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Aims: Blood cell classification helps detect various diseases. However, the current classification model of blood cells cannot always get great results. A network that automatically classifies blood cells can provide doctors with data as one of the criteria for diagnosing patients' disease types and severity. If doctors diagnose blood cells, doctors could spend lots of time on the diagnosis. The diagnosis progress is very tedious. Doctors can make some mistakes when they feel tired. On the other hand, different doctors may have different points on the same patient. Methods: We propose a ResNet50-based ensemble of randomized neural networks (ReRNet) for blood cell classification. ResNet50 is used as the backbone model for feature extraction. The extracted features are fed to 3 randomized neural networks (RNNs): Schmidt neural network, extreme learning machine, and dRVFL. The outputs of the ReRNet are the ensemble of these 3 RNNs based on the majority voting mechanism. The 5 × 5-fold cross-validation is applied to validate the proposed network. Results: The average-accuracy, average-sensitivity, average-precision, and average-F1-score are 99.97%, 99.96%, 99.98%, and 99.97%, respectively. Conclusions: The ReRNet is compared with 4 state-of-the-art methods and achieves the best classification performance. The ReRNet is an effective method for blood cell classification based on these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID‐19 pneumonia started in December 2019 and caused large casualties and huge economic losses. In this study, we intended to develop a computer‐aided diagnosis system based on artificial intelligence to automatically identify the COVID‐19 in chest computed tomography images. We utilized transfer learning to obtain the image‐level representation (ILR) based on the backbone deep convolutional neural network. Then, a novel neighboring aware representation (NAR) was proposed to exploit the neighboring relationships between the ILR vectors. To obtain the neighboring information in the feature space of the ILRs, an ILR graph was generated based on the k‐nearest neighbors algorithm, in which the ILRs were linked with their k‐nearest neighboring ILRs. Afterward, the NARs were computed by the fusion of the ILRs and the graph. On the basis of this representation, a novel end‐to‐end COVID‐19 classification architecture called neighboring aware graph neural network (NAGNN) was proposed. The private and public data sets were used for evaluation in the experiments. Results revealed that our NAGNN outperformed all the 10 state‐of‐the‐art methods in terms of generalization ability. Therefore, the proposed NAGNN is effective in detecting COVID‐19, which can be used in clinical diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) are small round dots distributed over the brain which contribute to stroke, dementia, and death. The early diagnosis is significant for the treatment. Method: In this paper, a new CMB detection approach was put forward for brain magnetic resonance images. We leveraged a sliding window to obtain training and testing samples from input brain images. Then, a 13-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) was designed and trained. Finally, we proposed to utilize an extreme learning machine (ELM) to substitute the last several layers in the CNN for detection. We carried out an experiment to decide the optimal number of layers to be substituted. The parameters in ELM were optimized by a heuristic algorithm named bat algorithm. The evaluation of our approach was based on hold-out validation, and the final predictions were generated by averaging the performance of five runs. Results: Through the experiments, we found replacing the last five layers with ELM can get the optimal results. Conclusion: We offered a comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms, and it can be revealed that our method was accurate in CMB detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective computing is one of the key technologies to achieve advanced brain-machine interfacing. It is increasingly concerning research orientation in the field of artificial intelligence. Emotion recognition is closely related to affective computing. Although emotion recognition based on electroencephalogram (EEG) has attracted more and more attention at home and abroad, subject-independent emotion recognition still faces enormous challenges. We proposed a subject-independent emotion recognition algorithm based on dynamic empirical convolutional neural network (DECNN) in view of the challenges. Combining the advantages of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and differential entropy (DE), we proposed a dynamic differential entropy (DDE) algorithm to extract the features of EEG signals. After that, the extracted DDE features were classified by convolutional neural networks (CNN). Finally, the proposed algorithm is verified on SJTU Emotion EEG Dataset (SEED). In addition, we discuss the brain area closely related to emotion and design the best profile of electrode placements to reduce the calculation and complexity. Experimental results show that the accuracy of this algorithm is 3.53 percent higher than that of the state-of-the-art emotion recognition methods. What's more, we studied the key electrodes for EEG emotion recognition, which is of guiding significance for the development of wearable EEG devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We analysed over 320 COVID-19 images and 320 healthy control images. • We proposed an improved CNN to extract individual image-level features. • We proposed to use GCN to extract relation-aware representations. • We proposed a DFF technology to combine features from GCN and CNN. • The proposed FCGNet gives better performance than 15 state-of-the-art approaches. (Aim) COVID-19 is an infectious disease spreading to the world this year. In this study, we plan to develop an artificial intelligence based tool to diagnose on chest CT images. (Method) On one hand, we extract features from a self-created convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn individual image-level representations. The proposed CNN employed several new techniques such as rank-based average pooling and multiple-way data augmentation. On the other hand, relation-aware representations were learnt from graph convolutional network (GCN). Deep feature fusion (DFF) was developed in this work to fuse individual image-level features and relation-aware features from both GCN and CNN, respectively. The best model was named as FGCNet. (Results) The experiment first chose the best model from eight proposed network models, and then compared it with 15 state-of-the-art approaches. (Conclusion) The proposed FGCNet model is effective and gives better performance than all 15 state-of-the-art methods. Thus, our proposed FGCNet model can assist radiologists to rapidly detect COVID-19 from chest CT images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting brain age of children accurately and quantitatively can give help in brain development analysis and brain disease diagnosis. Traditional methods to estimate brain age based on 3D magnetic resonance (MR), T1 weighted imaging (T1WI), and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) need complex preprocessing and extra scanning time, decreasing clinical practice, especially in children. This research aims at proposing an end-to-end AI system based on deep learning to predict the brain age based on routine brain MR imaging. We spent over 5 years enrolling 220 stacked 2D routine clinical brain MR T1-weighted images of healthy children aged 0 to 5 years old and randomly divided those images into training data including 176 subjects and test data including 44 subjects. Data augmentation technology, which includes scaling, image rotation, translation, and gamma correction, was employed to extend the training data. A 10-layer 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) was designed for predicting the brain age of children and it achieved reliable and accurate results on test data with a mean absolute deviation (MAE) of 67.6 days, a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 96.1 days, a mean relative error (MRE) of 8.2%, a correlation coefficient (R) of 0.985, and a coefficient of determination (R 2) of 0.971. Specially, the performance on predicting the age of children under 2 years old with a MAE of 28.9 days, a RMSE of 37.0 days, a MRE of 7.8%, a R of 0.983, and a R 2 of 0.967 is much better than that over 2 with a MAE of 110.0 days, a RMSE of 133.5 days, a MRE of 8.2%, a R of 0.883, and a R 2 of 0.780. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alcoholism changes the structure of brain. Several somatic marker hypothesis network-related regions are known to be damaged in chronic alcoholism. Neuroimaging approach can help us better understanding the impairment discovered in alcohol-dependent subjects. In this research, we recruited subjects from participating hospitals. In total, 188 abstinent long-term chronic alcoholic participants (95 men and 93 women) and 191 non-alcoholic control participants (95 men and 96 women) were enrolled in our experiment via computerized diagnostic interview schedule version IV and medical history interview employed to determine whether the applicants can be enrolled or excluded. The Siemens Verio Tim 3.0 T MR scanner (Siemens Medical Solutions, Erlangen, Germany) was employed to scan the subjects. Then, we proposed a 10-layer convolutional neural network for the diagnosis based on imaging, including three advanced techniques: parametric rectified linear unit (PReLU); batch normalization; and dropout. The structure of network is fine-tuned. The results show that our method secured a sensitivity of 97.73 ± 1.04%, a specificity of 97.69 ± 0.87%, and an accuracy of 97.71 ± 0.68%. We observed the PReLU gives better performance than ordinary ReLU, clipped ReLU, and leaky ReLU. The batch normalization and dropout gained enhanced performance as batch normalization overcame the internal covariate shift and dropout got over the overfitting. The results of our proposed 10-layer CNN model show its performance better than seven state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurately classify teeth category is important in further dental diagnosis. Analyzing huge dental data, that is, identifying the teeth category, is often a hard task. Current automatic methods are based on computer vision and deep learning approaches. In this study, we aimed to classify the teeth category into four classes: incisor, canine, premolar, and molar. Cone beam computed tomography was used to collect the data. We proposed a seven‐layer deep convolutional neural network with global average pooling to identify teeth category. Data augmentation method was used to enlarge the size of training dataset. The results showed the sensitivities of incisor, canine, premolar, and molar teeth are 88%, 86%, 84%, and 90%, respectively. The average sensitivity is 87.0%. We validated max pooling gives better results than average pooling. Our method is better than three state‐of‐the‐art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: This paper proposes a novel alcoholism identification approach that can assist radiologists in patient diagnosis. Method: AlexNet was used as the basic transfer learning model. The global learning rate was small, at 10−4, and the iteration epoch number was at 10. The learning rate factor of replaced layers was 10 times larger than that of the transferred layers. We tested five different replacement configurations of transfer learning. Results: The experiment shows that the best performance was achieved by replacing the final fully connected layer. Our method yielded a sensitivity of 97.44%± 1.15%, a specificity of 97.41 ± 1.51%, a precision of 97.34 ± 1.49%, an accuracy of 97.42 ± 0.95%, and an F1 score of 97.37 ± 0.97% on the test set. Conclusion: This method can assist radiologists in their routine alcoholism screening of brain magnetic resonance images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Multiple sclerosis is a severe brain and/or spinal cord disease. It may lead to a wide range of symptoms. Hence, the early diagnosis and treatment is quite important. Method: This study proposed a 14-layer convolutional neural network, combined with three advanced techniques: batch normalization, dropout, and stochastic pooling. The output of the stochastic pooling was obtained via sampling from a multinomial distribution formed from the activations of each pooling region. In addition, we used data augmentation method to enhance the training set. In total 10 runs were implemented with the hold-out randomly set for each run. Results: The results showed that our 14-layer CNN secured a sensitivity of 98.77 ± 0.35%, a specificity of 98.76 ± 0.58%, and an accuracy of 98.77 ± 0.39%. Conclusion: Our results were compared with CNN using maximum pooling and average pooling. The comparison shows stochastic pooling gives better performance than other two pooling methods. Furthermore, we compared our proposed method with six state-of-the-art approaches, including five traditional artificial intelligence methods and one deep learning method. The comparison shows our method is superior to all other six state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is an important brain disease. It alters the brain structure. Recently, scholars tend to use computer vision based techniques to detect AUD. We collected 235 subjects, 114 alcoholic and 121 non-alcoholic. Among the 235 image, 100 images were used as training set, and data augmentation method was used. The rest 135 images were used as test set. Further, we chose the latest powerful technique-convolutional neural network (CNN) based on convolutional layer, rectified linear unit layer, pooling layer, fully connected layer, and softmax layer. We also compared three different pooling techniques: max pooling, average pooling, and stochastic pooling. The results showed that our method achieved a sensitivity of 96.88%, a specificity of 97.18%, and an accuracy of 97.04%. Our method was better than three state-of-the-art approaches. Besides, stochastic pooling performed better than other max pooling and average pooling. We validated CNN with five convolution layers and two fully connected layers performed the best. The GPU yielded a 149× acceleration in training and a 166× acceleration in test, compared to CPU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cell segmentation and counting is a time-consuming and important experimental step in traditional biomedical research. Many current counting methods are Point-based methods which require exact cell locations. However, there are few such cell datasets with detailed object coordinates. Most existing cell datasets only have the total number of cells and a global segmentation annotation. To effectively use existing datasets, we divide the cell counting task into the cell's number prediction and cell segmentation. We propose a GAN-based efficient lightweight multi-scale-feature-fusion multi-task model (ELMGAN). To coordinate the learning of these two tasks, we propose a Norm-Combined Hybrid loss function (NH loss) and use the method of the generative adversarial network to train our networks. We propose a new Fold Beyond-nearest Upsampling method (FBU) in our lightweight and fast multi-scale-feature-fusion multi-task generator (LFMMG), which is twice as fast as the traditional interpolation upsampling method. We use multi-scale feature fusion technology to improve the quality of segmentation images. LFMMG reduces the number of parameters by nearly 50% compared with U-Net and gets better performance on cell segmentation. Compared with the traditional GAN model, our method improves the speed of image processing by nearly ten times. In addition, we also propose a Coordinated Multitasking Training Discriminator (CMTD) to refine the accuracy of the details of the features. Our method achieves non-Point-based counting that no longer needs to annotate the exact position of each cell in the image during the training and achieves excellent results in cell counting and segmentation. • We proposed a non-Point based counting method based on the number of cells and the global segmentation. • We proposed ELMGAN to segment and count cells, and proposed the NH Loss to train our network. • Our new upsampling method: FBU is twice as fast as the traditional interpolation methods. • Our generator: LFMMG is only one tenth the size of traditional Gan, but ten times faster. • Our ELMGAN overcomes the limitation of Point-based counting methods, and is better than SOTA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: This study proposes a new COVID-19 detection system called CGENet, based on computer vision and chest computed tomography images. First, an optimal backbone selection algorithm was proposed to determine the best backbone network for the CGENet adaptively. Then, we introduced a novel graph embedding mechanism to fuse the spatial relationship into the feature vectors. Finally, we chose the extreme learning machine as the classifier of the proposed CGENet to boost the classification performance. The proposed CGENet was evaluated on a public dataset using 5-fold cross-validation and compared with other algorithms. The results revealed that the proposed model achieved state-of-the-art classification performance. In all, the CGENet can be an effective and efficient tool that can assist COVID-19 diagnosis. Accurate and timely diagnosis of COVID-19 is indispensable to control its spread. This study proposes a novel explainable COVID-19 diagnosis system called CGENet based on graph embedding and an extreme learning machine for chest CT images. We put forward an optimal backbone selection algorithm to select the best backbone for the CGENet based on transfer learning. Then, we introduced graph theory into the ResNet-18 based on the k-nearest neighbors. Finally, an extreme learning machine was trained as the classifier of the CGENet. The proposed CGENet was evaluated on a large publicly-available COVID-19 dataset and produced an average accuracy of 97.78% based on 5-fold cross-validation. In addition, we utilized the Grad-CAM maps to present a visual explanation of the CGENet based on COVID-19 samples. In all, the proposed CGENet can be an effective and efficient tool to assist COVID-19 diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: One of the hottest areas in deep learning is computerized tumor diagnosis and treatment. The identification of tumor markers, the outline of tumor growth activity, and the staging of various tumor kinds are frequently included. There are several deep learning models based on convolutional neural networks that have high performance and accurate identification, with the potential to improve medical tasks. Breakthroughs and updates in computer algorithms and hardware devices, and intelligent algorithms applied in medical images have a diagnostic accuracy that doctors cannot match in some diseases. This paper reviews the progress of tumor detection from traditional computer-aided methods to convolutional neural networks and demonstrates the potential of the practical application of convolutional neural networks from practical cases to transform the detection model from experiment to clinical application. Tumors are new tissues that are harmful to human health. The malignant tumor is one of the main diseases that seriously affect human health and threaten human life. For cancer treatment, early detection of pathological features is essential to reduce cancer mortality effectively. Traditional diagnostic methods include routine laboratory tests of the patient's secretions, and serum, immune and genetic tests. At present, the commonly used clinical imaging examinations include X-ray, CT, MRI, SPECT scan, etc. With the emergence of new problems of radiation noise reduction, medical image noise reduction technology is more and more investigated by researchers. At the same time, doctors often need to rely on clinical experience and academic background knowledge in the follow-up diagnosis of lesions. However, it is challenging to promote clinical diagnosis technology. Therefore, due to the medical needs, research on medical imaging technology and computer-aided diagnosis appears. The advantages of a convolutional neural network in tumor diagnosis are increasingly obvious. The research on computer-aided diagnosis based on medical images of tumors has become a sharper focus in the industry. Neural networks have been commonly used to research intelligent methods to assist medical image diagnosis and have made significant progress. This paper introduces the traditional methods of computer-aided diagnosis of tumors. It introduces the segmentation and classification of tumor images as well as the diagnosis methods based on CNN to help doctors determine tumors. It provides a reference for developing a CNN computer-aided system based on tumor detection research in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cerebral microbleed (CMB) is a type of biomarker, which is related to cerebrovascular diseases. In this paper, a novel computer aided diagnosis method for CMB detection was presented. Firstly, sliding neighborhood algorithm was used to generate CMB and non-CMB samples from brain susceptibility weighted images. Then, a 15-layer proposed FeatureNet was trained for extracting features from the input samples. Afterwards, structure after the first fully connected layer in FeatureNet was replaced by three randomized neural networks for classification: Schmidt neural network, random vector functional-link net, and extreme learning machine, and the weights and biases in early layers of FeatureNet were frozen during the training of those three classifiers. Finally, the output of the three classifiers was ensemble by majority voting mechanism to get better classification performance. In our experiment, five-fold cross validation was employed for evaluation. Results revealed that our FeatureNet-SNN, FeatureNet-RVFL and FeatureNet-ELM yielded accuracy of 98.22%, 98.23%, and 97.54%, respectively, and the ensembled FeatureNet-EN improved the accuracy to 98.60%, which outperformed several existing state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed FeatureNet-EN model could provide accurate CMB detection, and thus reduce death tolls. Impact Statement — We propose a 15-layer FeatureNet to detect cerebral microbleed (CMB). We propose three FeatureNet variants: FeatureNet-SNN, FeatureNet-RVFL and FeatureNet-ELM. We use ensemble learning to combine three FeatureNet variants, and generate a FeatureNet-EN. The proposed FeatureNet-SNN, FeatureNet-RVFL and FeatureNet-ELM yielded accuracy of 98.22%, 98.23%, and 97.54%, respectively, and the ensembled FeatureNet-EN improved the accuracy to 98.60%, better than state-of-the-art methods. This method could provide accurate CMB detection, and thus reduce death tolls. • Propose a 15-layer FeatureNet to detect cerebral microbleed (CMB). • Propose three FeatureNet variants: FeatureNet-ELM, FeatureNet-SNN, and FeatureNet-RVFL. • Use ensemble learning to combine three FeatureNet variants, and generate a FeatureNet-EN. • The proposed FeatureNet-EN yields an accuracy of near 99%, better than state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 virus has swept the world and brought great impact to various fields, gaining wide attention from all walks of life since the end of 2019. At present, although the global epidemic situation is leveling off and vaccine doses have been administered in a large amount, confirmed cases are still emerging around the world. To make up for the missed diagnosis caused by the uncertainty of nucleic acid polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, utilizing lung CT examination as a combined detection method to improve the diagnostic rate becomes a necessity. Our research considered the time-consuming and labor-intensive characteristics of the traditional CT analyzing process, and developed an efficient deep learning framework named CSGBBNet to solve the binary classification task of COVID-19 images based on a COVID-Seg model for image preprocessing and a GBBNet for classification. The five runs with random seed on the test set showed our novel framework can rapidly analyze CT scan images and give out effective results for assisting COVID-19 detection, with the mean accuracy of 98.49 ± 1.23%, the sensitivity of 99.00 ± 2.00%, the specificity of 97.95 ± 2.51%, the precision of 98.10 ± 2.61%, and the F1 score of 98.51 ± 1.22%. Moreover, our model CSGBBNet performs better when compared with seven previous state-of-the-art methods. In this research, the aim is to link together biomedical research and artificial intelligence and provide some insights into the field of COVID-19 detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We review artificial intelligence applications of brain image preprocessing. • We investigate several commonly seen brain diseases and survey their intelligence-based methods. • We discuss AI's future in brain disease studies. Brain diseases threaten hundreds of thousands of people over the world. Medical imaging techniques such as MRI and CT are employed for various brain disease studies. As artificial intelligence succeeded in image analysis, scientists employed artificial intelligence, especially deep learning technologies, to assist brain disease studies. The AI applications for brain disease studies can be divided into two categories. The first category is preprocessing, including denoising, registration, skull-stripping, intensity normalization, and data augmentation. The second category is the clinical application that contains lesion segmentation, disease detection, grade classification, and outcome prediction. In this survey, we reviewed over one hundred representative papers on how to apply AI to brain disease studies. We first introduced AI-based preprocessing for brain disease studies. Second, we reviewed the influential works of AI-based brain disease studies. At last, we also discussed three development trends in the future. We hope this survey will inspire both expert-level researchers and entry-level beginners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Convolutional block attention module is included in the proposed model. • The proposed multiple-input end-to-end model can handle CCT and CXR images simultaneously. • Multiple-way data augmentation is employed to overcome overfitting problem. • The proposed model gives more accurate performances than individual modality. • The proposed model offers better performances than state-of-the-art approaches. COVID-19 has caused 3.34m deaths till 13/May/2021. It is now still causing confirmed cases and ongoing deaths every day. This study investigated whether fusing chest CT with chest X-ray can help improve the AI's diagnosis performance. Data harmonization is employed to make a homogeneous dataset. We create an end-to-end multiple-input deep convolutional attention network (MIDCAN) by using the convolutional block attention module (CBAM). One input of our model receives 3D chest CT image, and other input receives 2D X-ray image. Besides, multiple-way data augmentation is used to generate fake data on training set. Grad-CAM is used to give explainable heatmap. The proposed MIDCAN achieves a sensitivity of 98.10±1.88%, a specificity of 97.95±2.26%, and an accuracy of 98.02±1.35%. Our MIDCAN method provides better results than 8 state-of-the-art approaches. We demonstrate the using multiple modalities can achieve better results than individual modality. Also, we demonstrate that CBAM can help improve the diagnosis performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By October 6, 2020, Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was diagnosed worldwide, reaching 3,355,7427 people and 1,037,862 deaths. Detection of COVID-19 and pneumonia by the chest X-ray images is of great significance to control the development of the epidemic situation. The current COVID-19 and pneumonia detection system may suffer from two shortcomings: the selection of hyperparameters in the models is not appropriate, and the generalization ability of the model is poor. To solve the above problems, our team proposed an improved intelligent global optimization algorithm, which is based on the biogeography-based optimization to automatically optimize the hyperparameters value of the models according to different detection objectives. In the optimization progress, after selecting the immigration of suitable index vector and the emigration of suitable index vector, we proposed adding a comparison operation to compare the value of them. According to the different numerical relationships between them, the corresponding operations are performed to improve the migration operation of biogeography-based optimization. The improved algorithm (momentum factor biogeography-based optimization) can better perform the automatic optimization operation. In addition, our team also proposed two frameworks: biogeography convolutional neural network and momentum factor biogeography convolutional neural network. And two methods for detection COVID-19 based on the proposed frameworks. Our method used three convolutional neural networks (LeNet-5, VGG-16, and ResNet-18) as the basic classification models for chest X-ray images detection of COVID-19, Normal, and Pneumonia. The accuracy of LeNet-5, VGG-16, and ResNet-18 is improved by 1.56%, 1.48%, and 0.73% after using biogeography-based optimization to optimize the hyperparameters of the models. The accuracy of LeNet-5, VGG-16, and ResNet-18 is improved by 2.87%, 6.31%, and 1.46% after using the momentum factor biogeography-based optimization to optimize the hyperparameters of the models. Under the same experimental conditions, the performance of the momentum factor biogeography-based optimization is superior to the biogeography-based optimization in optimizing the hyperparameters of the convolutional neural networks. Experimental results show that the momentum factor biogeography-based optimization can improve the detection performance of the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of overall accuracy. In future research, we will continue to use and improve other global optimization algorithms to enhance the application ability of deep learning in medical pathological image detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]