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A typical growth of cells inside tissue is normally known as a nodular entity. Lung nodule segmentation from computed tomography (CT) images becomes crucial for early lung cancer diagnosis. An issue that pertains to the segmentation of lung nodules is homogenous modular variants. The resemblance among nodules as well as among neighboring regions is very challenging to deal with. Here, we propose an end-to-end U-Net-based segmentation framework named DA-Net for efficient lung nodule segmentation. This method extracts rich features by integrating compactly and densely linked rich convolutional blocks merged with Atrous convolutions blocks to broaden the view of filters without dropping loss and coverage data. We first extract the lung's ROI images from the whole CT scan slices using standard image processing operations and k-means clustering. This reduces the search space of the model to only lungs where the nodules are present instead of the whole CT scan slice. The evaluation of the suggested model was performed through utilizing the LIDC-IDRI dataset. According to the results, we found that DA-Net showed good performance, achieving an 81% Dice score value and 71.6% IOU score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growth of artificial intelligence in healthcare and biomedical research, many researchers are interested in large amounts of data in hospitals and medical research centers. Then the need for remote medicine services and clinical data utilization are expanding. However, since the misuse and abuse of clinical data causes serious problems, the scope of its use is bound to have a limited range physically and logically. Then a security-enhanced data distribution system for medical deep web environments. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based clinical data management model named DeepBlockshield to prevent information leakage between the deep web and the surface web. Blockchain supports data integrity and user validation to support data sharing in closed networks. Meanwhile, the agent performs integrity verification between the blockchain and the deep web and strengthens the security between the surface web and the deep web. DeepBlockShield verifies the user's validity through the records of the deep web and blockchain. Furthermore, we wrap the results analyzed by the valid request into a web interface and provide information to the requester asynchronously. In the experiment, the block generation cycle and size on the delay time was analyzed for verifying the stability of the blockchain network. As a result, it showed that the proposed approach guarantees the integrity and availability of clinical data in the deep web environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the recent advances of information and communication technology, people communicate with each other through online communities or social networking services, such as PatientsLikeMe and Facebook. One of the key challenges in aspects of providing sustainable situation-aware services is how to utilize peoples’ experiences shared as reusable social-intelligence. If domain-specific collective intelligence is well constructed, the knowledge usages can be extended to situation-awareness-based personal situation understanding, and sustainable recommendation services with user intent. In this paper, we introduce a sustainable situation-awareness supporting framework based on text-mining techniques and a domain-specific knowledge model, the so-called Service Quality Model for Hospitals (SQM-H). Different from obtaining sustainable contexts from heterogeneous sensors surrounding users, it aggregates SQM-H based service-specific knowledge from online health communities. Our framework includes a set of components: data aggregation, text-mining, service quality analysis, and open Application Programming Interface (APIs) for recommendation services. Those components have been designed to deal with users’ immediate request, providing service quality related information reflected in collective intelligence and analyzed information based on that along with the SQM-H. As a proof of concept, we implemented a prototype system which interacts with users through smartphone user interface. Our framework supports qualitative and quantitative information based on SQM-H and statistical analyses for the given user queries. Through the implementation and user tests, we confirmed an increased knowledge support for decision-making and an easy mashup with provided Open APIs. We believe that the suggested situation-awareness supporting framework can be applied to numerous sustainable applications related to healthcare and wellness domain areas if domain-specific knowledge models are redesigned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]