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Recent years have witnessed notable advancements in medical image segmentation through deep convolutional neural networks. However, a notable limitation lies in the local operation of convolution, which hinders the ability to fully exploit global semantic information. To overcome the challenges prevalent in medical image segmentation, the feature ensemble network with multi‐scale atrous transformer is proposed. At the core of the approach lies the multi‐scale contextual integration module, which is based on the multi‐scale atrous transformer and facilitates contextual integration of multi‐level features. To extract discriminative fine‐grained features of the target region, a hybrid attention mechanism that synergistically combines spatial and channel attention, thereby sharpening the model's focus on crucial target information within high‐level features, is incorporated. Additionally, the channel‐aware feature reconstruction module is introduced as an innovative component engineered to tackle feature similarity issues across different categories. This module performs feature reconstruction based on channel perception, effectively widening the feature gap between categories and enhancing the segmentation capability. It is worth mentioning that our approach surpasses the state‐of‐the‐art method using three benchmark datasets in medical image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic segmentation of renal tumours during renal cell carcinoma surgery can help doctors accurately locate the tumour region, protect the tissues and organs around the kidneys, enhance surgical efficiency, and reduce the possibility of leakage and misdiagnosis. However, since general polyp endoscopic image segmentation models have many problems when facing the task of renal tumour segmentation, there needs to be more research on the segmentation of endoscopic images of renal tumours. This paper proposes a multi‐scale dynamic segmentation kernel network for endoscopic image segmentation of kidney tumours. First, a spatial receptive field module is proposed to augment the feature information and improve the performance of the whole network. Second, an enhanced cross‐attention module is offered to attenuate the effect of a high‐similarity segmentation background. Finally, a multi‐scale dynamic segmentation kernel module is introduced to gradually refine the segmentation results from small to large sizes to obtain more accurate tumour boundaries. Extensive experiments on the established kidney tumour endoscopic dataset and publicly available endoscopic datasets show that this method exhibits enhanced performance and generalization capabilities compared to existing techniques. On this renal tumour dataset, MDSK‐Net achieved excellent results of 94.1% and 90.1% on mDice and mIoU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polyp segmentation in colorectal images is the most effective and necessary tool for the early detection of colorectal cancer, and deep learning has become popular for efficiently segmenting polyps. The complex morphological characteristics of polyps, such as the unclear boundary between polyps and mucosa, and the lack of training data could cause great difficulties in network fitting. Transformer-based semantic segmentation networks have achieved more promising performance than traditional convolutional neural networks. However, the dispersion of self-attention and the less accurate local feature recognition limit the further development and applications of Transformer-based networks. This paper proposes a novel Stepwise Attention Emphasis module to refocus self-attention for Transformer-based polyp segmentation in colorectal images, where a reverse fuse module is used to better fuse different levels of features. Furthermore, a new decoder network, called the densely smooth fusion decoder, is also proposed to enhance local details and provide more useful information from deep features to shallow features. Experimental comparisons are conducted, and result analysis shows that the proposed network achieves promising performance in both learning and generalization ability on public datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disease that causes a large number of deaths annually across the world is brain cancer and it has become an important research topic in the field of medical image processing in recent times. There are various techniques for the detection of brain tumors (BT) but magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) diagnosing techniques show superior performance in the prognosis and examination of brain tumors in the early stages. The manual detection of brain tumors by radiologists leads to many limitations like errors and lack of detection accuracy. Hence, there is a need for computer-aided diagnostic techniques to help radiologists in detecting brain tumors accurately from the MRI images. To make this process more effective, the implementation of an automated technique is a preferred choice. In this paper, an effective detection and classification technique Adaptive convolutional Autoencoder-based Snow Avalanches (ACAE-SA) Algorithm is proposed. This algorithm comprises an Adaptive CNN component and an Autoencoder to detect and categorize BT from the MRI images. To mitigate the computational complexities in these components a Snow Avalanches algorithm is integrated into this work as an optimization technique. For the validation of the proposed architecture two MRI image datasets namely figshare and BraTS 2018 are used. The proposed technique proved its effectiveness in the detection and classification of brain tumors from the MRI images and outperformed the state-of-the-art techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, with the expansion of technology and new architectures of deep learning, the accuracy of artificial intelligence methods in diagnosing diseases has increased. On the other hand, with the spread of new pandemic diseases such as Covid-19, timely and accurate diagnosis of the disease has become more important. Recently, proposed deep learning methods diagnose Covid-19 with acceptable accuracy but have expensive computational cost which could not distributed and implemented in edge devices. Sometimes the type of disease could be diagnosed by small models with few parameters. These small models can be placed in the fog or edge devices, and if they detect the disease with high confidence locally, the disease investigation request will not be sent to the cloud where the comprehensive and main trained model is located. Based on this idea; we proposed an ensemble of two deep learning models using boosting Shema named mobile COVID-Net, first a light weight MobileNet model designed and embedded in fog devices to diagnose pneumonia and Covid-19 which have similar symptoms with low computational cost and high confidence. If the embedded model fails to diagnose; a modified ResNet based neural network in the second layer designed to diagnose only Covid-19 with high precision in cloud, the distributed edge to cloud ensemble of neural network models trained and tested on publicly available dataset, has achieved a total accuracy of 93.8% for detection of Covid-19, in compare to 92.4% and 92% accuracy of COVID-Net and inception algorithms respectively. The most challenging part of the work is the accurate diagnosis of Covid-19 and pneumonia diseases from one another with the least amount of error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive disorders affect various cognitive functions that can have a substantial impact on individual’s daily life. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of such well-known cognitive disorders. Early detection and treatment of cognitive diseases using artificial intelligence can help contain them. However, the complex spatial relationships and long-range dependencies found in medical imaging data present challenges in achieving the objective. Moreover, for a few years, the application of transformers in imaging has emerged as a promising area of research. A reason can be transformer’s impressive capabilities of tackling spatial relationships and long-range dependency challenges in two ways, i.e., (1) using their self-attention mechanism to generate comprehensive features, and (2) capture complex patterns by incorporating global context and long-range dependencies. In this work, a Bi-Vision Transformer (BiViT) architecture is proposed for classifying different stages of AD, and multiple types of cognitive disorders from 2-dimensional MRI imaging data. More specifically, the transformer is composed of two novel modules, namely Mutual Latent Fusion (MLF) and Parallel Coupled Encoding Strategy (PCES), for effective feature learning. Two different datasets have been used to evaluate the performance of proposed BiViT-based architecture. The first dataset contain several classes such as mild or moderate demented stages of the AD. The other dataset is composed of samples from patients with AD and different cognitive disorders such as mild, early, or moderate impairments. For comprehensive comparison, a multiple transfer learning algorithm and a deep autoencoder have been each trained on both datasets. The results show that the proposed BiViT-based model achieves an accuracy of 96.38% on the AD dataset. However, when applied to cognitive disease data, the accuracy slightly decreases below 96% which can be resulted due to smaller amount of data and imbalance in data distribution. Nevertheless, given the results, it can be hypothesized that the proposed algorithm can perform better if the imbalanced distribution and limited availability problems in data can be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objective: Coronary artery disease remains a leading cause of mortality among individuals with cardiovascular conditions. The therapeutic use of bioresorbable vascular scaffolds (BVSs) through stent implantation is common, yet the effectiveness of current BVS segmentation techniques from Intravascular Optical Coherence Tomography (IVOCT) images is inadequate. Methods: This paper introduces an enhanced segmentation approach using a novel Wavelet-based U-shape network to address these challenges. We developed a Wavelet-based U-shape network that incorporates an Attention Gate (AG) and an Atrous Multi-scale Field Module (AMFM), designed to enhance the segmentation accuracy by improving the differentiation between the stent struts and the surrounding tissue. A unique wavelet fusion module mitigates the semantic gaps between different feature map branches, facilitating more effective feature integration. Results: Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model surpasses existing techniques in key metrics such as Dice coefficient, accuracy, sensitivity, and Intersection over Union (IoU), achieving scores of 85.10%, 99.77%, 86.93%, and 73.81%, respectively. The integration of AG, AMFM, and the fusion module played a crucial role in achieving these outcomes, indicating a significant enhancement in capturing detailed contextual information. Conclusion: The introduction of the Wavelet-based U-shape network marks a substantial improvement in the segmentation of BVSs in IVOCT images, suggesting potential benefits for clinical practices in coronary artery disease treatment. This approach may also be applicable to other intricate medical imaging segmentation tasks, indicating a broad scope for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the Circle of Willis, a critical vascular structure vital for cerebral blood supply. A modified novel dual‐pathway multi‐scale hierarchical upsampling network (HUNet) is presented, tailored explicitly for accurate segmentation of Circle of Willis anatomical components from medical imaging data. Evaluating both the multi‐label magnetic resonance angiography region of interest and the multi‐label magnetic resonance angiography whole brain‐case datasets, HUNet consistently outperforms the convolutional U‐net model, demonstrating superior capabilities and achieving higher accuracy across various classes. Additionally, the HUNet model achieves an exceptional dice similarity coefficient of 98.61 and 97.95, along with intersection over union scores of 73.32 and 85.76 in both the multi‐label magnetic resonance angiography region of interest and the multi‐label magnetic resonance angiography whole brain‐case datasets, respectively. These metrics highlight HUNet's exceptional performance in achieving precise and accurate segmentation of anatomical structures within the Circle of Willis, underscoring its robustness in medical image segmentation tasks. Visual representations substantiate HUNet's efficacy in delineating Circle of Willis structures, offering comprehensive insights into its superior performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doctors typically use non‐contrast‐enhanced computed tomography (NCECT) in the treatment of kidney cancer to map kidney and tumour structural information to functional imaging single‐photon emission computed tomography, which is then used to assess patient kidney function and predict postoperative recovery. However, the assessment of kidney function and formulation of surgical plans is constrained by the low contrast of tumours in NCECT, which hinders the acquisition of accurate tumour boundaries. Therefore, this study designed a radiomics feature‐enhanced level‐set evolution (RFLSE) to precisely segment small‐sample low‐contrast kidney tumours. Integration of high‐dimensional radiomics features into the level‐set energy function enhances the edge detection capability of low‐contrast kidney tumours. The use of sensitive radiomics features to control the regional term parameters achieves adaptive adjustment of the curve evolution amplitude, improving the level‐set segmentation process. The experimental data used low‐contrast, limited‐sample tumours provided by hospitals, as well as the public datasets BUSI18 and KiTS19. Comparative results with advanced energy functionals and deep learning models demonstrate the precision and robustness of RFLSE segmentation. Additionally, the application value of RFLSE in assisting doctors with accurately marking tumours and generating high‐quality pseudo‐labels for deep learning datasets is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) segmentation is an important task in ophthalmic medicine and is crucial for aiding glaucoma screening. With the development of smart healthcare and the increase of large datasets, there is an increasing number of research efforts targeting OD and OC segmentation, making it particularly important to provide a systematic review of the latest advances in the field. This paper presents a systematic review of commonly used datasets, evaluation metrics, and related research results in the field of OD and OC segmentation. The advantages and disadvantages of segmentation techniques based on traditional and deep learning methods are comparatively analysed. In addition, this study emphasizes the importance of OD and OC segmentation efforts in smart healthcare. Despite the technological advances, the lack of generalization capability is still a major obstacle limiting its clinical application. To address this issue, this study explores unsupervised domain adaptation methods to enhance the generalization performance of segmentation techniques and provide new strategies for clinical diagnosis. Finally, this paper discusses the challenges and future research directions faced by OD and OC segmentation when applied in the medical field to help readers comprehensively grasp the research dynamics in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel approach uses the V-Net architecture to segment pulmonary nodules from computed tomography (CT) scans, enhancing lung cancer detection's efficiency. Addressing lung cancer, a major global mortality cause, underscores the urgency for improved diagnostic methods. The aim of this research is to refine segmentation, a critical step for early cancer detection. The study leverages V-Net, a three-dimensional (3D) convolutional neural network (CNN) tailored for medical image segmentation, applied to lung nodule identification. It utilizes the LUNA16 dataset, containing 888 annotated CT images, for model training and evaluation. This dataset's variety of pulmonary conditions allows for a comprehensive method of assessment. The tailored V-Net architecture is optimized for lung nodule segmentation, with a focus on data preprocessing to elevate input image quality. Outcomes reveal significant progress in segmentation precision, achieving a loss score of 0.001 and a mIOU of 98%, setting new standards in the domain. Visuals of segmented lung nodules illustrate the method's effectiveness, indicating a promising avenue for early lung cancer detection and potentially better patient prognoses. The study contributes significantly to enhancing lung cancer diagnostic methodologies through advanced image analysis. An improved segmentation method based on V-Net architecture surpasses current techniques and encourages further deep learning exploration in medical diagnostics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brain tumors occur due to the expansion of abnormal cell tissues and can be malignant (cancerous) or benign (not cancerous). Numerous factors such as the position, size, and progression rate are considered while detecting and diagnosing brain tumors. Detecting brain tumors in their initial phases is vital for diagnosis where MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans play an important role. Over the years, deep learning models have been extensively used for medical image processing. The current study primarily investigates the novel Fine-Tuned Vision Transformer models (FTVTs)--FTVT-b16, FTVT-b32, FTVT-l16, FTVT-l32--for brain tumor classification, while also comparing them with other established deep learning models such as ResNet50, MobileNet-V2, and EfficientNet - B0. A dataset with 7,023 images (MRI scans) categorized into four different classes, namely, glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no tumor are used for classification. Further, the study presents a comparative analysis of these models including their accuracies and other evaluation metrics including recall, precision, and F1-score across each class. The deep learning models ResNet-50, EfficientNet-B0, and MobileNet-V2 obtained an accuracy of 96.5%, 95.1%, and 94.9%, respectively. Among all the FTVT models, FTVT-l16 model achieved a remarkable accuracy of 98.70% whereas other FTVT models FTVT-b16, FTVTb32, and FTVT-132 achieved an accuracy of 98.09%, 96.87%, 98.62%, respectively, hence proving the efficacy and robustness of FTVT's in medical image processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagnosing individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) accurately faces great challenges in clinical practice, primarily due to the data's high heterogeneity and limited sample size. To tackle this issue, the authors constructed a deep graph convolutional network (GCN) based on variable multi‐graph and multimodal data (VMM‐DGCN) for ASD diagnosis. Firstly, the functional connectivity matrix was constructed to extract primary features. Then, the authors constructed a variable multi‐graph construction strategy to capture the multi‐scale feature representations of each subject by utilising convolutional filters with varying kernel sizes. Furthermore, the authors brought the non‐imaging information into the feature representation at each scale and constructed multiple population graphs based on multimodal data by fully considering the correlation between subjects. After extracting the deeper features of population graphs using the deep GCN(DeepGCN), the authors fused the node features of multiple subgraphs to perform node classification tasks for typical control and ASD patients. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange I (ABIDE I) dataset, achieving an accuracy of 91.62% and an area under the curve value of 95.74%. These results demonstrated its outstanding performance compared to other ASD diagnostic algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world, with radiotherapy as one of the treatment options. Radiotherapy planning starts with delineating the affected area from healthy organs, called organs at risk (OAR). A new approach to automatic OAR segmentation in the chest cavity in Computed Tomography (CT) images is presented. The proposed approach is based on the modified U‐Net architecture with the ResNet‐34 encoder, which is the baseline adopted in this work. The new two‐branch CS‐SA U‐Net architecture is proposed, which consists of two parallel U‐Net models in which self‐attention blocks with cosine similarity as query‐key similarity function (CS‐SA) blocks are inserted between the encoder and decoder, which enabled the use of consistency regularisation. The proposed solution demonstrates state‐of‐the‐art performance for the problem of OAR segmentation in CT images on the publicly available SegTHOR benchmark dataset in terms of a Dice coefficient (oesophagus—0.8714, heart—0.9516, trachea—0.9286, aorta—0.9510) and Hausdorff distance (oesophagus—0.2541, heart—0.1514, trachea—0.1722, aorta—0.1114) and significantly outperforms the baseline. The current approach is demonstrated to be viable for improving the quality of OAR segmentation for radiotherapy planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) refers to a network of interconnected multimedia devices that communicate with each other over the Internet. Recently, smart healthcare has emerged as a significant application of the IoMT, particularly in the context of knowledge‐based learning systems. Smart healthcare systems leverage knowledge‐based learning to become more context‐aware, adaptable, and auditable while maintaining the ability to learn from historical data. In smart healthcare systems, devices capture images, such as X‐rays, Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The security and integrity of these images are crucial for the databases used in knowledge‐based learning systems to foster structured decision‐making and enhance the learning abilities of AI. Moreover, in knowledge‐driven systems, the storage and transmission of HD medical images exert a burden on the limited bandwidth of the communication channel, leading to data transmission delays. To address the security and latency concerns, this paper presents a lightweight medical image encryption scheme utilising bit‐plane decomposition and chaos theory. The results of the experiment yield entropy, energy, and correlation values of 7.999, 0.0156, and 0.0001, respectively. This validates the effectiveness of the encryption system proposed in this paper, which offers high‐quality encryption, a large key space, key sensitivity, and resistance to statistical attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the problems of the complex background of colorectal cancer tissue cell images and the difficulty of detection caused by the low differentiation of cancer cell regions, a deep learning method is used to detect the cancer cell regions. By integrating the skip feedback connection structure into U-Net and combining it with the Swin Transformer for feature extraction, we improve the multi-level feature extraction capabilities of the model. This algorithm enables end-to-end recognition of colorectal adenocarcinoma tissue images and achieves an accuracy of 95.8% on the NCT-CRC-HE-100K dataset, demonstrating its potential to significantly support colorectal cancer detection and treatment.Article Highlights: For the first time, the method of introducing the jump feedback connection structure of U-Net combined with the Swin Transformer backbone is used to recognize the pathological section cells of colorectal cancer with good results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commonly used automatic segmentation algorithms often have over-segmentation and error-segmentation problems when segmenting conglutinated bone fragments in computed tomography (CT) images. And the end face details of the fragments are lost in this process. At present, bone fragments are often manually segmented by doctors. This increases the workload of doctors and takes low efficiency and poor accuracy in bone segmentation. We propose an automatic bone fragment segmentation algorithm based on morphology to segment the conglutinated and separated bone fragments and reconstruct them in 2D and 3D spaces. The pixel classification and clustering method based on morphology are proposed in in the algorithm to identify the pixels in the fracture images. And a concave points detection method is proposed to segment the conglutination area of the fractured bone. This algorithm and two other commonly used algorithms are used in the experiment to segment the three typical fracture images. The segmentation results are quantitatively analyzed to demonstrate the advantages of the morphology algorithm. The morphology algorithm performs well in the metrics of Accuracy (.93 ±.07), Sensitivity (.92 ±.08), Dice coefficient (.92 ±.08) and Mean intersection over union (MIoU) (.92 ±.07). The segmentation results of this algorithm are closest to the manual segmentation results of doctors compared to the other two algorithms. We have demonstrated that the algorithm proposed in this paper has good segmentation accuracy for separated and conglutinated bone fragments. This algorithm significantly improves the segmentation accuracy and efficiency of bone fragments under complex fracture conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The incorporation of automatic segmentation methodologies into dental X-ray images refined the paradigms of clinical diagnostics and therapeutic planning by facilitating meticulous, pixel-level articulation of both dental structures and proximate tissues. This underpins the pillars of early pathological detection and meticulous disease progression monitoring. Nonetheless, conventional segmentation frameworks often encounter significant setbacks attributable to the intrinsic limitations of X-ray imaging, including compromised image fidelity, obscured delineation of structural boundaries, and the intricate anatomical structures of dental constituents such as pulp, enamel, and dentin. To surmount these impediments, we propose the Deformable Convolution and Mamba Integration Network, an innovative 2D dental X-ray image segmentation architecture, which amalgamates a Coalescent Structural Deformable Encoder, a Cognitively-Optimized Semantic Enhance Module, and a Hierarchical Convergence Decoder. Collectively, these components bolster the management of multi-scale global features, fortify the stability of feature representation, and refine the amalgamation of feature vectors. A comparative assessment against 14 baselines underscores its efficacy, registering a 0.95% enhancement in the Dice Coefficient and a diminution of the 95th percentile Hausdorff Distance to 7.494. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most common and rapidly spreading disease in the world is breast cancer. Most cases of breast cancer are observed in females. Breast cancer is controlled with early detection. Therefore, early detection and categorization of breast cancer are essential to enable patients to take the right course of treatment. Early discovery helps to manage many cases and lower the death rate. In this study, a brand-new Spider Monkey-based Recurrent Neural System (SMbRNS) is created for predicting breast cancer cells in an early stage. Breast mammography images are used in this instance as the dataset for the system. The breast dataset is also analyzed using the established SMbRNS function to detect and segregate the breast cancer-afflicted region efficiently. The developed model aims to enhance the segmented breast cancer results using spider monkey fitness. The developed method computes the chance of breast cancer using the dataset; segmented images are used for monitoring. Additionally, the Python code used to perform this strategy allows for evaluating the created model parameters against earlier research. The experimental results are validated with other prevailing models regarding the accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score to prove the efficiency. The designed model gained 99.82% accuracy and 99.12% precision for segmenting breast cancer. The current study model produces mammography with better accuracy for the segmentation of breast cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: The rapid development of deep learning techniques has greatly improved the performance of medical image segmentation, and medical image segmentation networks based on convolutional neural networks and Transformer have been widely used in this field. However, due to the limitation of the restricted receptive field of convolutional operation and the lack of local fine information extraction ability of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer, the current neural networks with pure convolutional or Transformer structure as the backbone still perform poorly in medical image segmentation. METHODS: In this paper, we propose FDB-Net (Fusion Double Branch Network, FDB-Net), a double branch medical image segmentation network combining CNN and Transformer, by using a CNN containing gnConv blocks and a Transformer containing Varied-Size Window Attention (VWA) blocks as the feature extraction backbone network, the dual-path encoder ensures that the network has a global receptive field as well as access to the target local detail features. We also propose a new feature fusion module (Deep Feature Fusion, DFF), which helps the image to simultaneously fuse features from two different structural encoders during the encoding process, ensuring the effective fusion of global and local information of the image. CONCLUSION: Our model achieves advanced results in all three typical tasks of medical image segmentation, which fully validates the effectiveness of FDB-Net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In clinical conditions limited by equipment, attaining lightweight skin lesion segmentation is pivotal as it facilitates the integration of the model into diverse medical devices, thereby enhancing operational efficiency. However, the lightweight design of the model may face accuracy degradation, especially when dealing with complex images such as skin lesion images with irregular regions, blurred boundaries, and oversized boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient lightweight attention network (ELANet) for the skin lesion segmentation task. In ELANet, two different attention mechanisms of the bilateral residual module (BRM) can achieve complementary information, which enhances the sensitivity to features in spatial and channel dimensions, respectively, and then multiple BRMs are stacked for efficient feature extraction of the input information. In addition, the network acquires global information and improves segmentation accuracy by putting feature maps of different scales through multi-scale attention fusion (MAF) operations. Finally, we evaluate the performance of ELANet on three publicly available datasets, ISIC2016, ISIC2017, and ISIC2018, and the experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve 89.87%, 81.85%, and 82.87% of the mIoU on the three datasets with a parametric of 0.459 M, which is an excellent balance between accuracy and lightness and is superior to many existing segmentation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pancreas not only is situated in a complex abdominal background but is also surrounded by other abdominal organs and adipose tissue, resulting in blurred organ boundaries. Accurate segmentation of pancreatic tissue is crucial for computer-aided diagnosis systems, as it can be used for surgical planning, navigation, and assessment of organs. In the light of this, the current paper proposes a novel Residual Double Asymmetric Convolution Network (ResDAC-Net) model. Firstly, newly designed ResDAC blocks are used to highlight pancreatic features. Secondly, the feature fusion between adjacent encoding layers fully utilizes the low-level and deep-level features extracted by the ResDAC blocks. Finally, parallel dilated convolutions are employed to increase the receptive field to capture multiscale spatial information. ResDAC-Net is highly compatible to the existing state-of-the-art models, according to three (out of four) evaluation metrics, including the two main ones used for segmentation performance evaluation (i.e., DSC and Jaccard index). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesion segmentation is a fundamental task in medical image processing, often facing the challenge of subtle lesions. It is important to detect these lesions, even though they can be difficult to identify. Convolutional neural networks, an effective method in medical image processing, often ignore the relationship between lesions, leading to topological errors during training. To tackle topological errors, move is made from pixel‐level to hypergraph representations. Hypergraphs can model lesions as vertices connected by hyperedges, capturing the topology between lesions. This paper introduces a novel dynamic hypergraph learning strategy called DHLS. DHLS allows for the dynamic construction of hypergraphs contingent upon input vertex variations. A hypergraph global‐aware segmentation network, termed HGSNet, is further proposed. HGSNet can capture the key high‐order structure information, which is able to enhance global topology expression. Additionally, a composite loss function is introduced. The function emphasizes the global aspect and the boundary of segmentation regions. The experimental setup compared HGSNet with other advanced models on medical image datasets from various organs. The results demonstrate that HGSNet outperforms other models and achieves state‐of‐the‐art performance on three public datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renal ultrasound (US) imaging, also known as a kidney ultrasound, serves as a pivotal diagnostic tool for evaluating renal health. It plays a critical role in various aspects of patient care, including diagnosis, treatment planning, surgical intervention, and post-treatment monitoring, allowing healthcare providers to assess both the kidneys and bladder. Furthermore, segmentation of kidney ultrasound (US) images is essential in extracting relevant objects or areas from the complete image, aiding in the evaluation of tissue organization and improving diagnostic accuracy. While manual delineation of kidneys in US images presents challenges in clinical settings due to complexity and tedium, this study introduces a novel approach to enhance the delineation of kidney outlines in 2D ultrasound images using deep learning techniques. The method involves concatenating two DeeplabV3 models, leveraging ResNet-18 and ResNet-152 backbones. Evaluation of the method yielded promising results, with precision, recall, F1 score, accuracy, and Jaccard index reported at 0.978, 0.993, 0.985, 0.997, and 0.971 respectively, accompanied by standard deviations of ±0.009, ±0.005, ±0.005, ±0.001, and ±0.009, our findings underscore the efficacy of the proposed method in augmenting kidney outline detection in 2D ultrasound images. This advancement holds significant promise for enhancing clinical diagnosis and treatment planning in renal health management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Automatic segmentation of renal tumours during renal cell carcinoma surgery can help doctors accurately locate the tumour region, protect the tissues and organs around the kidneys, enhance surgical efficiency, and reduce the possibility of leakage and misdiagnosis. However, since general polyp endoscopic image segmentation models have many problems when facing the task of renal tumour segmentation, there needs to be more research on the segmentation of endoscopic images of renal tumours. This paper proposes a multi‐scale dynamic segmentation kernel network for endoscopic image segmentation of kidney tumours. First, a spatial receptive field module is proposed to augment the feature information and improve the performance of the whole network. Second, an enhanced cross‐attention module is offered to attenuate the effect of a high‐similarity segmentation background. Finally, a multi‐scale dynamic segmentation kernel module is introduced to gradually refine the segmentation results from small to large sizes to obtain more accurate tumour boundaries. Extensive experiments on the established kidney tumour endoscopic dataset and publicly available endoscopic datasets show that this method exhibits enhanced performance and generalization capabilities compared to existing techniques. On this renal tumour dataset, MDSK‐Net achieved excellent results of 94.1% and 90.1% on mDice and mIoU.

Abstract Recent years have witnessed notable advancements in medical image segmentation through deep convolutional neural networks. However, a notable limitation lies in the local operation of convolution, which hinders the ability to fully exploit global semantic information. To overcome the challenges prevalent in medical image segmentation, the feature ensemble network with multi‐scale atrous transformer is proposed. At the core of the approach lies the multi‐scale contextual integration module, which is based on the multi‐scale atrous transformer and facilitates contextual integration of multi‐level features. To extract discriminative fine‐grained features of the target region, a hybrid attention mechanism that synergistically combines spatial and channel attention, thereby sharpening the model's focus on crucial target information within high‐level features, is incorporated. Additionally, the channel‐aware feature reconstruction module is introduced as an innovative component engineered to tackle feature similarity issues across different categories. This module performs feature reconstruction based on channel perception, effectively widening the feature gap between categories and enhancing the segmentation capability. It is worth mentioning that our approach surpasses the state‐of‐the‐art method using three benchmark datasets in medical image segmentation.

Abstract Diagnosing individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) accurately faces great challenges in clinical practice, primarily due to the data's high heterogeneity and limited sample size. To tackle this issue, the authors constructed a deep graph convolutional network (GCN) based on variable multi‐graph and multimodal data (VMM‐DGCN) for ASD diagnosis. Firstly, the functional connectivity matrix was constructed to extract primary features. Then, the authors constructed a variable multi‐graph construction strategy to capture the multi‐scale feature representations of each subject by utilising convolutional filters with varying kernel sizes. Furthermore, the authors brought the non‐imaging information into the feature representation at each scale and constructed multiple population graphs based on multimodal data by fully considering the correlation between subjects. After extracting the deeper features of population graphs using the deep GCN(DeepGCN), the authors fused the node features of multiple subgraphs to perform node classification tasks for typical control and ASD patients. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange I (ABIDE I) dataset, achieving an accuracy of 91.62% and an area under the curve value of 95.74%. These results demonstrated its outstanding performance compared to other ASD diagnostic algorithms.

Abstract Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world, with radiotherapy as one of the treatment options. Radiotherapy planning starts with delineating the affected area from healthy organs, called organs at risk (OAR). A new approach to automatic OAR segmentation in the chest cavity in Computed Tomography (CT) images is presented. The proposed approach is based on the modified U‐Net architecture with the ResNet‐34 encoder, which is the baseline adopted in this work. The new two‐branch CS‐SA U‐Net architecture is proposed, which consists of two parallel U‐Net models in which self‐attention blocks with cosine similarity as query‐key similarity function (CS‐SA) blocks are inserted between the encoder and decoder, which enabled the use of consistency regularisation. The proposed solution demonstrates state‐of‐the‐art performance for the problem of OAR segmentation in CT images on the publicly available SegTHOR benchmark dataset in terms of a Dice coefficient (oesophagus—0.8714, heart—0.9516, trachea—0.9286, aorta—0.9510) and Hausdorff distance (oesophagus—0.2541, heart—0.1514, trachea—0.1722, aorta—0.1114) and significantly outperforms the baseline. The current approach is demonstrated to be viable for improving the quality of OAR segmentation for radiotherapy planning.

Abstract The Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) refers to a network of interconnected multimedia devices that communicate with each other over the Internet. Recently, smart healthcare has emerged as a significant application of the IoMT, particularly in the context of knowledge‐based learning systems. Smart healthcare systems leverage knowledge‐based learning to become more context‐aware, adaptable, and auditable while maintaining the ability to learn from historical data. In smart healthcare systems, devices capture images, such as X‐rays, Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The security and integrity of these images are crucial for the databases used in knowledge‐based learning systems to foster structured decision‐making and enhance the learning abilities of AI. Moreover, in knowledge‐driven systems, the storage and transmission of HD medical images exert a burden on the limited bandwidth of the communication channel, leading to data transmission delays. To address the security and latency concerns, this paper presents a lightweight medical image encryption scheme utilising bit‐plane decomposition and chaos theory. The results of the experiment yield entropy, energy, and correlation values of 7.999, 0.0156, and 0.0001, respectively. This validates the effectiveness of the encryption system proposed in this paper, which offers high‐quality encryption, a large key space, key sensitivity, and resistance to statistical attacks.

Abstract Optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) segmentation is an important task in ophthalmic medicine and is crucial for aiding glaucoma screening. With the development of smart healthcare and the increase of large datasets, there is an increasing number of research efforts targeting OD and OC segmentation, making it particularly important to provide a systematic review of the latest advances in the field. This paper presents a systematic review of commonly used datasets, evaluation metrics, and related research results in the field of OD and OC segmentation. The advantages and disadvantages of segmentation techniques based on traditional and deep learning methods are comparatively analysed. In addition, this study emphasizes the importance of OD and OC segmentation efforts in smart healthcare. Despite the technological advances, the lack of generalization capability is still a major obstacle limiting its clinical application. To address this issue, this study explores unsupervised domain adaptation methods to enhance the generalization performance of segmentation techniques and provide new strategies for clinical diagnosis. Finally, this paper discusses the challenges and future research directions faced by OD and OC segmentation when applied in the medical field to help readers comprehensively grasp the research dynamics in this area.

Abstract Doctors typically use non‐contrast‐enhanced computed tomography (NCECT) in the treatment of kidney cancer to map kidney and tumour structural information to functional imaging single‐photon emission computed tomography, which is then used to assess patient kidney function and predict postoperative recovery. However, the assessment of kidney function and formulation of surgical plans is constrained by the low contrast of tumours in NCECT, which hinders the acquisition of accurate tumour boundaries. Therefore, this study designed a radiomics feature‐enhanced level‐set evolution (RFLSE) to precisely segment small‐sample low‐contrast kidney tumours. Integration of high‐dimensional radiomics features into the level‐set energy function enhances the edge detection capability of low‐contrast kidney tumours. The use of sensitive radiomics features to control the regional term parameters achieves adaptive adjustment of the curve evolution amplitude, improving the level‐set segmentation process. The experimental data used low‐contrast, limited‐sample tumours provided by hospitals, as well as the public datasets BUSI18 and KiTS19. Comparative results with advanced energy functionals and deep learning models demonstrate the precision and robustness of RFLSE segmentation. Additionally, the application value of RFLSE in assisting doctors with accurately marking tumours and generating high‐quality pseudo‐labels for deep learning datasets is demonstrated.

Abstract This research investigates the Circle of Willis, a critical vascular structure vital for cerebral blood supply. A modified novel dual‐pathway multi‐scale hierarchical upsampling network (HUNet) is presented, tailored explicitly for accurate segmentation of Circle of Willis anatomical components from medical imaging data. Evaluating both the multi‐label magnetic resonance angiography region of interest and the multi‐label magnetic resonance angiography whole brain‐case datasets, HUNet consistently outperforms the convolutional U‐net model, demonstrating superior capabilities and achieving higher accuracy across various classes. Additionally, the HUNet model achieves an exceptional dice similarity coefficient of 98.61 and 97.95, along with intersection over union scores of 73.32 and 85.76 in both the multi‐label magnetic resonance angiography region of interest and the multi‐label magnetic resonance angiography whole brain‐case datasets, respectively. These metrics highlight HUNet's exceptional performance in achieving precise and accurate segmentation of anatomical structures within the Circle of Willis, underscoring its robustness in medical image segmentation tasks. Visual representations substantiate HUNet's efficacy in delineating Circle of Willis structures, offering comprehensive insights into its superior performance.

Abstract Hyperspectral imaging has demonstrated its potential to provide correlated spatial and spectral information of a sample by a non‐contact and non‐invasive technology. In the medical field, especially in histopathology, HSI has been applied for the classification and identification of diseased tissue and for the characterization of its morphological properties. In this work, we propose a hybrid scheme to classify non‐tumor and tumor histological brain samples by hyperspectral imaging. The proposed approach is based on the identification of characteristic components in a hyperspectral image by linear unmixing, as a features engineering step, and the subsequent classification by a deep learning approach. For this last step, an ensemble of deep neural networks is evaluated by a cross‐validation scheme on an augmented dataset and a transfer learning scheme. The proposed method can classify histological brain samples with an average accuracy of 88%, and reduced variability, computational cost, and inference times, which presents an advantage over methods in the state‐of‐the‐art. Hence, the work demonstrates the potential of hybrid classification methodologies to achieve robust and reliable results by combining linear unmixing for features extraction and deep learning for classification.

Abstract Lesion segmentation is a fundamental task in medical image processing, often facing the challenge of subtle lesions. It is important to detect these lesions, even though they can be difficult to identify. Convolutional neural networks, an effective method in medical image processing, often ignore the relationship between lesions, leading to topological errors during training. To tackle topological errors, move is made from pixel‐level to hypergraph representations. Hypergraphs can model lesions as vertices connected by hyperedges, capturing the topology between lesions. This paper introduces a novel dynamic hypergraph learning strategy called DHLS. DHLS allows for the dynamic construction of hypergraphs contingent upon input vertex variations. A hypergraph global‐aware segmentation network, termed HGSNet, is further proposed. HGSNet can capture the key high‐order structure information, which is able to enhance global topology expression. Additionally, a composite loss function is introduced. The function emphasizes the global aspect and the boundary of segmentation regions. The experimental setup compared HGSNet with other advanced models on medical image datasets from various organs. The results demonstrate that HGSNet outperforms other models and achieves state‐of‐the‐art performance on three public datasets.