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Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has been widely used to learn low-dimensional representations of data. However, NMF pays the same attention to all attributes of a data point, which inevitably leads to inaccurate representations. For example, in a human-face dataset, if an image contains a hat on a head, the hat should be removed or the importance of its corresponding attributes should be decreased during matrix factorization. This article proposes a new type of NMF called entropy weighted NMF (EWNMF), which uses an optimizable weight for each attribute of each data point to emphasize their importance. This process is achieved by adding an entropy regularizer to the cost function and then using the Lagrange multiplier method to solve the problem. Experimental results with several datasets demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The code developed in this study is available at https://github.com/Poisson-EM/Entropy-weighted-NMF.

A behavior description helps analyze tiny objects, similar objects, objects with weak visual information, and objects with similar visual information. It plays a fundamental role in the identification and classification of dynamic objects in microscopic videos. To this end, we propose foldover features to describe the behavior of dynamic objects. Foldover is defined as: Each frame of an object's motion is superimposed on the same spatial plane in the spacetime order of the motion, the result of the superposition is the foldover of the object's motion. Foldover of an object contains temporal information, spatial information, behavior features and static features. Therefore, the features extracted based on the foldover of the object are the foldover features. In this work, we first generate foldover for each object in microscopic videos in X, Y and Z directions, respectively. Then, we extract foldover features from the X, Y and Z directions with statistical methods, respectively. The core content of this paper is to construct the foldovers and extract the foldover features. Through these two steps, the temporal information, spatial information, behavior features and static features of the object are enhanced and included in the foldover features. Furthermore, the description of the behavior of dynamic objects by the foldover features is strengthened. Finally, we use four different classifiers to test the effectiveness of the proposed foldover features. In the experiment, we use a microscopic sperm video dataset to evaluate the proposed foldover features, including three types of 1374 sperms, and obtain the highest classification accuracy of 96.5%.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is associated with morphologic abnormalities of airways with various patterns and severities. However, the way of effectively representing these abnormalities is lacking and whether these abnormalities enable to distinguish COPD from healthy controls is unknown. We propose to use deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to assess 3D lung airway tree from the perspective of computer vision, thereby constructing models of identifying COPD. After extracting airway trees from CT images, snapshots of their 3D visualizations are obtained from ventral, dorsal and isometric views. Using snapshots of each view, one deep CNN model is constructed and further optimized by Bayesian optimization algorithm to indentify COPD. The majority voting of three views presents the final prediction. Finally, the class-discriminative localization maps have been drawn to visually explain the CNNs' decisions. The models trained with single view (ventral, dorsal and isometric) of colorful snapshots present the similar accuracy (ACC) (86.8%, 87.5% and 86.7%) and the model after voting achieves the ACC of 88.2%. The ACC of the final voting model using gray and binary snapshots achieves 88.6% and 86.4%, respectively. Our specially designed CNNs outperform the typical off-the-shelf CNNs and the pre-trained CNNs with fine tuning. The class-discriminative regions of COPD are mainly located at central airways; however, regions in HC are scattering and located at peripheral airways. It is feasible to identify COPD using snapshots of 3D lung airway tree extracted from CT images via deep CNN. The CNNs can represent the abnormalities of airway tree in COPD and make accurate CT-based diagnosis of COPD.

CT screening has been proven to be effective for diagnosing lung cancer at its early manifestation in the form of pulmonary nodules, thus decreasing the mortality. However, the exponential increase of image data makes their accurate assessment a very challenging task given that the number of radiologists is limited and they have been overworked. Recently, numerous methods, especially ones based on deep learning with convolutional neural network (CNN), have been developed to automatically detect and classify pulmonary nodules in medical images. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of these methods and their performances. First, we briefly introduce the fundamental knowledge of CNN as well as the reasons for their suitability to medical images analysis. Then, a brief description of various medical images datasets, as well as the environmental setup essential for facilitating lung nodule investigations with CNNs, is presented. Furthermore, comprehensive overviews of recent progress in pulmonary nodule analysis using CNNs are provided. Finally, existing challenges and promising directions for further improving the application of CNN to medical images analysis and pulmonary nodule assessment, in particular, are discussed. It is shown that CNNs have transformed greatly the early diagnosis and management of lung cancer. We believe that this review will provide all the medical research communities with the necessary knowledge to master the concept of CNN so as to utilize it for improving the overall human healthcare system.

In this paper, a novel microscopic machine vision system is proposed to solve a degradation monitoring problem of low-voltage electromagnetic coil insulation in practical industrial fields, where an ensemble learning approach in a compound membrane computing framework is newly introduced. This membrane computing framework is constituted by eight layers, 29 membranes, 72 objects, and 35 rules. In this framework, multiple machine learning methods, including classical pattern recognition methods and novel deep learning methods, are tested and compared. First, the most optimal feature extraction approaches are selected. Then, the selected approaches are fused together to achieve an even better monitoring performance. Third, a large number of experiments are used to evaluate and prove the usefulness and potential of the proposed system, where a mean accuracy of 61.4% is achieved on 1035 validation images of six degradation states with single state matching, and mean accuracies of 61.0% and 77.4% are achieved on 622 test images of six degradation states with single state matching and state range matching, respectively. Finally, a mechanical device is designed to apply the system to real industrial tasks.

Various deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used to distinguish between benign and malignant pulmonary nodules using CT images. However, single learner usually presents unsatisfied performance due to limited hypothesis space, or falling into local minima, or wrong selection of hypothesis space. To tackle these issues, we propose to build ensemble learners through fusing multiple deep CNN learners for pulmonary nodules classification. CT image patches of 743 nodules are extracted from LIDC-IDRI database and utilized. First, eight deep CNN learners with different architectures are trained and evaluated by 10-fold cross-validation. Each nodule has eight predictions from the eight primary learners. Second, we fuse these eight predictions by the strategies of majority voting (VOT), averaging (AVE), or machine learning. Specifically, different machine learning algorithms including K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), Decision Trees (DT), Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forests (RF), Gradient Boosting Regression Trees (GBRT) and Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) are implemented. Moreover, the correlation coefficients between the predictions of 10 ensemble learners are calculated, and the hierarchical clustering dendrogram is drawn. It is found that the ensemble learners achieve higher prediction accuracy (84.0% vs 81.7%) than single CNN learner. The overlap ratio among the 10 ensemble learners is much higher than that of the 8 primary learners (62.9% vs 33.2%). In addition, it is shown that ensemble learners are roughly divided into three categories: the first (SVM, MLP, GBRT and RF) achieves the best performance; the second (VOT and AVE) is better than the third (AdaBoost, DT, NB and KNN). VOT and AVE yield higher recall than the machine learning algorithms. These results indicate that ensemble learners based on multiple CNN learners can achieve better performances for pulmonary nodules classification using CT images and that preferred fusion strategies include SVM, MLP, GBRT and RF.