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The identification of critical nodes is important for safe operation and accident prevention in power grids. With the accelerated development of renewable energies, the uncertainty of renewable energy has brought greater challenges to the node importance assessment of the power system. The electrical spreading probability method is proposed in this paper to identify the critical nodes in the power grid containing renewable energy. First, the uncertainty factors of renewable energy are established through probability density functions, and Monte Carlo simulation and stochastic DC optimum power flow are adopted to effectively deal with the impact of uncertain power output from solar and wind energies. Then, considering the system topology and load loss after cascading failures calculated by Monte Carlo simulation, a method is proposed to calculate the probability of nodes being infected. Finally, according to the Susceptible–Infected model, a method depending on the propagation ability of nodes is proposed to identify the critical nodes in the complex power system. The effectiveness of the proposed ESP method is verified through simulation examples of the modified IEEE39 power system and the modified IEEE118 power system. • An electrical spreading probability method is proposed. • By adopting the ESP method, a more accurate assessment result can be obtained. • More effectively eliminate the uncertainty brought by renewable energy integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to explore the neural mechanism in Chronic prostatitis/Chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS) using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. The functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed on 31 male CP/CPPS-patients and 31 age and education matched male healthy controls on a 3-T magnetic resonance imaging unit. A two-sample t-test was adopted to reveal the regional homogeneity between the patients and healthy controls. The mean regional homogeneity values in the alerted brain regions of patients were correlated with the clinical measurements by using Pearson's correlation analyses. The CP/CPPS-patients had significantly decreased regional homogeneity in the bilateral anterior cingulate cortices, insular cortices and right medial prefrontal cortex, while significantly increased regional homogeneity in the brainstem and right thalamus compared with the healthy controls. In the CP/CPPS-patients, the mean regional homogeneity value in the left anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral insular cortices and brainstem were respectively correlated with the National Institutes of Health Chronic Prostatitis Symptom Index total score and pain subscale. These brain regions are important in the pain modulation process. Therefore, an impaired pain modulatory system, either by decreased descending pain inhibition or enhanced pain facilitation, may explain the pain symptoms in CP/CPPS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glioma detection and segmentation is a challenging task for radiologists and clinicians. The research reported in this paper seeks to develop a better clinical decision support algorithm for clinicians diagnosis. This paper presents a probabilistic method for detection and segmentation between abnormal tissue regions and brain tumour (tumour core and edema) portions from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). A framework is constructed to learn structure of undirected graphical models that can represent the spatial relationships among variables and apply it to glioma segmentation. Compared with the pixel of image, the superpixel is more consistent with human visual cognition and contains less redundancy, thus, the superpixels are considered as the basic unit of structure learning and glioma segmentation scheme. ℓ1-regularization techniques are applied to learn the appropriate structure for modeling graphical models. Conditional Random Fields (CRF) are used to model the spatial interactions among image superpixel regions and their measurements. A number of features including statistics features, the combined features from the local binary pattern as well as gray level run length, curve features, and fractal features were extracted from each superpixel. The features are then passed by ℓ1-regularization to ensure a robust classification. The proposed method is compared with support vector machine and Fuzzy c-means to classify each superpixel into normal and abnormal tissue. The proposed system is tested for the presence of low grade as well as high grade glioma tumors on images collected from BRATS2013, BRATS2015 data set and Henan Provincial People’s Hospital (HNPPH) data set. The experiments performed provides similarity between segmented and truth image up to 91.5% by correlation method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenal success and popularity of peer-to-peer (p2p) streaming over the last decade took many providers, researchers, as well as the mass, by surprise. It would become the dominant type of traffic over the Internet in the very near future. The released Windows Vista contains its own P2P networking system. Though P2P streaming has become one of the most attractive network applications, it is still awaiting some technological breakthroughs. P2P streaming faces very different challenges from other P2P applications, such as file download. In live P2P streaming, the stringent real-time performance requirement in terms of bandwidth and latency is one of the challenges it faces. In addition, frequent joining and leaving of the autonomous end-hosts have more significant impact on the system performance. So the churn problem and reconstruction due to uncertainty are key challenges of P2P streaming. A number of solutions were proposed which did not take all the factors into account. This paper presents IAM (IP Address Matching), a novel protocol for P2P live streaming system. For overlay structure, neighbor selection algorithm-FAMM (Forward Address Maximum Matching), which allows the peer choose the close peers as neighbors, is proposed. In this mechanism peer selects neighbors by matching IP address in regular expression. IP address is assigned by area basically, so the closer the peers are, the more the same bits of IP address they have. Peer chooses the first m (m > 0) peers whose IP address has same bits with it as the neighbors. Meanwhile, the latency is generally low. FAMM just likes the DHT routing. As managing peer failures and proper recovery are of critical importance for a robust P2P streaming system, a new peer exception mechanism is also proposed which is the other central issue of the IAM. According to the different error information which the peer receives, it detects the departure or failure of the neighbor intelligently and recovers from an unstable state promptly. To evaluate the performance of the IAM, we have conducted extensive simulations and real-network experiment. The results indicate that IAM shortens the latency and is robust to the dynamic peers. It achieves superior comprehensive performance over Random scheme. It is proved effective in the real-network environment, and the latency of recovery is shortened significantly which is only 25% of that with the usual mechanism, as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, deep learning (DNN) based methods have made leapfrogging level breakthroughs in detecting cardiac arrhythmias as the cost effectiveness of arithmetic power, and data size has broken through the tipping point. However, the inability of these methods to provide a basis for modeling decisions limits clinicians' confidence on such methods. In this paper, a Gate Recurrent Unit (GRU) and decision tree fusion model, referred to as (T-GRU), was designed to explore the problem of arrhythmia recognition and to improve the credibility of deep learning methods. The fusion model multipathway processing time-frequency domain featured the introduction of decision tree probability analysis of frequency domain features, the regularization of GRU model parameters and weight control to improve the decision tree model output weights. The MIT-BIH arrhythmia database was used for validation. Results showed that the low-frequency band features dominated the model prediction. The fusion model had an accuracy of 98.31%, sensitivity of 96.85%, specificity of 98.81%, and precision of 96.73%, indicating its high reliability and clinical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image enhancement technology is often used to improve the quality of medical images and helps doctors or expert systems identify and diagnose diseases. This paper aimed at the characteristics of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with complex and difficult-to-enhance details and to propose a nonsubsampled contourlet transform- (NSCT-) based enhancement algorithm called MIE-NSCT. NSCT was used for MRI sub-band decomposition. For high-pass sub-bands, four fuzzy rules were proposed to enhance multiscale and multidirectional edge contour details from adjacent eight directions, whilst for low-pass sub-bands, a new adaptive histogram enhancement algorithm was proposed. The problem of noise amplification and loss of details during the enhancement process was solved. The algorithm was verified on the public dataset BraTS2017 and compared with other advanced methods. Experimental results showed that MIE-NSCT had obvious advantages in improving the quality of medical images, and high-quality medical images showed enhanced performance in grading tumour. MIE-NSCT is suitable for integration into an interactive expert system to provide support for the visualization of disease diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amide proton transfer (APT) imaging is a noninvasive molecular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique based on the chemical exchange-dependent saturation transfer mechanism. The purpose of this study was to investigate the diagnostic performance of APT MRI in detecting intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) at hyperacute, acute and subacute stages by comparing with susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI). APT MRI and SWI were performed on 33 included patients with ICH by using a 3-T MRI unit. A two-sided Mann-Whitney U test was used to detect differences in APT-weighted (APTw) and SWI signal intensities of ICH at hyperacute, acute and subacute stages. Receiver operating characteristic analysis was used to assess the diagnostic utilities of APT MRI and SWI. Our results showed that APT MRI could detect ICH at hyperacute, acute and subacute stages. Therefore, APTw signal intensity may serve as a reliable, noninvasive imaging biomarker for detecting ICH at hyperacute, acute and subacute stages. Moreover, APT MRI could provide additional information for the ICH compared with SWI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To establish a radiomics nomogram by integrating clinical risk factors and radiomics features extracted from digital mammography (MG) images for pre-operative prediction of axillary lymph node (ALN) metastasis in breast cancer. 216 patients with breast cancer lesions confirmed by surgical excision pathology were divided into the primary cohort (n = 144) and validation cohort (n = 72). Radiomics features were extracted from craniocaudal (CC) view of mammograms, and radiomics features selection were performed using the methods of ANOVA F-value and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator; then a radiomics signature was constructed with the method of support vector machine. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to establish a radiomics nomogram based on the combination of radiomics signature and clinical factors. The C-index and calibration curves were derived based on the regression analysis both in the primary and validation cohorts. 95 of 216 patients were confirmed with ALN metastasis by pathology, and 52 cases were diagnosed as ALN metastasis based on MG-reported criteria. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of MG-reported criteria were 42.7%, 90.8%, 24.1% and 0.666 (95% confidence interval: 0.591–0.741]. The radiomics nomogram, comprising progesterone receptor status, molecular subtype and radiomics signature, showed good calibration and better favorite performance for the metastatic ALN detection (AUC 0.883 and 0.863 in the primary and validation cohorts) than each independent clinical features (AUC 0.707 and 0.657 in the primary and validation cohorts) and radiomics signature (AUC 0.876 and 0.862 in the primary and validation cohorts). The MG-based radiomics nomogram could be used as a non-invasive and reliable tool in predicting ALN metastasis and may facilitate to assist clinicians for pre-operative decision-making. ALN status remains among the most important breast cancer prognostic factors and is essential for making treatment decisions. However, the value of detecting metastatic ALN by MG is very limited. The studies on pre-operative ALN metastasis prediction using the method of MG-based radiomics in breast cancer are very few. Therefore, we studied whether MG-based radiomics nomogram could be used as a predictive biomarker for the detection of metastatic ALN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]