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Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many works have been published proposing solutions to the problems that arose in this scenario. In this vein, one of the topics that attracted the most attention is the development of computer-based strategies to detect COVID-19 from thoracic medical imaging, such as chest X-ray (CXR) and computerized tomography scan (CT scan). By searching for works already published on this theme, we can easily find thousands of them. This is partly explained by the fact that the most severe worldwide pandemic emerged amid the technological advances recently achieved, and also considering the technical facilities to deal with the large amount of data produced in this context. Even though several of these works describe important advances, we cannot overlook the fact that others only use well-known methods and techniques without a more relevant and critical contribution. Hence, differentiating the works with the most relevant contributions is not a trivial task. The number of citations obtained by a paper is probably the most straightforward and intuitive way to verify its impact on the research community. Aiming to help researchers in this scenario, we present a review of the top-100 most cited papers in this field of investigation according to the Google Scholar search engine. We evaluate the distribution of the top-100 papers taking into account some important aspects, such as the type of medical imaging explored, learning settings, segmentation strategy, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), and finally, the dataset and code availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a summary of a special issue in the journal Applied Sciences titled "Artificial Intelligence Technology in Medical Image Analysis." The special issue explores the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in medical imaging and its impact on diagnostic and therapeutic processes. The use of AI-powered tools in image interpretation has shown exceptional capabilities in detecting and diagnosing medical conditions from imaging data, particularly in radiology. AI also contributes to improving image quality, automating routine tasks, and streamlining healthcare workflows. However, challenges such as data privacy, ethics, and regulatory frameworks need to be addressed for responsible implementation. The special issue includes several research papers that present advancements in automated medical decision support, age estimation, quality assurance, orthotic insole recommendation, tumor identification, thalamus segmentation, medical image classification, hyperparameter optimization, lung disease classification, and thoracic cavity segmentation. These papers demonstrate the potential of AI in improving accuracy, efficiency, and personalized treatment in medical image analysis. The integration of AI into healthcare requires collaboration between AI researchers, healthcare professionals, and regulatory bodies to ensure responsible and effective deployment. The future of AI in medical image analysis holds promise for improved diagnostic accuracy, early disease detection, and personalized treatment strategies. [Extracted from the article]

The rapid development of deep learning in medical imaging has significantly enhanced the capabilities of artificial intelligence while simultaneously introducing challenges, including the need for vast amounts of training data and the labor-intensive tasks of labeling and segmentation. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have emerged as a solution, offering synthetic image generation for data augmentation and streamlining medical image processing tasks through models such as cGAN, CycleGAN, and StyleGAN. These innovations not only improve the efficiency of image augmentation, reconstruction, and segmentation, but also pave the way for unsupervised anomaly detection, markedly reducing the reliance on labeled datasets. Our investigation into GANs in medical imaging addresses their varied architectures, the considerations for selecting appropriate GAN models, and the nuances of model training and performance evaluation. This paper aims to provide radiologists who are new to GAN technology with a thorough understanding, guiding them through the practical application and evaluation of GANs in brain imaging with two illustrative examples using CycleGAN and pixel2style2pixel (pSp)-combined StyleGAN. It offers a comprehensive exploration of the transformative potential of GANs in medical imaging research. Ultimately, this paper strives to equip radiologists with the knowledge to effectively utilize GANs, encouraging further research and application within the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalized orthopedic devices are increasingly favored for their potential to enhance long-term treatment success. Despite significant advancements across various disciplines, the seamless integration and full automation of personalized orthopedic treatments remain elusive. This paper identifies key interdisciplinary gaps in integrating and automating advanced technologies for personalized orthopedic treatment. It begins by outlining the standard clinical practices in orthopedic treatments and the extent of personalization achievable. The paper then explores recent innovations in artificial intelligence, biomaterials, genomic and proteomic analyses, lab-on-a-chip, medical imaging, image-based biomechanical finite element modeling, biomimicry, 3D printing and bioprinting, and implantable sensors, emphasizing their contributions to personalized treatments. Tentative strategies or solutions are proposed to address the interdisciplinary gaps by utilizing innovative technologies. The key findings highlight the need for the non-invasive quantitative assessment of bone quality, patient-specific biocompatibility, and device designs that address individual biological and mechanical conditions. This comprehensive review underscores the transformative potential of these technologies and the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration to integrate and automate them into a cohesive, intelligent system for personalized orthopedic treatments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oncology has emerged as a crucial field of study in the domain of medicine. Computed tomography has gained widespread adoption as a radiological modality for the identification and characterisation of pathologies, particularly in oncology, enabling precise identification of affected organs and tissues. However, achieving accurate liver segmentation in computed tomography scans remains a challenge due to the presence of artefacts and the varying densities of soft tissues and adjacent organs. This paper compares artificial intelligence algorithms and traditional medical image processing techniques to assist radiologists in liver segmentation in computed tomography scans and evaluates their accuracy and efficiency. Despite notable progress in the field, the limited availability of public datasets remains a significant barrier to broad participation in research studies and replication of methodologies. Future directions should focus on increasing the accessibility of public datasets, establishing standardised evaluation metrics, and advancing the development of three-dimensional segmentation techniques. In addition, maintaining a collaborative relationship between technological advances and medical expertise is essential to ensure that these innovations not only achieve technical accuracy, but also remain aligned with clinical needs and realities. This synergy ensures their applicability and effectiveness in real-world healthcare environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image diagnosis using deep learning has shown significant promise in clinical medicine. However, it often encounters two major difficulties in real-world applications: (1) domain shift, which invalidates the trained model on new datasets, and (2) class imbalance problems leading to model biases towards majority classes. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a transfer learning solution, named Dynamic Weighting Translation Transfer Learning (DTTL), for imbalanced medical image classification. The approach is grounded in information and entropy theory and comprises three modules: Cross-domain Discriminability Adaptation (CDA), Dynamic Domain Translation (DDT), and Balanced Target Learning (BTL). CDA connects discriminative feature learning between source and target domains using a synthetic discriminability loss and a domain-invariant feature learning loss. The DDT unit develops a dynamic translation process for imbalanced classes between two domains, utilizing a confidence-based selection approach to select the most useful synthesized images to create a pseudo-labeled balanced target domain. Finally, the BTL unit performs supervised learning on the reassembled target set to obtain the final diagnostic model. This paper delves into maximizing the entropy of class distributions, while simultaneously minimizing the cross-entropy between the source and target domains to reduce domain discrepancies. By incorporating entropy concepts into our framework, our method not only significantly enhances medical image classification in practical settings but also innovates the application of entropy and information theory within deep learning and medical image processing realms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DTTL achieves the best performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods for imbalanced medical image classification tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing dominance of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, the important prospects for their application have extended to various medical fields, including domains such as in vitro diagnosis, intelligent rehabilitation, medical imaging, and prognosis. Breast cancer is a common malignancy that critically affects women's physical and mental health. Early breast cancer screening—through mammography, ultrasound, or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)—can substantially improve the prognosis for breast cancer patients. AI applications have shown excellent performance in various image recognition tasks, and their use in breast cancer screening has been explored in numerous studies. This paper introduces relevant AI techniques and their applications in the field of medical imaging of the breast (mammography and ultrasound), specifically in terms of identifying, segmenting, and classifying lesions; assessing breast cancer risk; and improving image quality. Focusing on medical imaging for breast cancer, this paper also reviews related challenges and prospects for AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an editorial introducing a special issue of the journal Sensors on the topic of "Machine Learning Methods for Biomedical Data Analysis." The editorial highlights the importance of machine learning in analyzing complex biomedical data and its applications in various areas such as medical decision making, radiological image segmentation, and track prediction for medical imaging. The special issue received submissions from researchers around the world, covering topics like biomedical diagnostics, biomedical care tools, health monitoring, industrial applications, and others. The editorial concludes by stating that the collection of papers provides a reference for the current state of the art and a starting point for future advanced methods in the field. [Extracted from the article]

The study of human torso medical image segmentation is significant for computer-aided diagnosis of human examination, disease tracking, and disease prevention and treatment. In this paper, two application tasks are designed for torso medical images: the abdominal multi-organ segmentation task and the spine segmentation task. For this reason, this paper proposes a net-work model CI-UNet improve the accuracy of edge segmentation. CI-UNet is a U-shaped network structure consisting of encoding and decoding networks. Firstly, it replaces UNet's double convolutional backbone network with a VGG16 network loaded with Transfer Learning. It feeds image information from two adjacent layers in the VGG16 network into the decoding grid via information aggregation blocks. Secondly, Polarized Self-Attention is added at the decoding network and the hopping connection, which allows the network to focus on the compelling features of the image. Finally, the image information is decoded by convolution and Up-sampling several times to obtain the segmentation results. CI-UNet was tested in the abdominal multi-organ segmentation task using the Chaos (Combined CT-MR Healthy Abdominal Organ Segmentation) open challenge dataset and compared with UNet, Attention UNet, PSPNet, DeepLabv3+ prediction networks, and dedicated network for MRI images. The experimental results showed that the average intersegmental union (mIoU) and average pixel accuracy (mPA) of organ segmentation were 82.33% and 90.10%, respectively, higher than the above comparison network. Meanwhile, we used CI-UNet for the spine dataset of the Guizhou branch of Beijing Jishuitan Hospital. The average intersegmental union (mIoU) and average pixel accuracy (mPA) of organ segmentation were 87.97% and 93.48%, respectively, which were approved by the physicians for both tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a barrage of primary research and reviews. We investigated the publishing process, time and resource wasting, and assessed the methodological quality of the reviews on artificial intelligence techniques to diagnose COVID-19 in medical images. We searched nine databases from inception until 1 September 2020. Two independent reviewers did all steps of identification, extraction, and methodological credibility assessment of records. Out of 725 records, 22 reviews analysing 165 primary studies met the inclusion criteria. This review covers 174,277 participants in total, including 19,170 diagnosed with COVID-19. The methodological credibility of all eligible studies was rated as critically low: 95% of papers had significant flaws in reporting quality. On average, 7.24 (range: 0–45) new papers were included in each subsequent review, and 14% of studies did not include any new paper into consideration. Almost three-quarters of the studies included less than 10% of available studies. More than half of the reviews did not comment on the previously published reviews at all. Much wasting time and resources could be avoided if referring to previous reviews and following methodological guidelines. Such information chaos is alarming. It is high time to draw conclusions from what we experienced and prepare for future pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms have revolutionized the medical image segmentation processes. Thus, the precise segmentation of organs and their lesions may contribute to an efficient diagnostics process and a more effective selection of targeted therapies, as well as increasing the effectiveness of the training process. In this context, AI may contribute to the automatization of the image scan segmentation process and increase the quality of the resulting 3D objects, which may lead to the generation of more realistic virtual objects. In this paper, we focus on the AI-based solutions applied in medical image scan segmentation and intelligent visual content generation, i.e., computer-generated three-dimensional (3D) images in the context of extended reality (XR). We consider different types of neural networks used with a special emphasis on the learning rules applied, taking into account algorithm accuracy and performance, as well as open data availability. This paper attempts to summarize the current development of AI-based segmentation methods in medical imaging and intelligent visual content generation that are applied in XR. It concludes with possible developments and open challenges in AI applications in extended reality-based solutions. Finally, future lines of research and development directions of artificial intelligence applications, both in medical image segmentation and extended reality-based medical solutions, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Despite multiple standardized interpretation criteria (SICs) for imaging response assessment in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), these systems remain relatively underutilized. This underutilization may in part relate to the fact that the relevant information has been published in disparate journals over multiple decades. This paper aims to review the SICs available for use in interpreting post-treatment FDG PET/CT in patients with HNSCC. We evaluate each SIC in the context of eight desired traits. Selecting a SIC that best matches the needs of one's practice is expected to facilitate multidisciplinary buy-in and maximize the likelihood of successful implementation. Introduction: There is growing interest in the development and application of standardized imaging criteria (SIC), to minimize variability and improve the reproducibility of image interpretation in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Methods: "Squamous cell carcinoma" AND "standardized interpretation criteria" OR "radiographic response assessment" were searched using PubMed and Google Scholar for articles published between 2009 and 2024, returning 56 publications. After abstract review, 18 were selected for further evaluation, and 6 different SICs (i.e., PERCIST, Porceddu, Hopkins, NI-RADS, modified Deauville, and Cuneo) were included in this review. Each SIC is evaluated in the context of 8 desired traits of a standardized reporting system. Results: Two SICs have societal endorsements (i.e., PERCIST, NI-RADS); four can be used in the evaluation of locoregional and systemic disease (i.e., PERCIST, Hopkins, NI-RADS, Cuneo), and four have specific categories for equivocal imaging results (i.e., Porceddu, NI-RADS, modified Deauville, and Cuneo). All demonstrated areas for future improvement in the context of the 8 desired traits. Conclusion: Multiple SICs have been developed for and demonstrated value in HNSCC post-treatment imaging; however, these systems remain underutilized. Selecting an SIC with features that best match the needs of one's practice is expected to maximize the likelihood of successful implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the continuous advancement of deep learning technology, U-Net–based algorithms for image denoising play a crucial role in medical image processing. However, most U-Net-based medical image denoising algorithms typically have large parameter sizes, which poses significant limitations in practical applications where computational resources are limited or large-scale patient data processing are required. In this paper, we propose a medical image denoising algorithm called AsymUNet, developed using an asymmetric U-Net framework and a spatially rearranged multilayer perceptron (MLP). AsymUNet utilizes an asymmetric U-Net to reduce the computational burden, while a multiscale feature fusion module enhances the feature interaction between the encoder and decoder. To better preserve the image details, spatially rearranged MLP blocks serve as the core building blocks of AsymUNet. These blocks effectively extract both the local and global features of the image, reducing the model's reliance on prior knowledge of the image and further accelerating the training and inference processes. Experimental results demonstrate that AsymUNet achieves superior performance metrics and visual results compared with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liver segmentation technologies play vital roles in clinical diagnosis, disease monitoring, and surgical planning due to the complex anatomical structure and physiological functions of the liver. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the developments, challenges, and future directions in liver segmentation technology. We systematically analyzed high-quality research published between 2014 and 2024, focusing on liver segmentation methods, public datasets, and evaluation metrics. This review highlights the transition from manual to semi-automatic and fully automatic segmentation methods, describes the capabilities and limitations of available technologies, and provides future outlooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image denoising has numerous real-world applications. Despite their widespread use, existing medical image denoising methods fail to address complex noise patterns and typically generate artifacts in numerous cases. This paper proposes a novel medical image denoising method that learns denoising using an end-to-end learning strategy. Furthermore, the proposed model introduces a novel deep–wider residual block to capture long-distance pixel dependencies for medical image denoising. Additionally, this study proposes leveraging multi-head attention-guided image reconstruction to effectively denoise medical images. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method outperforms existing qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods for numerous medical image modalities. The proposed method can outperform state-of-the-art models for various medical image modalities. It illustrates a significant performance gain over its counterparts, with a cumulative PSNR score of 8.79 dB. The proposed method can also denoise noisy real-world medical images and improve clinical application performance such as abnormality detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of data across multiple domains necessitates the adoption of machine learning models that respect user privacy and data security, particularly in sensitive scenarios like surveillance and medical imaging. Federated learning (FL) offers a promising solution by decentralizing the learning process, allowing multiple participants to collaboratively train a model without sharing their data. However, when applied to complex tasks such as object detection, standard FL frameworks can fall short in balancing the dual demands of high accuracy and stringent privacy. This paper introduces a sophisticated federated object detection framework that incorporates advanced differential privacy mechanisms to enhance privacy protection. Our framework is designed to work effectively across heterogeneous and potentially large-scale datasets, characteristic of real-world environments. It integrates a novel adaptive differential privacy model that strategically adjusts the noise scale during the training process based on the sensitivity of the features being learned and the progression of the model's accuracy. We present a detailed methodology that includes a privacy budget management system, which optimally allocates and tracks privacy expenditure throughout training cycles. Additionally, our approach employs a hybrid model aggregation technique that not only ensures robust privacy guarantees but also mitigates the degradation of object detection performance typically associated with DP. The effectiveness of our framework is demonstrated through extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, including COCO and PASCAL VOC. Our results show that our framework not only adheres to strict DP standards but also achieves near-state-of-the-art object detection performance, underscoring its practical applicability. For example, in some settings, our method can lower the privacy success rate by 40% while maintaining high model accuracy. This study makes significant strides in advancing the field of privacy-preserving machine learning, especially in applications where user privacy cannot be compromised. The proposed framework sets a new benchmark for implementing federated learning in complex, privacy-sensitive tasks and opens avenues for future research in secure, decentralized machine learning technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate medical image segmentation can assist doctors in observing lesion areas and making precise judgments. Effectively utilizing important multi-scale semantic information in local and global contexts is key to improving segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we present a multi-scale dual attention network (MSDA-Net), which enhances feature representation under different receptive fields and effectively utilizes the important multi-scale semantic information from both local and global contexts in medical images. MSDA-Net is a typical encoder–decoder structure and introduces a multi-receptive field densely connected module (MRD) in the decoder. This module captures semantic information across various receptive fields and utilizes dense connections to provide comprehensive and detailed semantic representations. Furthermore, a parallel dual-branch attention module (PDA), incorporating spatial and channel attention, focuses intensively on detailed features within lesion areas. This module enhances feature representation, facilitates the identification of disease boundaries, and improves the accuracy of segmentation. To validate the effectiveness of MSDA-Net, we conducted performance analyses on the CVC-ClinicDB, 2018 Data Science Bowl, ISIC 2018, and colon cancer slice datasets. We also compared our method with U-Net, UNet++, and other methods. The experimental results unequivocally demonstrate that MSDA-Net outperforms these methods, showcasing its superior performance in medical image segmentation tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White blood cell (WBC) classification is pivotal in medical image analysis, playing a critical role in the precise diagnosis and monitoring of diseases. This paper presents a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture designed specifically for the classification of WBC images. Our model, trained on an extensive dataset, automates the extraction of discriminative features essential for accurate subtype identification. We conducted comprehensive experiments on a publicly available image dataset to validate the efficacy of our methodology. Comparative analysis with state-of-the-art methods shows that our approach significantly outperforms existing models in accurately categorizing WBCs into their respective subtypes. An in-depth analysis of the features learned by the CNN reveals key insights into the morphological traits—such as shape, size, and texture—that contribute to its classification accuracy. Importantly, the model demonstrates robust generalization capabilities, suggesting its high potential for real-world clinical implementation. Our findings indicate that the proposed CNN architecture can substantially enhance the precision and efficiency of WBC subtype identification, offering significant improvements in medical diagnostics and patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dual-energy CT (DECT) imaging has broadened the potential of CT imaging by offering multiple postprocessing datasets with a single acquisition at more than one energy level. DECT shows profound capabilities to improve diagnosis based on its superior material differentiation and its quantitative value. However, the potential of dual-energy imaging remains relatively untapped, possibly due to its intricate workflow and the intrinsic technical limitations of DECT. Knowing the clinical advantages of dual-energy imaging and recognizing its limitations and pitfalls is necessary for an appropriate clinical use. The aims of this paper are to review the physical and technical bases of DECT acquisition and analysis, to discuss the advantages and limitations of DECT in different clinical scenarios, to review the technical constraints in material labeling and quantification, and to evaluate the cutting-edge applications of DECT imaging, including artificial intelligence, qualitative and quantitative imaging biomarkers, and DECT-derived radiomics and radiogenomics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fusion of multi-modal medical images has great significance for comprehensive diagnosis and treatment. However, the large differences between the various modalities of medical images make multi-modal medical image fusion a great challenge. This paper proposes a novel multi-scale fusion network based on multi-dimensional dynamic convolution and residual hybrid transformer, which has better capability for feature extraction and context modeling and improves the fusion performance. Specifically, the proposed network exploits multi-dimensional dynamic convolution that introduces four attention mechanisms corresponding to four different dimensions of the convolutional kernel to extract more detailed information. Meanwhile, a residual hybrid transformer is designed, which activates more pixels to participate in the fusion process by channel attention, window attention, and overlapping cross attention, thereby strengthening the long-range dependence between different modes and enhancing the connection of global context information. A loss function, including perceptual loss and structural similarity loss, is designed, where the former enhances the visual reality and perceptual details of the fused image, and the latter enables the model to learn structural textures. The whole network adopts a multi-scale architecture and uses an unsupervised end-to-end method to realize multi-modal image fusion. Finally, our method is tested qualitatively and quantitatively on mainstream datasets. The fusion results indicate that our method achieves high scores in most quantitative indicators and satisfactory performance in visual qualitative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: In this study, after conducting a comprehensive review of 1356 papers that evaluated the diagnostic performance of deep learning (DL) methods based on medical images for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the findings showed a pooled sensitivity of 89% (95% CI: 87–91), a specificity of 90% (95% CI: 87–92), and an AUC of 0.95 (95% CI: 0.93–0.97). In addition, both the DL methods and human clinicians demonstrated similar levels of performance in HCC detection, with receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) values of 0.97 (95% CI: 0.95–0.98) for both groups, indicating no discernible difference. Although the heterogeneity was obvious, the utilization of DL methods for diagnosing HCC through medical images has shown promising outcomes. (1) Background: The aim of our research was to systematically review papers specifically focused on the hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) diagnostic performance of DL methods based on medical images. (2) Materials: To identify related studies, a comprehensive search was conducted in prominent databases, including Embase, IEEE, PubMed, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Library. The search was limited to studies published before 3 July 2023. The inclusion criteria consisted of studies that either developed or utilized DL methods to diagnose HCC using medical images. To extract data, binary information on diagnostic accuracy was collected to determine the outcomes of interest, namely, the sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve (AUC). (3) Results: Among the forty-eight initially identified eligible studies, thirty studies were included in the meta-analysis. The pooled sensitivity was 89% (95% CI: 87–91), the specificity was 90% (95% CI: 87–92), and the AUC was 0.95 (95% CI: 0.93–0.97). Analyses of subgroups based on medical image methods (contrast-enhanced and non-contrast-enhanced images), imaging modalities (ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging, and computed tomography), and comparisons between DL methods and clinicians consistently showed the acceptable diagnostic performance of DL models. The publication bias and high heterogeneity observed between studies and subgroups can potentially result in an overestimation of the diagnostic accuracy of DL methods in medical imaging. (4) Conclusions: To improve future studies, it would be advantageous to establish more rigorous reporting standards that specifically address the challenges associated with DL research in this particular field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical imaging and deep learning models are essential to the early identification and diagnosis of brain cancers, facilitating timely intervention and improving patient outcomes. This research paper investigates the integration of YOLOv5, a state-of-the-art object detection framework, with non-local neural networks (NLNNs) to improve brain tumor detection's robustness and accuracy. This study begins by curating a comprehensive dataset comprising brain MRI scans from various sources. To facilitate effective fusion, the YOLOv5 and NLNNs, K-means+, and spatial pyramid pooling fast+ (SPPF+) modules are integrated within a unified framework. The brain tumor dataset is used to refine the YOLOv5 model through the application of transfer learning techniques, adapting it specifically to the task of tumor detection. The results indicate that the combination of YOLOv5 and other modules results in enhanced detection capabilities in comparison to the utilization of YOLOv5 exclusively, proving recall rates of 86% and 83% respectively. Moreover, the research explores the interpretability aspect of the combined model. By visualizing the attention maps generated by the NLNNs module, the regions of interest associated with tumor presence are highlighted, aiding in the understanding and validation of the decision-making procedure of the methodology. Additionally, the impact of hyperparameters, such as NLNNs kernel size, fusion strategy, and training data augmentation, is investigated to optimize the performance of the combined model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of medical image classification models necessitates a substantial number of labeled images for model training. In real-world scenarios, sample sizes are typically limited and labeled samples often constitute only a small portion of the dataset. This paper aims to investigate a collaborative similarity learning strategy that optimizes pseudo-labels to enhance model accuracy and expedite its convergence, known as the joint similarity learning framework. By integrating semantic similarity and instance similarity, the pseudo-labels are mutually refined to ensure their quality during initial training. Furthermore, the similarity score is utilized as a weight to guide samples away from misclassification predictions during the classification process. To enhance the model's generalization ability, an adaptive consistency constraint is introduced into the loss function to improve performance on untrained datasets. The model achieved a satisfactory accuracy of 93.65% at 80% labeling ratio, comparable to supervised learning methods' performance. Even with very low labeling ratio (e.g., 5%), the model still attained an accuracy of 74.28%. Comparison with other techniques such as Mean Teacher and FixMatch revealed that our approach significantly outperforms them in medical image classification tasks through improving accuracy by approximately 2%, demonstrating this framework's leadership in medical image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precise medical image segmentation of regions of interest (ROIs) is crucial for accurate disease diagnosis and progression assessment. However, acquiring high-quality annotated data at the pixel level poses a significant challenge due to the resource-intensive nature of this process. This scarcity of high-quality annotated data results in few-shot scenarios, which are highly prevalent in clinical applications. To address this obstacle, this paper introduces Agent-Guided SAM (AGSAM), an innovative approach that transforms the Segment Anything Model (SAM) into a fully automated segmentation method by automating prompt generation. Capitalizing on the pre-trained feature extraction and decoding capabilities of SAM-Med2D, AGSAM circumvents the need for manual prompt engineering, ensuring adaptability across diverse segmentation methods. Furthermore, the proposed feature augmentation convolution module (FACM) enhances model accuracy by promoting stable feature representations. Experimental evaluations demonstrate AGSAM's consistent superiority over other methods across various metrics. These findings highlight AGSAM's efficacy in tackling the challenges associated with limited annotated data while achieving high-quality medical image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of deep learning (DL) has revolutionized medical imaging, offering unprecedented avenues for accurate disease classification and diagnosis. DL models have shown remarkable promise for classifying brain tumors from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans. However, despite their impressive performance, the opaque nature of DL models poses challenges in understanding their decision-making mechanisms, particularly crucial in medical contexts where interpretability is essential. This paper explores the intersection of medical image analysis and DL interpretability, aiming to elucidate the decision-making rationale of DL models in brain tumor classification. Leveraging ten state-of-the-art DL frameworks with transfer learning, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation encompassing both classification accuracy and interpretability. These models underwent thorough training, testing, and fine-tuning, resulting in EfficientNetB0, DenseNet121, and Xception outperforming the other models. These top-performing models were examined using adaptive path-based techniques to understand the underlying decision-making mechanisms. Grad-CAM and Grad-CAM++ highlighted critical image regions where the models identified patterns and features associated with each class of the brain tumor. The regions where the models identified patterns and features correspond visually to the regions where the tumors are located in the images. This result shows that DL models learn important features and patterns in the regions where tumors are located for decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung cancer is identified by the uncontrolled proliferation of cells in lung tissues. The timely detection of malignant cells in the lungs, crucial for processes such as oxygen provision and carbon dioxide elimination in the human body, is imperative. The application of deep learning for discerning lymph node involvement in CT scans and histopathological images has garnered widespread attention due to its potential impact on patient diagnosis and treatment. This paper suggests employing DenseNet for lung cancer detection, leveraging its ability to transmit learned features backward through each layer continuously. This characteristic not only reduces model parameters but also enhances the learning of local features, facilitating a better comprehension of the structural complexity and uneven distribution in CT scans and histopathological cancer images. Furthermore, DenseNet accompanied by an attention mechanism (ATT-DenseNet) allows the model to focus on specific parts of an image, giving more weight to relevant regions. Compared to existing algorithms, the ATT-DenseNet demonstrates a remarkable enhancement in accuracy, precision, recall, and the F1-Score. It achieves an average improvement of 20% in accuracy, 19.66% in precision, 24.33% in recall, and 22.33% in the F1-Score across these metrics. The motivation behind the research is to leverage deep learning technologies to enhance the precision and reliability of lung cancer diagnostics, thus addressing the gap in early detection and treatment. This pursuit is driven by the potential of deep learning models, like DenseNet, to provide significant improvements in analyzing complex medical images for better clinical outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung cancer, a prevalent and life-threatening condition, necessitates early detection for effective intervention. Considering the recent advancements in deep learning techniques, particularly in medical image analysis, which offer unparalleled accuracy and efficiency, in this paper, we propose a method for the automated identification of cancerous cells in lung tissue images. We explore various deep learning architectures with the objective of identifying the most effective one based on both quantitative and qualitative assessments. In particular, we assess qualitative outcomes by incorporating the concept of prediction explainability, enabling the visualization of areas within tissue images deemed relevant to the presence of lung cancer by the model. The experimental analysis, conducted on a dataset comprising 15,000 lung tissue images, demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method, yielding an accuracy rate of 0.99. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review furnishes an exhaustive analysis of the latest advancements in deep learning techniques applied to whole slide images (WSIs) in the context of cancer prognosis, focusing specifically on publications from 2019 through 2023. The swiftly maturing field of deep learning, in combination with the burgeoning availability of WSIs, manifests significant potential in revolutionizing the predictive modeling of cancer prognosis. In light of the swift evolution and profound complexity of the field, it is essential to systematically review contemporary methodologies and critically appraise their ramifications. This review elucidates the prevailing landscape of this intersection, cataloging major developments, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, and providing discerning insights into prospective directions. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of the field aims to be presented, which can serve as a critical resource for researchers and clinicians, ultimately enhancing the quality of cancer care outcomes. This review's findings accentuate the need for ongoing scrutiny of recent studies in this rapidly progressing field to discern patterns, understand breakthroughs, and navigate future research trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer is an incurable disease based on unregulated cell division. Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer in women worldwide, and early detection can lower death rates. Medical images can be used to find important information for locating and diagnosing breast cancer. The best information for identifying and diagnosing breast cancer comes from medical pictures. This paper reviews the history of the discipline and examines how deep learning and machine learning are applied to detect breast cancer. The classification of breast cancer, using several medical imaging modalities, is covered in this paper. Numerous medical imaging modalities' classification systems for tumors, non-tumors, and dense masses are thoroughly explained. The differences between various medical image types are initially examined using a variety of study datasets. Following that, numerous machine learning and deep learning methods exist for diagnosing and classifying breast cancer. Finally, this review addressed the challenges of categorization and detection and the best results of different approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, image segmentation based on deep learning has been widely used in medical imaging, automatic driving, monitoring and security. In the fields of monitoring and security, the specific location of a person is detected by image segmentation, and it is segmented from the background to analyze the specific actions of the person. However, in low-illumination conditions, it is a great challenge to the traditional image-segmentation algorithms. Unfortunately, a scene with low light or even no light at night is often encountered in monitoring and security. Given this background, this paper proposes a multi-modal fusion network based on the encoder and decoder structure. The encoder, which contains a two-branch swin-transformer backbone instead of the traditional convolutional neural network, fuses the RGB and depth features with a multiscale fusion attention block. The decoder is also made up of the swin-transformer backbone and is finally connected via the encoder with several residual connections, which are proven to be beneficial in improving the accuracy of the network. Furthermore, this paper first proposes the low light–human segmentation (LLHS) dataset of portrait segmentation, with aligned depth and RGB images with fine annotation under low illuminance, by combining the traditional monocular camera and a depth camera with active structured light. The network is also tested in different levels of illumination. Experimental results show that the proposed network has good robustness in the scene of human segmentation in a low-light environment with varying illumination. The mean Intersection over Union (mIoU), which is often used to evaluate the performance of image segmentation model, of the Swin-MFA in the LLHS dataset is 81.0, is better than those of ACNet, 3DGNN, ESANet, RedNet and RFNet at the same level of depth in a mixed multi-modal network and is far ahead of the segmentation algorithm that only uses RGB features, so it has important practical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, according to the publications of both the Global Cancer Observatory (GCO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), breast cancer (BC) represents one of the highest prevalent cancers in women worldwide. Almost 47% of the world's 100,000 people are diagnosed with breast cancer, among females. Moreover, BC prevails among 38.8% of Egyptian women having cancer. Current deep learning developments have shown the common usage of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for analyzing medical images. Unlike the randomly initialized ones, pre-trained natural image database (ImageNet)-based CNN models may become successfully fine-tuned to obtain improved findings. To conduct the automatic detection of BC by the CBIS-DDSM dataset, a CNN model, namely CoroNet, is proposed. It relies on the Xception architecture, which has been pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset and has been fully trained on whole-image BC according to mammograms. The convolutional design method is used in this paper, since it performs better than the other methods. On the prepared dataset, CoroNet was trained and tested. Experiments show that in a four-class classification, it may attain an overall accuracy of 94.92% (benign mass vs. malignant mass) and (benign calcification vs. malignant calcification). CoroNet has a classification accuracy of 88.67% for the two-class cases (calcifications and masses). The paper concluded that there are promising outcomes that could be improved because more training data are available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DNN-based systems have demonstrated unprecedented performance in terms of accuracy and speed over the past decade. However, recent work has shown that such models may not be sufficiently robust during the inference process. Furthermore, due to the data-driven learning nature of DNNs, designing interpretable and generalizable networks is a major challenge, especially when considering critical applications such as medical computer-aided diagnostics (CAD) and other medical imaging tasks. Within this context, a line of approaches incorporating prior knowledge domain information into deep learning methods has recently emerged. In particular, many of these approaches utilize known physics-based forward imaging models, aimed at improving the stability and generalization ability of DNNs for medical imaging applications. In this paper, we review recent work focused on such physics-based or physics-prior-based learning for a variety of imaging modalities and medical applications. We discuss how the inclusion of such physics priors to the training process and/or network architecture supports their stability and generalization ability. Moreover, we propose a new physics-based approach, in which an explicit physics prior, which describes the relation between the input and output of the forward imaging model, is included as an additional input into the network architecture. Furthermore, we propose a tailored training process for this extended architecture, for which training data are generated with perturbed physical priors that are also integrated into the network. Within the scope of this approach, we offer a problem formulation for a regression task with a highly nonlinear forward model and highlight possible useful applications for this task. Finally, we briefly discuss future challenges for physics-informed deep learning in the context of medical imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wound care professionals provide proper diagnosis and treatment with heavy reliance on images and image documentation. Segmentation of wound boundaries in images is a key component of the care and diagnosis protocol since it is important to estimate the area of the wound and provide quantitative measurement for the treatment. Unfortunately, this process is very time-consuming and requires a high level of expertise, hence the need for automatic wound measurement methods. Recently, automatic wound segmentation methods based on deep learning have shown promising performance; yet, they heavily rely on large training datasets. A few wound image datasets were published including the Diabetic Foot Ulcer Challenge dataset, the Medetec wound dataset, and WoundDB. Existing public wound image datasets suffer from small size and a lack of annotation. There is a need to build a fully annotated dataset to benchmark wound segmentation methods. To address these issues, we propose the Foot Ulcer Segmentation Challenge (FUSeg), organized in conjunction with the 2021 International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI). It contains 1210 pixel-wise annotated foot ulcer images collected over 2 years from 889 patients. The submitted algorithms are reviewed in this paper and the dataset can be accessed through the Foot Ulcer Segmentation Challenge website. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chest X-ray imaging plays a vital and indispensable role in the diagnosis of lungs, enabling healthcare professionals to swiftly and accurately identify lung abnormalities. Deep learning (DL) approaches have attained popularity in recent years and have shown promising results in automated medical image analysis, particularly in the field of chest radiology. This paper presents a novel DL framework specifically designed for the multi-class diagnosis of lung diseases, including fibrosis, opacity, tuberculosis, normal, viral pneumonia, and COVID-19 pneumonia, using chest X-ray images, aiming to address the need for efficient and accessible diagnostic tools. The framework employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture with custom blocks to enhance the feature maps designed to learn discriminative features from chest X-ray images. The proposed DL framework is evaluated on a large-scale dataset, demonstrating superior performance in the multi-class diagnosis of the lung. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the presented approach, thorough experiments are conducted against pre-existing state-of-the-art methods, revealing significant accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity improvements. The findings of the study showcased remarkable accuracy, achieving 98.88%. The performance metrics for precision, recall, F1-score, and Area Under the Curve (AUC) averaged 0.9870, 0.9904, 0.9887, and 0.9939 across the six-class categorization system. This research contributes to the field of medical imaging and provides a foundation for future advancements in DL-based diagnostic systems for lung diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel U-Net model incorporating a hybrid attention mechanism for automating the segmentation of sub-retinal layers in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images. OCT is an ophthalmology tool that provides detailed insights into retinal structures. Manual segmentation of these layers is time-consuming and subjective, calling for automated solutions. Our proposed model combines edge and spatial attention mechanisms with the U-Net architecture to improve segmentation accuracy. By leveraging attention mechanisms, the U-Net focuses selectively on image features. Extensive evaluations using datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing approaches, making it a valuable tool for medical professionals. The study also highlights the model's robustness through performance metrics such as an average Dice score of 94.99%, Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) of 97.00%, and Strength of Agreement (SOA) classifications like "Almost Perfect", "Excellent", and "Very Strong". This advanced predictive model shows promise in expediting processes and enhancing the precision of ocular imaging in real-world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical imaging is crucial for the detection and diagnosis of breast cancer. Artificial intelligence and computer vision have rapidly become popular in medical image analyses thanks to technological advancements. To improve the effectiveness and efficiency of medical diagnosis and treatment, significant efforts have been made in the literature on medical image processing, segmentation, volumetric analysis, and prediction. This paper is interested in the development of a prediction pipeline for breast cancer studies based on 3D computed tomography (CT) scans. Several algorithms were designed and integrated to classify the suitability of the CT slices. The selected slices from patients were then further processed in the pipeline. This was followed by data generalization and volume segmentation to reduce the computation complexity. The selected input data were fed into a 3D U-Net architecture in the pipeline for analysis and volumetric predictions of cancer tumors. Three types of U-Net models were designed and compared. The experimental results show that Model 1 of U-Net obtained the highest accuracy at 91.44% with the highest memory usage; Model 2 had the lowest memory usage with the lowest accuracy at 85.18%; and Model 3 achieved a balanced performance in accuracy and memory usage, which is a more suitable configuration for the developed pipeline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To develop diagnostic imaging approaches, this paper emphasizes the transformational potential of merging geophysics with health sciences. Diagnostic imaging technology improvements have transformed the health sciences by enabling earlier and more precise disease identification, individualized therapy, and improved patient care. This review article examines the connection between geophysics and diagnostic imaging in the field of health sciences. Geophysics, which is typically used to explore Earth's subsurface, has provided new uses of its methodology in the medical field, providing innovative solutions to pressing medical problems. The article examines the different geophysical techniques like electrical imaging, seismic imaging, and geophysics and their corresponding imaging techniques used in health sciences like tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound imaging, etc. The examination includes the description, similarities, differences, and challenges associated with these techniques and how modified geophysical techniques can be used in imaging methods in health sciences. Examining the progression of each method from geophysics to medical imaging and its contributions to illness diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring are highlighted. Also, the utilization of geophysical data analysis techniques like signal processing and inversion techniques in image processing in health sciences has been briefly explained, along with different mathematical and computational tools in geophysics and how they can be implemented for image processing in health sciences. The key findings include the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence in geophysics-driven medical imaging, demonstrating the revolutionary effects of data-driven methods on precision, speed, and predictive modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is known that, with the development of artificial intelligence science in recent years, it has started to be used in all areas of life. Due to the increase in diseases that threaten human life, such as epidemics and cancer, more attention has been paid to research in this field. Especially in the field of biomedical image processing, very successful results have been obtained in recent years with the use of deep learning methods. For this study, MR images are utilized to diagnose brain tumors. To assist doctors and radiologists in automatic brain tumor diagnosis and to overcome the need for manual diagnosis, a brain MR image automated classification system is being developed. The data used in the study are open access data obtained from the Kaggle library. This paper presents a novel approach for classifying brain MR images utilizing a dataset of 7022 MR images. To give an unbiased evaluation of the dataset, it is divided into a 40% test and 60% training set. Respectively, VGG, ResNet, DenseNet and SqueezeNet architectures are trained and used for feature extraction from brain MRI images. In order to classify the extracted features, machine learning methods (Support Vector Machines, K-Nearest Neighbors, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Linear Regression Analysis) are applied first, then an ensemble learning method is applied and the best validation method is selected. In addition, parameter optimization is applied to the trained CNN algorithms. In order to develop the proposed methods, the Python software program was used in the training and testing phases of the models, and the classification success rates were mutually evaluated. Among the results found, it can see that the ResNet architecture reached 100% accuracy. The data obtained as a result of the study were compared with the results of similar studies. In conclusion, the techniques and methods applied highlight their effectiveness in accurately classifying brain MRI images and their potential to improve diagnostic capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the three most serious and deadly cancers in the world is colorectal cancer. The most crucial stage, like with any cancer, is early diagnosis. In the medical industry, artificial intelligence (AI) has recently made tremendous strides and showing promise for clinical applications. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) applications have recently gained popularity in the analysis of medical texts and images due to the benefits and achievements they have made in the early diagnosis of cancerous tissues and organs. In this paper, we intend to systematically review the state-of-the-art research on AI-based ML and DL techniques applied to the modeling of colorectal cancer. All research papers in the field of colorectal cancer are collected based on ML and DL techniques, and they are then classified into three categories: the aim of the prediction, the method of the prediction, and data samples. Following that, a thorough summary and a list of the studies gathered under each topic are provided. We conclude our study with a critical discussion of the challenges and opportunities in colorectal cancer prediction using ML and DL techniques by concentrating on the technical and medical points of view. Finally, we believe that our study will be helpful to scientists who are considering employing ML and DL methods to diagnose colorectal cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the medical field, 3D ultrasound reconstruction can visualize the internal structure of patients, which is very important for doctors to carry out correct analyses and diagnoses. Furthermore, medical 3D ultrasound images have been widely used in clinical disease diagnosis because they can more intuitively display the characteristics and spatial location information of the target. The traditional way to obtain 3D ultrasonic images is to use a 3D ultrasonic probe directly. Although freehand 3D ultrasound reconstruction is still in the research stage, a lot of research has recently been conducted on the freehand ultrasound reconstruction method based on wireless ultrasonic probe. In this paper, a wireless linear array probe is used to build a freehand acousto-optic positioning 3D ultrasonic imaging system. B-scan is considered the brightness scan. It is used for producing a 2D cross-section of the eye and its orbit. This system is used to collect and construct multiple 2D B-scans datasets for experiments. According to the experimental results, a freehand 3D ultrasonic reconstruction method based on depth learning is proposed, which is called sequence prediction reconstruction based on acoustic optical localization (SPRAO). SPRAO is an ultrasound reconstruction system which cannot be put into medical clinical use now. Compared with 3D reconstruction using a 3D ultrasound probe, SPRAO not only has a controllable scanning area, but also has a low cost. SPRAO solves some of the problems in the existing algorithms. Firstly, a 60 frames per second (FPS) B-scan sequence can be synthesized using a 12 FPS wireless ultrasonic probe through 2–3 acquisitions. It not only effectively reduces the requirement for the output frame rate of the ultrasonic probe, but also increases the moving speed of the wireless probe. Secondly, SPRAO analyzes the B-scans through speckle decorrelation to calibrate the acousto-optic auxiliary positioning information, while other algorithms have no solution to the cumulative error of the external auxiliary positioning device. Finally, long short-term memory (LSTM) is used to predict the spatial position and attitude of B-scans, and the calculation of pose deviation and speckle decorrelation is integrated into a 3D convolutional neural network (3DCNN). Prepare for real-time 3D reconstruction under the premise of accurate spatial pose of B-scans. At the end of this paper, SPRAO is compared with linear motion, IMU, speckle decorrelation, CNN and other methods. From the experimental results, it can be observed that the spatial pose deviation of B-scans output using SPRAO is the best of these methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a major reason of blindness around the world. The ophthalmologist manually analyzes the morphological alterations in veins of retina, and lesions in fundus images that is a time-taking, costly, and challenging procedure. It can be made easier with the assistance of computer aided diagnostic system (CADs) that are utilized for the diagnosis of DR lesions. Artificial intelligence (AI) based machine/deep learning methods performs vital role to increase the performance of the detection process, especially in the context of analyzing medical fundus images. In this paper, several current approaches of preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction/selection, and classification are discussed for the detection of DR lesions. This survey paper also includes a detailed description of DR datasets that are accessible by the researcher for the identification of DR lesions. The existing methods limitations and challenges are also addressed, which will assist invoice researchers to start their work in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a discussion about the fundamental principles of Analysis of Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) Systems for Medical Imaging and Computer-Assisted Interventions. The three key concepts of Analysis (Verification, Evaluation, and Validation) are introduced, illustrated with examples of systems using AR/VR, and defined. The concepts of system specifications, measurement accuracy, uncertainty, and observer variability are defined and related to the analysis principles. The concepts are illustrated with examples of AR/VR working systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, there is an increasing demand for remote monitoring technologies to reduce patient and provider exposure. One field that has an increasing potential is teleguided ultrasound, where telemedicine and point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) merge to create this new scope. Teleguided POCUS can minimize staff exposure while preserving patient safety and oversight during bedside procedures. In this paper, we propose the use of teleguided POCUS supported by AI technologies for the remote monitoring of COVID-19 patients by non-experienced personnel including self-monitoring by the patients themselves. Our hypothesis is that AI technologies can facilitate the remote monitoring of COVID-19 patients through the utilization of POCUS devices, even when operated by individuals without formal medical training. In pursuit of this goal, we performed a pilot analysis to evaluate the performance of users with different clinical backgrounds using a computer-based system for COVID-19 detection using lung ultrasound. The purpose of the analysis was to emphasize the potential of the proposed AI technology for improving diagnostic performance, especially for users with less experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in clinical diagnosis, treatment planning, and disease monitoring. The automatic segmentation method based on deep learning has developed rapidly, with segmentation results comparable to clinical experts for large objects, but the segmentation accuracy for small objects is still unsatisfactory. Current segmentation methods based on deep learning find it difficult to extract multiple scale features of medical images, leading to an insufficient detection capability for smaller objects. In this paper, we propose a context feature fusion and attention mechanism based network for small target segmentation in medical images called CFANet. CFANet is based on U-Net structure, including the encoder and the decoder, and incorporates two key modules, context feature fusion (CFF) and effective channel spatial attention (ECSA), in order to improve segmentation performance. The CFF module utilizes contextual information from different scales to enhance the representation of small targets. By fusing multi-scale features, the network captures local and global contextual cues, which are critical for accurate segmentation. The ECSA module further enhances the network's ability to capture long-range dependencies by incorporating attention mechanisms at the spatial and channel levels, which allows the network to focus on information-rich regions while suppressing irrelevant or noisy features. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging medical image datasets, namely ADAM, LUNA16, Thoracic OAR, and WORD. Experimental results show that CFANet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of segmentation accuracy and robustness. The proposed method achieves excellent performance in segmenting small targets in medical images, demonstrating its potential in various clinical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) advancements, especially deep learning, have significantly improved medical image processing and analysis in various tasks such as disease detection, classification, and anatomical structure segmentation. This work overviews fundamental concepts, state-of-the-art models, and publicly available datasets in the field of medical imaging. First, we introduce the types of learning problems commonly employed in medical image processing and then proceed to present an overview of commonly used deep learning methods, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and generative adversarial networks (GANs), with a focus on the image analysis task they are solving, including image classification, object detection/localization, segmentation, generation, and registration. Further, we highlight studies conducted in various application areas, encompassing neurology, brain imaging, retinal analysis, pulmonary imaging, digital pathology, breast imaging, cardiac imaging, bone analysis, abdominal imaging, and musculoskeletal imaging. The strengths and limitations of each method are carefully examined, and the paper identifies pertinent challenges that still require attention, such as the limited availability of annotated data, variability in medical images, and the interpretability issues. Finally, we discuss future research directions with a particular focus on developing explainable deep learning methods and integrating multi-modal data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image segmentation is crucial for medical image processing and the development of computer-aided diagnostics. In recent years, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely adopted for medical image segmentation and have achieved significant success. UNet, which is based on CNNs, is the mainstream method used for medical image segmentation. However, its performance suffers owing to its inability to capture long-range dependencies. Transformers were initially designed for Natural Language Processing (NLP), and sequence-to-sequence applications have demonstrated the ability to capture long-range dependencies. However, their abilities to acquire local information are limited. Hybrid architectures of CNNs and Transformer, such as TransUNet, have been proposed to benefit from Transformer's long-range dependencies and CNNs' low-level details. Nevertheless, automatic medical image segmentation remains a challenging task due to factors such as blurred boundaries, the low-contrast tissue environment, and in the context of ultrasound, issues like speckle noise and attenuation. In this paper, we propose a new model that combines the strengths of both CNNs and Transformer, with network architectural improvements designed to enrich the feature representation captured by the skip connections and the decoder. To this end, we devised a new attention module called Three-Level Attention (TLA). This module is composed of an Attention Gate (AG), channel attention, and spatial normalization mechanism. The AG preserves structural information, whereas channel attention helps to model the interdependencies between channels. Spatial normalization employs the spatial coefficient of the Transformer to improve spatial attention akin to TransNorm. To further improve the skip connection and reduce the semantic gap, skip connections between the encoder and decoder were redesigned in a manner similar to that of the UNet++ dense connection. Moreover, deep supervision using a side-output channel was introduced, analogous to BASNet, which was originally used for saliency predictions. Two datasets from different modalities, a CT scan dataset and an ultrasound dataset, were used to evaluate the proposed UNet architecture. The experimental results showed that our model consistently improved the prediction performance of the UNet across different datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a subfield of computer science that aims to implement computer systems that perform tasks that generally require human learning, reasoning, and perceptual abilities. AI is widely used in the medical field. The interpretation of medical images requires considerable effort, time, and skill. AI-aided interpretations, such as automated abnormal lesion detection and image classification, are promising areas of AI. However, when images with different characteristics are extracted, depending on the manufacturer and imaging environment, a so-called domain shift problem occurs in which the developed AI has a poor versatility. Domain adaptation is used to address this problem. Domain adaptation is a tool that generates a newly converted image which is suitable for other domains. It has also shown promise in reducing the differences in appearance among the images collected from different devices. Domain adaptation is expected to improve the reading accuracy of AI for heterogeneous image distributions in gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy and medical image analyses. In this paper, we review the history and basic characteristics of domain shift and domain adaptation. We also address their use in gastrointestinal endoscopy and the medical field more generally through published examples, perspectives, and future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to better preserve the anatomical structure information of Computed Tomography (CT) source images and highlight the metabolic information of lesion regions in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) source images, a hybrid multimodal medical image fusion method (LatLRR-GAN) based on Latent low-rank representation (LatLRR) and the dual discriminators Generative Adversarial Network (ED-D2GAN) is proposed. Firstly, considering the denoising capability of LatLRR, source images were decomposed by LatLRR. Secondly, the ED-D2GAN model was put forward as the low-rank region fusion method, which can fully extract the information contained by the low-rank region images. Among them, encoder and decoder networks were used in the generator; convolutional neural networks were also used in dual discriminators. Thirdly, a threshold adaptive weighting algorithm based on the region energy ratio is proposed as the salient region fusion rule, which can improve the overall sharpness of the fused image. The experimental results show that compared with the best methods of the other six methods, this paper is effective in multiple objective evaluation metrics, including the average gradient, edge intensity, information entropy, spatial frequency and standard deviation. The results of the two experiments are improved by 35.03%, 42.42%, 4.66%, 8.59% and 11.49% on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thoracic diseases refer to disorders that affect the lungs, heart, and other parts of the rib cage, such as pneumonia, novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), tuberculosis, cardiomegaly, and fracture. Millions of people die every year from thoracic diseases. Therefore, early detection of these diseases is essential and can save many lives. Earlier, only highly experienced radiologists examined thoracic diseases, but recent developments in image processing and deep learning techniques are opening the door for the automated detection of these diseases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review including: types of thoracic diseases; examination types of thoracic images; image pre-processing; models of deep learning applied to the detection of thoracic diseases (e.g., pneumonia, COVID-19, edema, fibrosis, tuberculosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and lung cancer); transfer learning background knowledge; ensemble learning; and future initiatives for improving the efficacy of deep learning models in applications that detect thoracic diseases. Through this survey paper, researchers may be able to gain an overall and systematic knowledge of deep learning applications in medical thoracic images. The review investigates a performance comparison of various models and a comparison of various datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of current radiomic and AI applications in veterinary diagnostic imaging. We discuss the essential elements of AI for veterinary practitioners with the aim of helping them make informed decisions in applying AI technologies to their practices and that veterinarians will play an integral role in ensuring the appropriate uses and suitable curation of data. The expertise of veterinary professionals will be vital to ensuring suitable data and, subsequently, AI that meets the needs of the profession. Great advances have been made in human health care in the application of radiomics and artificial intelligence (AI) in a variety of areas, ranging from hospital management and virtual assistants to remote patient monitoring and medical diagnostics and imaging. To improve accuracy and reproducibility, there has been a recent move to integrate radiomics and AI as tools to assist clinical decision making and to incorporate it into routine clinical workflows and diagnosis. Although lagging behind human medicine, the use of radiomics and AI in veterinary diagnostic imaging is becoming more frequent with an increasing number of reported applications. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of current radiomic and AI applications in veterinary diagnostic imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]