge graph that represents the relevance between the objects and image privacy. • Based on the graph, we deal with the traditional image classification problem with the novel graph-based neural network. • The introduction of the knowledge graph not only makes the model more explainable but also makes better use of the information of objects provided by the images. • Our method relies on the intrinsic relevance in the dataset rather than extra knowledge, thus is applicable for other tasks. With the development of social media and smartphones, people share their daily lives via a large number of images, but the convince also raises a problem of privacy leakage. Therefore, effective methods are needed to infer the privacy risk of images and identify images that may disclose privacy. Several works have tried to solve this problem with deep learning models. However, we know little about how the models infer the privacy label of an image, thus it is not easy to understand why the image may disclose privacy. Inspired by recent research on graph neural networks, we introduce prior knowledge to the deep models to make the inference more explainable. We propose the Graph-based neural networks for Image Privacy (GIP) to infer the privacy risk of images. The GIP mainly focuses on objects in an image, and the knowledge graph is extracted from the objects in the dataset without reliance on extra knowledge. Experimental results show that the GIP achieves higher performance compared with the object-based methods and comparable performance even compared with the multi-modal fusion method. The results show that the introduction of the knowledge graph not only makes the deep model more explainable but also makes better use of the information of objects provided by the images. Combing the knowledge graph with deep learning is a promising way to help protect image privacy that is worth exploring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related death worldwide. Early diagnosis can effectively reduce the mortality, and computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) as an important way to assist doctors has developed rapidly. In particular, automated pulmonary nodule detection in computed tomography (CT) images is crucial to CAD. It is a challenging task to quickly locate the exact positions of lung nodules. In this paper, a novel automated pulmonary nodule detection framework with 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to assist the CT reading process. Firstly, we adjust the structure of Faster R-CNN with two region proposal networks and a deconvolutional layer to detect nodule candidates, and then three models are trained for three kinds of slices for later result fusion. Secondly, a boosting architecture based on 2D CNN is designed for false positive reduction, which is a classifier to distinguish true nodules from the candidates. The misclassified samples are still kept for retraining a model which boosts the sensitivity for pulmonary nodule detection. Finally, the results of these networks are fused to vote out the final classification results. Extensive experiments are conducted on LUNA16, and the sensitivity of nodule candidate detection achieves 86.42%. For the false positive reduction, the sensitivity reaches 73.4% and 74.4% at 1/8 and 1/4 FPs/scan, respectively. It illustrates that the proposed method can obviously achieve accurate pulmonary nodule detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Distant supervised relation extraction is an important task in the field of natural language processing. There are two main shortcomings for most state-of-the-art methods. One is that they take all sentences of an entity pair as input, which would result in a large computational cost. But in fact, few of most relevant sentences are enough to recognize the relation of an entity pair. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel hierarchical selective attention network for relation extraction under distant supervision. Our model first selects most relevant sentences by taking coarse sentence-level attention on all sentences of an entity pair and then employs word-level attention to construct sentence representations and fine sentence-level attention to aggregate these sentence representations. Experimental results on a widely used dataset demonstrate that our method performs significantly better than most of existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uyghur text localization in complex background images is a significant research for Uyghur image content analysis. In this paper, we propose a robust Uyghur text localization method in complex background images and provide a CPU-GPU heterogeneous parallelization scheme. Firstly, a multi-color-channel enhanced maximally stable extremal region is used to extract components in images, which is robust to blur and low contrast. Secondly, a two-stage component classification system is used to filter out non-text components. Finally, a component connected graph algorithm is proposed to construct text lines. Experiments on the proposed dataset demonstrate that our algorithm compares favorably with the state-of-the-art algorithms when handling Uyghur texts. Besides, the heterogeneous parallel implementation achieves 12.5 times speedup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of mobile devices is producing a new wave of mobile visual search applications that enable users to sense their surroundings with smart phones. As the particular challenges of mobile visual search, achieving high recognition bitrate becomes the consistent target of existed related works. In this paper, we explore to holistically exploit the deep learning-based hashing methods for more robust and instant mobile visual search. Firstly, we present a comprehensive survey of the existed deep learning based hashing methods, which showcases their remarkable power of automatic learning highly robust and compact binary code representation for visual search. Furthermore, in order to implement the deep learning hashing on computation and memory constrained mobile device, we investigate the deep learning optimization works to accelerate the computation and reduce the model size. Finally, we demonstrate a case study of deep learning hashing based mobile visual search system. The evaluations show that the proposed system can significantly improve 70% accuracy in MAP than traditional methods, and only needs less than one second computation time on the ordinary mobile phone. Finally, with the comprehensive study, we discuss the open issues and future research directions of deep learning hashing for mobile visual search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to maximize the operation profit while maintaining the service quality, an effective energy management scheme is highly needed for the Photovoltaic-assisted Charging Station (PVCS). Considering the uncertainty of Electric Vehicle (EV) charging demand and PV power output, it will be challenging to determine the charging power for EVs to make informed real-time decisions. In this study, an online energy management method leveraging both offline optimization and online learning is proposed. In order to maximize the self-consumption of Photovoltaic (PV) energy and decide the power supplied from the power grid with Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing, here online learning is coupled with the rule-based decision-making to obtain a real-time online algorithm. The knowledge base for online learning is derived and updated from the results of offline optimization after every operation day. The PVCS located at workplace parking lots is used as an example to test the proposed method. The simulation results show that the method can be implemented without the information on future PV power and charging demand. The obtained results are close to the optimal results from offline optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate skin lesion segmentation in dermoscopic images is crucial to the early diagnosis of skin cancers. However, it remains a challenging task due to fuzzy lesion boundaries, irregular lesion shapes, and the existence of various interference factors. In this paper, a novel Attention Synergy Network (AS-Net) is developed to enhance the discriminative ability for skin lesion segmentation by combining both spatial and channel attention mechanisms. The spatial attention path captures lesion-related features in the spatial dimension while the channel attention path selectively emphasizes discriminative features in the channel dimension. The synergy module is designed to optimally integrate both spatial and channel information, and a weighted binary cross-entropy loss function is introduced to emphasize the foreground lesion region. Comprehensive experiments indicate that our proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance with the highest overall score in the ISIC2017 challenge, and outperforms several popular deep neural networks on both ISIC2018 and PH2 datasets. • Proposes AS-Net to enhance the discriminative ability for skin lesion segmentation. • Combines spatial and channel attentions for feature learning of skin lesions. • A weighted loss function is presented to emphasize the skin lesion region. • Our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three publicly available datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] PM is an ideal candidate for co-digestion with MAW. [•] The optimal COD ratio of PM:MAW for anaerobic digestion is 1.0:1.5. [•] The structure and composition of bacterial communities varied in the early and late stage. [•] The type of main OTUs did not differ much among tanks with different ratios of PM to MAW, only the proportion is different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We propose an efficient 3D residual neural network for brain tumor segmentation. • We propose a fusion loss function based on Dice and Cross-entropy. • We introduce a concise but effective post-processing method. • The evaluation is performed on the BRATS 2018 dataset. • The results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches. Brain tumors are the most aggressive and mortal cancers, which lead to short life expectancy. A reliable and efficient automatic or semi-automatic segmentation method is significant for clinical practice. In recent years, deep learning-based methods achieve great success in brain tumor segmentation. However, due to the limitation of parameters and computational complexity, there is still much room for improvement in these methods. In this paper, we propose an efficient 3D residual neural network (ERV-Net) for brain tumor segmentation, which has less computational complexity and GPU memory consumption. In ERV-Net, a computation-efficient network, 3D ShuffleNetV2, is firstly utilized as encoder to reduce GPU memory and improve the efficiency of ERV-Net, and then the decoder with residual blocks (Res-decoder) is introduced to avoid degradation. Furthermore, a fusion loss function, which is composed of Dice loss and Cross-entropy loss, is developed to solve the problems of network convergence and data imbalance. Moreover, a concise and effective post-processing method is proposed to refine the coarse segmentation result of ERV-Net. The experimental results on the dataset of multimodal brain tumor segmentation challenge 2018 (BRATS 2018) demonstrate that ERV-Net achieves the best performance with Dice of 81.8%, 91.21% and 86.62% and Hausdorff distance of 2.70 mm, 3.88 mm and 6.79 mm for enhancing tumor, whole tumor and tumor core, respectively. Besides, ERV-Net also achieves high efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]