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With its standardized MRI datasets of the entire spine, the German National Cohort (GNC) has the potential to deliver standardized biometric reference values for intervertebral discs (VD), vertebral bodies (VB) and spinal canal (SC). To handle such large-scale big data, artificial intelligence (AI) tools are needed. In this manuscript, we will present an AI software tool to analyze spine MRI and generate normative standard values. 330 representative GNC MRI datasets were randomly selected in equal distribution regarding parameters of age, sex and height. By using a 3D U-Net, an AI algorithm was trained, validated and tested. Finally, the machine learning algorithm explored the full dataset (n = 10,215). VB, VD and SC were successfully segmented and analyzed by using an AI-based algorithm. A software tool was developed to analyze spine-MRI and provide age, sex, and height-matched comparative biometric data. Using an AI algorithm, the reliable segmentation of MRI datasets of the entire spine from the GNC was possible and achieved an excellent agreement with manually segmented datasets. With the analysis of the total GNC MRI dataset with almost 30,000 subjects, it will be possible to generate real normative standard values in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new semi-automated method is proposed in this study that detects joint traces from digital images and calculates the length distribution through three-dimensional data structuring. The method comprises detecting the pixels corresponding to the joint trace in digital images and calculating the length distribution through three-dimensional data structuring of the pixels detected as the joint trace. Semantic segmentation based on deep learning techniques is applied to the detection of joint trace pixels to overcome the limitations of rule-based image processing techniques. For training a deep learning network, various rock joint images were sampled and labeled, following which the data sets for training, validation, and testing were prepared through classification and augmentation. Using the prepared datasets, the performance of the classifiers based on widely used semantic segmentation networks, namely U-Net (University of Freiburg, Germany) network and DeepLabV3+ (Google, USA) network, was compared. The classifier based on the DeepLabV3+ network was ultimately selected and applied. The trained classifier successfully detected pixels corresponding to the joint trace in images of both flat and uneven rock surfaces, indicating that the deep learning technique could be applied effectively to joint trace detection from digital images. Further, a data structuring technique is proposed to calculate the joint trace length using pixelwise data detected through the trained classifier. This technique uses point cloud data obtained by photogrammetry, and comprises two-dimensional thinning and segmentation, three-dimensional projection, segmentation, and segment linking. The entire proposed method, from detecting the joint trace pixels to three-dimensional data structuring, was verified by applying it to both simple flat and uneven rock surface models. • New technique for joint trace detection using deep learning network is proposed. • New data structuring technique for pixelwise data is proposed. • Semi-automatic calculation of the trace length is possible using the two techniques. • Proposed techniques is verified by applying it to both flat and uneven rock surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate models face limitations in their ability to accurately represent highly variable atmospheric phenomena. To resolve fine‐scale physical processes, allowing for local impact assessments, downscaling techniques are essential. We propose spateGAN, a novel approach for spatio‐temporal downscaling of precipitation data using conditional generative adversarial networks. Our method is based on a video super‐resolution approach and trained on 10 years of country‐wide radar observations for Germany. It simultaneously increases the spatial and temporal resolution of coarsened precipitation observations from 32 to 2 km and from 1 hr to 10 min. Our experiments indicate that the ensembles of generated temporally consistent rainfall fields are in high agreement with the observational data. Spatial structures with plausible advection were accurately generated. Compared to trilinear interpolation and a classical convolutional neural network, the generative model reconstructs the resolution‐dependent extreme value distribution with high skill. It showed a high fractions skill score of 0.6 (spatio‐temporal scale: 32 km and 1 hr) for rainfall intensities over 15 mm h−1 and a low relative bias of 3.35%. A power spectrum analysis confirmed that the probabilistic downscaling ability of our model further increased its skill. We observed that neural network predictions may be interspersed by recurrent structures not related to rainfall climatology, which should be a known issue for future studies. We were able to mitigate them by using an appropriate model architecture and model selection process. Our findings suggest that spateGAN offers the potential to complement and further advance the development of climate model downscaling techniques, due to its performance and computational efficiency. Plain Language Summary: Natural disasters like floods, hail, or landslides originate from precipitation. Global climate models are an important tool to understand these hazards and derive expected changes in a future climate. However, they operate on spatial and temporal scales that limit the regional ability to reflect their small‐scale characteristics. This has led to the development of dynamical and statistical downscaling methods. Due to their computational efficiency, machine learning algorithms recently got increased attention as a method for improving the spatial resolution of climate data. Here, we describe a new deep learning model that allows to simultaneously increasing both the temporal and spatial resolution of precipitation data. Our presented approach enhances the spatial resolution by a factor of 16 and the temporal resolution by a factor of 6. The generated rain fields are hardly identifiable as artificially generated and exhibit the typical structure, movement, and distribution of observed rain fields. Key Points: High performance simultaneous spatial and temporal precipitation downscaling enabled by 3D convolution approachGeneration of realistic high‐resolution ensembles using probabilistic conditional generative adversarial networksLow computational effort compared to dynamical downscaling approaches [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The used car market has a high global economic importance, with more than 35 million cars sold yearly. Accurately predicting prices is a crucial task for both buyers and sellers to facilitate informed decisions in terms of opportunities or potential problems. Although various machine learning techniques have been applied to create robust prediction models, a comprehensive approach has yet to be studied. This research introduced two datasets from different markets, one with over 300,000 entries from Germany to serve as a training basis for deep prediction models and a second dataset from Romania containing more than 15,000 car quotes used mainly to observe local traits. As such, we included extensive cross-market analyses by comparing the emerging Romanian market versus one of the world's largest and most developed car markets, Germany. Our study used several neural network architectures that captured complex relationships between car model features, individual add-ons, and visual features to predict used car prices accurately. Our models achieved a high R2 score exceeding 0.95 on both datasets, indicating their effectiveness in estimating used car prices. Moreover, we experimented with advanced convolutional architectures to predict car prices based solely on visual features extracted from car images. This approach exhibited transfer-learning capabilities, leading to improved prediction accuracy, especially since the Romanian training dataset was limited. Our experiments highlighted the most important factors influencing the price, while our findings have practical implications for buyers and sellers in assessing the value of vehicles. At the same time, the insights gained from this study enable informed decision making and provide valuable guidance in the used car market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The utilization of stationary underwater cameras is a modern and well-adapted approach to provide a continuous and cost-effective long-term solution to monitor underwater habitats of particular interest. A common goal of such monitoring systems is to gain better insight into the dynamics and condition of populations of various marine organisms, such as migratory or commercially relevant fish taxa. This paper describes a complete processing pipeline to automatically determine the abundance, type and estimate the size of biological taxa from stereoscopic video data captured by the stereo camera of a stationary Underwater Fish Observatory (UFO). A calibration of the recording system was carried out in situ and, afterward, validated using the synchronously recorded sonar data. The video data were recorded continuously for nearly one year in the Kiel Fjord, an inlet of the Baltic Sea in northern Germany. It shows underwater organisms in their natural behavior, as passive low-light cameras were used instead of active lighting to dampen attraction effects and allow for the least invasive recording possible. The recorded raw data are pre-filtered by an adaptive background estimation to extract sequences with activity, which are then processed by a deep detection network, i.e., Yolov5. This provides the location and type of organisms detected in each video frame of both cameras, which are used to calculate stereo correspondences following a basic matching scheme. In a subsequent step, the size and distance of the depicted organisms are approximated using the corner coordinates of the matched bounding boxes. The Yolov5 model employed in this study was trained on a novel dataset comprising 73,144 images and 92,899 bounding box annotations for 10 categories of marine animals. The model achieved a mean detection accuracy of 92.4%, a mean average precision (mAP) of 94.8% and an F1 score of 93%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. The best method to prevent CRC is with a colonoscopy. During this procedure, the gastroenterologist searches for polyps. However, there is a potential risk of polyps being missed by the gastroenterologist. Automated detection of polyps helps to assist the gastroenterologist during a colonoscopy. There are already publications examining the problem of polyp detection in the literature. Nevertheless, most of these systems are only used in the research context and are not implemented for clinical application. Therefore, we introduce the first fully open-source automated polyp-detection system scoring best on current benchmark data and implementing it ready for clinical application. To create the polyp-detection system (ENDOMIND-Advanced), we combined our own collected data from different hospitals and practices in Germany with open-source datasets to create a dataset with over 500,000 annotated images. ENDOMIND-Advanced leverages a post-processing technique based on video detection to work in real-time with a stream of images. It is integrated into a prototype ready for application in clinical interventions. We achieve better performance compared to the best system in the literature and score a F1-score of 90.24% on the open-source CVC-VideoClinicDB benchmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ntroduction: Ferroptosis-related gene (FRG) signature is important for assessing novel therapeutic approaches and prognosis in glioma. We trained a deep learning network for determining FRG signatures using multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Methods: FRGs of patients with glioma were acquired from public databases. FRG-related risk score stratifying prognosis was developed from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and validated using the Chinese Glioma Genome Atlas. Multiparametric MRI-derived glioma images and the corresponding genomic information were obtained for 122 cases from TCGA and The Cancer Imaging Archive. The deep learning network was trained using 3D-Resnet, and threefold cross-validation was performed to evaluate the predictive performance. Results: The FRG-related risk score was associated with poor clinicopathological features and had a high predictive value for glioma prognosis. Based on the FRG-related risk score, patients with glioma were successfully classified into two subgroups (28 and 94 in the high- and low-risk groups, respectively). The deep learning networks TC (enhancing tumor and non-enhancing portion of the tumor core) mask achieved an average cross-validation accuracy of 0.842 and an average AUC of 0.781, while the deep learning networks WT (whole tumor and peritumoral edema) mask achieved an average cross-validation accuracy of 0.825 and an average AUC of 0.781. Discussion: Our findings indicate that FRG signature is a prognostic indicator of glioma. In addition, we developed a deep learning network that has high classification accuracy in automatically determining FRG signatures, which may be an important step toward the clinical translation of novel therapeutic approaches and prognosis of glioma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Load forecasting is of crucial importance for operations of electric power systems. In recent years, deep learning based methods are emerging for load forecasting because their strong nonlinear approximation capabilities can provide more forecasting precision than conventional statistical methods. However, they usually suffer from some problems, e.g., the gradient vanishment and over-fitting. In order to address these problems, an unshared convolution based deep learning model with densely connected network is proposed. In this model, the backbone is the unshared convolutional neural network and a densely connected structure is adopted, which could alleviate the gradient vanishment. What is more, we use a regularization method named clipped $L_2$ -norm to overcome over-fitting, and design a trend decomposition strategy to address the possible distribution differences between the training and validation data. Finally, we conduct five case studies to verify the outperformance of our proposed deep learning model for deterministic and interval load forecasting. Two high-voltage and an medium-voltage real load datasets from Australia, Germany and America are used for model training and validation, respectively. Results show that the proposed model can achieve higher load forecasting accuracy, compared with other existing methods including the popular conventional methods such as naive forecast and generalized additive model, and deep learning methods, e.g., long short-term memory network, convolutional neural network, fully connected network, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dough fermentation plays an essential role in the bread production process, and its success is critical to producing high-quality products. In Germany, the number of stores per bakery chain has increased within the last years as well as the trend to finish the bakery products local at the stores. There is an unsatisfied demand for skilled workers, which leads to an increasing number of untrained and inexperienced employees at the stores. This paper proposes a method for the automatic monitoring of the fermentation process based on optical techniques. By using a combination of machine learning and superellipsoid model fitting, we have developed an instance segmentation and parameter estimation method for dough objects that are positioned inside a fermentation chamber. In our method we measure the given topography at discrete points in time using a movable laser sensor system that is located at the back of the fermentation chamber. By applying the superellipsoid model fitting method, we estimated the volume of each object and achieved results with a deviation of approximately 10% on average. Thereby, the volume gradient is monitored continuously and represents the progress of the fermentation state. Exploratory tests show the reliability and the potential of our method, which is particularly suitable for local stores but also for high volume production in bakery plants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy system modeling is essential in analyzing present and future system configurations motivated by the energy transition. Energy models need various input data sets at different scales, including detailed information about energy generation and transport infrastructure. However, accessing such data sets is not straightforward and often restricted, especially for energy infrastructure data. We present a detection model for the automatic recognition of pipeline pathways using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to address this lack of energy infrastructure data sets. The model was trained with historical low-resolution satellite images of the construction phase of British gas transport pipelines, made with the Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper instrument. The satellite images have been automatically labeled with the help of high-resolution pipeline route data provided by the respective Transmission System Operator (TSO). We have used data augmentation on the training data and trained our model with four different initial learning rates. The models trained with the different learning rates have been validated with 5-fold cross-validation using the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric. We show that our model can reliably identify pipeline pathways despite the comparably low resolution of the used satellite images. Further, we have successfully tested the model's capability in other geographic regions by deploying satellite images of the NEL pipeline in Northern Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a Stack Auto-encoder (SAE)-Driven and Semi-Supervised (SSL)-Based Deep Neural Network (DNN) to extract buildings from relatively low-cost satellite near infrared images. The novelty of our scheme is that we employ only an extremely small portion of labeled data for training the deep model which constitutes less than 0.08% of the total data. This way, we significantly reduce the manual effort needed to complete an annotation process, and thus the time required for creating a reliable labeled dataset. On the contrary, we apply novel semi-supervised techniques to estimate soft labels (targets) of the vast amount of existing unlabeled data and then we utilize these soft estimates to improve model training. Overall, four SSL schemes are employed, the Anchor Graph, the Safe Semi-Supervised Regression (SAFER), the Squared-loss Mutual Information Regularization (SMIR), and an equal importance Weighted Average of them (WeiAve). To retain only the most meaning information of the input data, labeled and unlabeled ones, we also employ a Stack Autoencoder (SAE) trained under an unsupervised manner. This way, we handle noise in the input signals, attributed to dimensionality redundancy, without sacrificing meaningful information. Experimental results on the benchmarked dataset of Vaihingen city in Germany indicate that our approach outperforms all state-of-the-art methods in the field using the same type of color orthoimages, though the fact that a limited dataset is utilized (10 times less data or better, compared to other approaches), while our performance is close to the one achieved by high expensive and much more precise input information like the one derived from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors. In addition, the proposed approach can be easily expanded to handle any number of classes, including buildings, vegetation, and ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: As sociability in cattle is a matter of good animal husbandry, this study provides technical groundwork for a camera based system to automatically analyse dairy cattle herd activity. Eight surveillance cameras were recording a group of thirty-six lactating Holstein Friesian dairy cows. A Mask R-CNN model was trained to determine pixel level segmentation masks for the cows in the video material. The animals were successfully segmented reaching high 'averaged precision scores' for bounding boxes (0.91) and segmentation masks (0.85) for a given IOU threshold of 0.5. As providing training data for deep learning models is time consuming and tedious, this article also deals with the question "How many images do I have to annotate?" and analyses the performance of the model depending on the size of the used training data set. With increasing herd sizes came an enhanced requirement for automated systems to support the farmers in the monitoring of the health and welfare status of their livestock. Cattle are a highly sociable species, and the herd structure has important impact on the animal welfare. As the behaviour of the animals and their social interactions can be influenced by the presence of a human observer, a camera based system that automatically detects the animals would be beneficial to analyse dairy cattle herd activity. In the present study, eight surveillance cameras were mounted above the barn area of a group of thirty-six lactating Holstein Friesian dairy cows at the Chamber of Agriculture in Futterkamp in Northern Germany. With Mask R-CNN, a state-of-the-art model of convolutional neural networks was trained to determine pixel level segmentation masks for the cows in the video material. The model was pre-trained on the Microsoft common objects in the context data set, and transfer learning was carried out on annotated image material from the recordings as training data set. In addition, the relationship between the size of the used training data set and the performance on the model after transfer learning was analysed. The trained model achieved averaged precision (Intersection over union, IOU = 0.5) 91% and 85% for the detection of bounding boxes and segmentation masks of the cows, respectively, thereby laying a solid technical basis for an automated analysis of herd activity and the use of resources in loose-housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undocumented building constructions are buildings or stories that were built years ago, but are missing in the official digital cadastral maps (DFK). The detection of undocumented building constructions is essential to urban planning and monitoring. The state of Bavaria, Germany, uses two semi-automatic detection methods for this task that suffer from a high false alarm rate. To solve this problem, we propose a novel framework to detect undocumented building constructions using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and official geodata, including high resolution optical data and the Normalized Digital Surface Model (nDSM). More specifically, an undocumented building pixel is labeled as "building" by the CNN but does not overlap with a building polygon of the DFK. The class of old or new undocumented building can be further separated when a Temporal Digital Surface Model (tDSM) is introduced in the stage of decision fusion. In a further step, undocumented story construction is detected as the pixels that are "building" in both DFK and predicted results from CNN, but shows a height deviation from the tDSM. By doing so, we have produced a seamless map of undocumented building constructions for one-quarter of the state of Bavaria, Germany at a spatial resolution of 0.4 m, which has proved that our framework is robust to detect undocumented building constructions at large-scale. Considering that the official geodata exploited in this research is advantageous because of its high quality and large coverage, a transferability analysis experiment is also designed in our research to investigate the sampling strategies for building detection at large-scale. Our results indicate that building detection results in unseen areas at large-scale can be improved when training samples are collected from different districts. In an area where training samples are available, local training sampless collection and training can save much time and effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]