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Non-linear convection-reaction-diffusion (CRD) partial differential equations (PDEs) are crucial for modeling complex phenomena in fields such as biology, ecology, population dynamics, physics, and engineering. Numerical approximation of these non-linear systems is essential due to the challenges of obtaining exact solutions. Traditionally, the Galerkin finite element method (GFEM) has been the standard computational tool for solving these PDEs. With the advancements in machine learning, Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) has emerged as a promising alternative for approximating non-linear PDEs. In this study, we compare the performance of PINN and GFEM by solving four distinct one-dimensional CRD problems with varying initial and boundary conditions and evaluate the performance of PINN over GFEM. This evaluation metrics includes error estimates, and visual representations of the solutions, supported by statistical methods such as the root mean squared error (RMSE), the standard deviation of error, the the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test and the coefficient of variation (CV) test. Our findings reveal that while both methods achieve solutions close to the analytical results, PINN demonstrate superior accuracy and efficiency. PINN achieved significantly lower RMSE values and smaller standard deviations for Burgers' equation, Fisher's equation, and Newell-Whitehead-Segel equation, indicating higher accuracy and greater consistency. While GFEM shows slightly better accuracy for the Burgers-Huxley equation, its performance was less consistent over time. In contrast, PINN exhibit more reliable and robust performance, highlighting their potential as a cutting-edge approach for solving non-linear PDEs., Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures

Applying deep learning (DL) for annotating surgical instruments in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgeries (MIS) represents a significant advancement in surgical technology. This systematic review examines 48 studies that and advanced DL methods and architectures. These sophisticated DL models have shown notable improvements in the precision and efficiency of detecting and segmenting surgical tools. The enhanced capabilities of these models support various clinical applications, including real-time intraoperative guidance, comprehensive postoperative evaluations, and objective assessments of surgical skills. By accurately identifying and segmenting surgical instruments in video data, DL models provide detailed feedback to surgeons, thereby improving surgical outcomes and reducing complication risks. Furthermore, the application of DL in surgical education is transformative. The review underscores the significant impact of DL on improving the accuracy of skill assessments and the overall quality of surgical training programs. However, implementing DL in surgical tool detection and segmentation faces challenges, such as the need for large, accurately annotated datasets to train these models effectively. The manual annotation process is labor-intensive and time-consuming, posing a significant bottleneck. Future research should focus on automating the detection and segmentation process and enhancing the robustness of DL models against environmental variations. Expanding the application of DL models across various surgical specialties will be essential to fully realize this technology's potential. Integrating DL with other emerging technologies, such as augmented reality (AR), also offers promising opportunities to further enhance the precision and efficacy of surgical procedures., Comment: 57 pages, 9 figures, Published in Artificial Intelligence Reviews journal

Recent developments in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have spurred significant interest in their potential applications across various medical imaging domains. On the one hand, there is a temptation to use these generative models to synthesize realistic-looking medical image data, while on the other hand, the ability to identify synthetic image data in a pool of data is also significantly important. In this study, we explore the potential of the Gemini (\textit{gemini-1.0-pro-vision-latest}) and GPT-4V (gpt-4-vision-preview) models for medical image analysis using two modalities of medical image data. Utilizing synthetic and real imaging data, both Gemini AI and GPT-4V are first used to classify real versus synthetic images, followed by an interpretation and analysis of the input images. Experimental results demonstrate that both Gemini and GPT-4 could perform some interpretation of the input images. In this specific experiment, Gemini was able to perform slightly better than the GPT-4V on the classification task. In contrast, responses associated with GPT-4V were mostly generic in nature. Our early investigation presented in this work provides insights into the potential of MLLMs to assist with the classification and interpretation of retinal fundoscopy and lung X-ray images. We also identify key limitations associated with the early investigation study on MLLMs for specialized tasks in medical image analysis., Comment: Accepted in Fifth IEEE Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for HealthCare, IEEE 25th International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science

We investigate the behavior of various measures of quantum coherence and quantum correlation in the spin-1/2 Heisenberg XYZ model with added Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya (DM) and Kaplan--Shekhtman--Entin-Wohlman--Aharony (KSEA) interactions at a thermal regime described by a Gibbs density operator. We aim to understand the restricted hierarchical classification of different quantum resources, where Bell nonlocality $\subseteq$ quantum steering $\subseteq$ quantum entanglement $\subseteq$ quantum discord $\subseteq$ quantum coherence. This hierarchy highlights the increasingly stringent conditions required as we move from quantum coherence to more specific quantum phenomena. In order to enhance quantum coherence, quantum correlation, and fidelity of teleportation, our analysis encompasses the effects of independently provided sinusoidal magnetic field control as well as DM and KSEA interactions on the considered system. The results reveal that enhancing the entanglement or quantum correlation of the channel does not always guarantee successful teleportation or even an improvement in teleportation fidelity. Thus, the relationship between teleportation fidelity and the channel's underlying quantum properties is intricate. Our study provides valuable insights into the complex interplay of quantum coherence and correlation hierarchy, offering potential applications for quantum communication and information processing technologies., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. All comments are welcome

We propose a theoretical scheme for the generation of nonreciprocal multipartite entanglement in a two-mode cavity magnomechanical system, consisting of two cross-microwave (MW) cavities having a yttrium iron garnet (YIG) sphere, which is coupled through magnetic dipole interaction. Our results show that the self-Kerr effect of magnon can significantly enhance multipartite entanglement, which turns out to be nonreciprocal when the magnetic field is tuned along the crystallographic axis [110]. This is due to the frequency shift on the magnons (YIG sphere), which depends on the direction of the magnetic field. Interestingly, the degree of nonreciprocity of bipartite entanglements depends upon a careful optimal choice of system parameters like normalized cavity detunings, bipartite nonlinear index, self-Kerr coefficient, and effective magnomechanical coupling rate G. In addition to bipartite entanglement, we also present the idea of a bidirectional contrast ratio, which quantifies the nonreciprocity in tripartite entanglements. Our present theoretical proposal for nonreciprocity in multipartite entanglement may find applications in diverse engineering nonreciprocal devices, Comment: 13 pages, 7figures

In this paper, we analytically present the phenomena of nanomechanically induced transparency (NMIT) and transmission rate in a parity-time-symmetric ($\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric) opto-nanomechanical system (ONMS) where a levitated dielectric nanospheres is trapped near the antinodes closest to right mirror of passive cavity which further coupled to an active cavity via hoping factor. We find that the phenomenon of NMIT may be generated from the output probe field in the presence of an effective opto-nanomechanical coupling between the cavity field and the nanosphere, whose steady-state position is influenced by the Coulomb interaction between the cavity mirror and the nanosphere. In addition, the width and height of the transparency window can be controlled through the effective optomechanical coupling, which is readily adjusted by altering changing the nanosphere's radius and the Coulomb interaction. One of the most interesting result is the transition NMIT behavior in $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric and broken $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric regime. We show that the presence of nanosphere in the passive cavity enhances the width and transmission rate of NMIT window in passive-passive regime and in passive-active regime, a notable decrease of sideband amplification has been observed. These results show that our scheme may find some potential applications for optical signal processing an and quantum information processing., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures

Vision transformer-based methods are advancing the field of medical artificial intelligence and cancer imaging, including lung cancer applications. Recently, many researchers have developed vision transformer-based AI methods for lung cancer diagnosis and prognosis. This scoping review aims to identify the recent developments on vision transformer-based AI methods for lung cancer imaging applications. It provides key insights into how vision transformers complemented the performance of AI and deep learning methods for lung cancer. Furthermore, the review also identifies the datasets that contributed to advancing the field. Of the 314 retrieved studies, this review included 34 studies published from 2020 to 2022. The most commonly addressed task in these studies was the classification of lung cancer types, such as lung squamous cell carcinoma versus lung adenocarcinoma, and identifying benign versus malignant pulmonary nodules. Other applications included survival prediction of lung cancer patients and segmentation of lungs. The studies lacked clear strategies for clinical transformation. SWIN transformer was a popular choice of the researchers; however, many other architectures were also reported where vision transformer was combined with convolutional neural networks or UNet model. It can be concluded that vision transformer-based models are increasingly in popularity for developing AI methods for lung cancer applications. However, their computational complexity and clinical relevance are important factors to be considered for future research work. This review provides valuable insights for researchers in the field of AI and healthcare to advance the state-of-the-art in lung cancer diagnosis and prognosis. We provide an interactive dashboard on lung-cancer.onrender.com/., Comment: submitted to BMC Medical Imaging journal

The purpose of the research is to find the numerical solutions to the system of time dependent nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) utilizing the Modified Galerkin Weighted Residual Method (MGWRM) with the help of modified Bernstein polynomials. An approximate solution of the system has been assumed in accordance with the modified Bernstein polynomials. Thereafter, the modified Galerkin method has been applied to the system of nonlinear parabolic PDEs and has transformed the model into a time dependent ordinary differential equations system. Then the system has been converted into the recurrence equations by employing backward difference approximation. However, the iterative calculation is performed by using the Picard Iterative method. A few renowned problems are then solved to test the applicability and efficiency of our proposed scheme. The numerical solutions at different time levels are then displayed numerically in tabular form and graphically by figures. The comparative study is presented along with L2 norm, and L infinity norm.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based models can help in diagnosing COVID-19 from lung CT scans and X-ray images; however, these models require large amounts of data for training and validation. Many researchers studied Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for producing synthetic lung CT scans and X-Ray images to improve the performance of AI-based models. It is not well explored how good GAN-based methods performed to generate reliable synthetic data. This work analyzes 43 published studies that reported GANs for synthetic data generation. Many of these studies suffered data bias, lack of reproducibility, and lack of feedback from the radiologists or other domain experts. A common issue in these studies is the unavailability of the source code, hindering reproducibility. The included studies reported rescaling of the input images to train the existing GANs architecture without providing clinical insights on how the rescaling was motivated. Finally, even though GAN-based methods have the potential for data augmentation and improving the training of AI-based models, these methods fall short in terms of their use in clinical practice. This paper highlights research hotspots in countering the data scarcity problem, identifies various issues as well as potentials, and provides recommendations to guide future research. These recommendations might be useful to improve acceptability for the GAN-based approaches for data augmentation as GANs for data augmentation are increasingly becoming popular in the AI and medical imaging research community., Comment: submitted to 2023 CVPR workshop on Generative Models for Computer Vision

Generative models have been very successful over the years and have received significant attention for synthetic data generation. As deep learning models are getting more and more complex, they require large amounts of data to perform accurately. In medical image analysis, such generative models play a crucial role as the available data is limited due to challenges related to data privacy, lack of data diversity, or uneven data distributions. In this paper, we present a method to generate brain tumor MRI images using generative adversarial networks. We have utilized StyleGAN2 with ADA methodology to generate high-quality brain MRI with tumors while using a significantly smaller amount of training data when compared to the existing approaches. We use three pre-trained models for transfer learning. Results demonstrate that the proposed method can learn the distributions of brain tumors. Furthermore, the model can generate high-quality synthetic brain MRI with a tumor that can limit the small sample size issues. The approach can addresses the limited data availability by generating realistic-looking brain MRI with tumors. The code is available at: ~\url{https://github.com/rizwanqureshi123/Brain-Tumor-Synthetic-Data}., Comment: Accepted in AICS conference

Generative models are becoming popular for the synthesis of medical images. Recently, neural diffusion models have demonstrated the potential to generate photo-realistic images of objects. However, their potential to generate medical images is not explored yet. In this work, we explore the possibilities of synthesis of medical images using neural diffusion models. First, we use a pre-trained DALLE2 model to generate lungs X-Ray and CT images from an input text prompt. Second, we train a stable diffusion model with 3165 X-Ray images and generate synthetic images. We evaluate the synthetic image data through a qualitative analysis where two independent radiologists label randomly chosen samples from the generated data as real, fake, or unsure. Results demonstrate that images generated with the diffusion model can translate characteristics that are otherwise very specific to certain medical conditions in chest X-Ray or CT images. Careful tuning of the model can be very promising. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to generate lungs X-Ray and CT images using neural diffusion models. This work aims to introduce a new dimension in artificial intelligence for medical imaging. Given that this is a new topic, the paper will serve as an introduction and motivation for the research community to explore the potential of diffusion models for medical image synthesis. We have released the synthetic images on https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/hazrat/awesomelungs., Comment: 8 pages. Submitted to AICS 2022 conference

Healthcare data are inherently multimodal, including electronic health records (EHR), medical images, and multi-omics data. Combining these multimodal data sources contributes to a better understanding of human health and provides optimal personalized healthcare. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly machine learning (ML), enable the fusion of these different data modalities to provide multimodal insights. To this end, in this scoping review, we focus on synthesizing and analyzing the literature that uses AI techniques to fuse multimodal medical data for different clinical applications. More specifically, we focus on studies that only fused EHR with medical imaging data to develop various AI methods for clinical applications. We present a comprehensive analysis of the various fusion strategies, the diseases and clinical outcomes for which multimodal fusion was used, the ML algorithms used to perform multimodal fusion for each clinical application, and the available multimodal medical datasets. We followed the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. We searched Embase, PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar to retrieve relevant studies. We extracted data from 34 studies that fulfilled the inclusion criteria. In our analysis, a typical workflow was observed: feeding raw data, fusing different data modalities by applying conventional machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) algorithms, and finally, evaluating the multimodal fusion through clinical outcome predictions. Specifically, early fusion was the most used technique in most applications for multimodal learning (22 out of 34 studies). We found that multimodality fusion models outperformed traditional single-modality models for the same task. Disease diagnosis and prediction were the most common clinical outcomes (reported in 20 and 10 studies, respectively) from a clinical outcome perspective., Comment: Accepted in Nature Scientific Reports. 20 pages

Text detection in natural scene images has applications for autonomous driving, navigation help for elderly and blind people. However, the research on Urdu text detection is usually hindered by lack of data resources. We have developed a dataset of scene images with Urdu text. We present the use of machine learning methods to perform detection of Urdu text from the scene images. We extract text regions using channel enhanced Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) method. First, we classify text and noise based on their geometric properties. Next, we use a support vector machine for early discarding of non-text regions. To further remove the non-text regions, we use histogram of oriented gradients (HoG) features obtained and train a second SVM classifier. This improves the overall performance on text region detection within the scene images. To support research on Urdu text, We aim to make the data freely available for research use. We also aim to highlight the challenges and the research gap for Urdu text detection., Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS ML4D workshop. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2109.08060

Robust speech emotion recognition relies on the quality of the speech features. We present speech features enhancement strategy that improves speech emotion recognition. We used the INTERSPEECH 2010 challenge feature-set. We identified subsets from the features set and applied Principle Component Analysis to the subsets. Finally, the features are fused horizontally. The resulting feature set is analyzed using t-distributed neighbour embeddings (t-SNE) before the application of features for emotion recognition. The method is compared with the state-of-the-art methods used in the literature. The empirical evidence is drawn using two well-known datasets: Emotional Speech Dataset (EMO-DB) and Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS) for two languages, German and English, respectively. Our method achieved an average recognition gain of 11.5\% for six out of seven emotions for the EMO-DB dataset, and 13.8\% for seven out of eight emotions for the RAVDESS dataset as compared to the baseline study., Comment: Accepted at PeerJ Computer Science

Deep learning techniques, particularly convolutional neural networks, have shown great potential in computer vision and medical imaging applications. However, deep learning models are computationally demanding as they require enormous computational power and specialized processing hardware for model training. To make these models portable and compatible for prototyping, their implementation on low-power devices is imperative. In this work, we present the implementation of Modified U-Net on Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick 2 (NCS-2) for the segmentation of medical images. We selected U-Net because, in medical image segmentation, U-Net is a prominent model that provides improved performance for medical image segmentation even if the dataset size is small. The modified U-Net model is evaluated for performance in terms of dice score. Experiments are reported for segmentation task on three medical imaging datasets: BraTs dataset of brain MRI, heart MRI dataset, and Ziehl-Neelsen sputum smear microscopy image (ZNSDB) dataset. For the proposed model, we reduced the number of parameters from 30 million in the U-Net model to 0.49 million in the proposed architecture. Experimental results show that the modified U-Net provides comparable performance while requiring significantly lower resources and provides inference on the NCS-2. The maximum dice scores recorded are 0.96 for the BraTs dataset, 0.94 for the heart MRI dataset, and 0.74 for the ZNSDB dataset., Comment: Preprint of paper accepted in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Brief

U-Net is a widely adopted neural network in the domain of medical image segmentation. Despite its quick embracement by the medical imaging community, its performance suffers on complicated datasets. The problem can be ascribed to its simple feature extracting blocks: encoder/decoder, and the semantic gap between encoder and decoder. Variants of U-Net (such as R2U-Net) have been proposed to address the problem of simple feature extracting blocks by making the network deeper, but it does not deal with the semantic gap problem. On the other hand, another variant UNET++ deals with the semantic gap problem by introducing dense skip connections but has simple feature extraction blocks. To overcome these issues, we propose a new U-Net based medical image segmentation architecture R2U++. In the proposed architecture, the adapted changes from vanilla U-Net are: (1) the plain convolutional backbone is replaced by a deeper recurrent residual convolution block. The increased field of view with these blocks aids in extracting crucial features for segmentation which is proven by improvement in the overall performance of the network. (2) The semantic gap between encoder and decoder is reduced by dense skip pathways. These pathways accumulate features coming from multiple scales and apply concatenation accordingly. The modified architecture has embedded multi-depth models, and an ensemble of outputs taken from varying depths improves the performance on foreground objects appearing at various scales in the images. The performance of R2U++ is evaluated on four distinct medical imaging modalities: electron microscopy (EM), X-rays, fundus, and computed tomography (CT). The average gain achieved in IoU score is 1.5+-0.37% and in dice score is 0.9+-0.33% over UNET++, whereas, 4.21+-2.72 in IoU and 3.47+-1.89 in dice score over R2U-Net across different medical imaging segmentation datasets., Comment: Paper accepted in Neural Computing and Applications (2022). Please cite the final version available from Springer website https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00521-022-07419-7

This review presents a comprehensive study on the role of GANs in addressing the challenges related to COVID-19 data scarcity and diagnosis. It is the first review that summarizes the different GANs methods and the lungs images datasets for COVID-19. It attempts to answer the questions related to applications of GANs, popular GAN architectures, frequently used image modalities, and the availability of source code. This review included 57 full-text studies that reported the use of GANs for different applications in COVID-19 lungs images data. Most of the studies (n=42) used GANs for data augmentation to enhance the performance of AI techniques for COVID-19 diagnosis. Other popular applications of GANs were segmentation of lungs and super-resolution of the lungs images. The cycleGAN and the conditional GAN were the most commonly used architectures used in nine studies each. 29 studies used chest X-Ray images while 21 studies used CT images for the training of GANs. For majority of the studies (n=47), the experiments were done and results were reported using publicly available data. A secondary evaluation of the results by radiologists/clinicians was reported by only two studies. Conclusion: Studies have shown that GANs have great potential to address the data scarcity challenge for lungs images of COVID-19. Data synthesized with GANs have been helpful to improve the training of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models trained for the diagnosis of COVID-19. Besides, GANs have also contributed to enhancing the CNNs performance through the super-resolution of the images and segmentation. This review also identified key limitations of the potential transformation of GANs based methods in clinical applications.

Background: Vaccination programs are effective only when a significant percentage of people are vaccinated. However, vaccine acceptance varies among communities around the world. Social media usage is arguably one of the factors affecting public attitudes towards vaccines. Objective: This study aims to identify if the social media usages factors can be used to predict attitudes and behavior towards the COVID-19 vaccines among the people in the Arab world. Methods: An online survey was conducted in the Arab countries and 217 Arab people participated in this study. Logistic regression was applied to identify what demographics and social media usage factors predict public attitudes and behavior towards the COVID-19 vaccines. Results: Of the 217 participants, 56.22% of them were willing to accept the vaccine and 41.47% of them were hesitant. This study shows that none of the social media usages factors were significant enough to predict the actual vaccine acceptance behavior. Whereas the analysis showed few of the social media usage factors can predict public attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines. For example, frequent social media users were 2.85 times more likely to agree that the risk of COVID-19 is being exaggerated (OR=2.85, 95% CI=0.86-9.45, p=0.046) than infrequent social media users. Whereas participants having more trust in vaccine information shared by their contacts are less likely to agree that decision-makers have verified that vaccines are safe (OR=0.528, 95% CI= 0.276-1.012, p=0.05). Conclusion: The use of social media and information shared on it may affect public attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines. Therefore, disseminating correct and validated information about COVID-19 and other vaccines on social media is important for increasing public trust and countering the impact of incorrect and misinformation.

Entropic uncertainty and entanglement are two distinct aspects of quantum mechanical procedures. To estimate entropic uncertainty relations, entropies are used: the greater the entropy bound, the less effective the quantum operations and entanglement are. In this regard, we analyze the entropic uncertainty, entropic uncertainty lower bound, and concurrence dynamics in two non-interacting qubits. The exposure of two qubits is studied in two different qubit-noise configurations, namely, common qubit-noise and independent qubit-noise interactions. To include the noisy effects of the local external fields, a Gaussian Ornstein Uhlenbeck process is considered. We show that the rise in entropic uncertainty gives rise to the disentanglement in the two-qubit Werner type state and both are directly proportional. Depending on the parameters adjustment and the number of environments coupled, different classical environments have varying capacities to induce entropic uncertainty and disentanglement in quantum systems. The entanglement is shown to be vulnerable to current external fields; however, by employing the ideal parameter ranges we provided, prolonged entanglement retention while preventing entropic uncertainty growth can be achieved. Besides, we have also analyzed the intrinsic behavior of the classical fields towards two-qubit entanglement without any imperfection with respect to different parameters

Text detection in natural scene images for content analysis is an interesting task. The research community has seen some great developments for English/Mandarin text detection. However, Urdu text extraction in natural scene images is a task not well addressed. In this work, firstly, a new dataset is introduced for Urdu text in natural scene images. The dataset comprises of 500 standalone images acquired from real scenes. Secondly, the channel enhanced Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) method is applied to extract Urdu text regions as candidates in an image. Two-stage filtering mechanism is applied to eliminate non-candidate regions. In the first stage, text and noise are classified based on their geometric properties. In the second stage, a support vector machine classifier is trained to discard non-text candidate regions. After this, text candidate regions are linked using centroid-based vertical and horizontal distances. Text lines are further analyzed by a different classifier based on HOG features to remove non-text regions. Extensive experimentation is performed on the locally developed dataset to evaluate the performance. The experimental results show good performance on test set images. The dataset will be made available for research use. To the best of our knowledge, the work is the first of its kind for the Urdu language and would provide a good dataset for free research use and serve as a baseline performance on the task of Urdu text extraction.

Food resources face severe damages under extraordinary situations of catastrophes such as earthquakes, cyclones, and tsunamis. Under such scenarios, speedy assessment of food resources from agricultural land is critical as it supports aid activity in the disaster hit areas. In this article, a deep learning approach is presented for the detection and segmentation of coconut tress in aerial imagery provided through the AI competition organized by the World Bank in collaboration with OpenAerialMap and WeRobotics. Maked Region-based Convolutional Neural Network approach was used identification and segmentation of coconut trees. For the segmentation task, Mask R-CNN model with ResNet50 and ResNet1010 based architectures was used. Several experiments with different configuration parameters were performed and the best configuration for the detection of coconut trees with more than 90% confidence factor was reported. For the purpose of evaluation, Microsoft COCO dataset evaluation metric namely mean average precision (mAP) was used. An overall 91% mean average precision for coconut trees detection was achieved., Comment: Published in IET Computer Vision, 09 April 2021

Ultrasound imaging provides information from a large part of the muscle. It has recently been shown that ultrafast ultrasound imaging can be used to record and analyze the mechanical response of individual MUs using blind source separation. In this work, we present an alternative method - a deep learning pipeline - to identify active MUs in ultrasound image sequences, including segmentation of their territories and signal estimation of their mechanical responses (twitch train). We train and evaluate the model using simulated data mimicking the complex activation pattern of tens of activated MUs with overlapping territories and partially synchronized activation patterns. Using a slow fusion approach (based on 3D CNNs), we transform the spatiotemporal image sequence data to 2D representations and apply a deep neural network architecture for segmentation. Next, we employ a second deep neural network architecture for signal estimation. The results show that the proposed pipeline can effectively identify individual MUs, estimate their territories, and estimate their twitch train signal at low contraction forces. The framework can retain spatio-temporal consistencies and information of the mechanical response of MU activity even when the ultrasound image sequences are transformed into a 2D representation for compatibility with more traditional computer vision and image processing techniques. The proposed pipeline is potentially useful to identify simultaneously active MUs in whole muscles in ultrasound image sequences of voluntary skeletal muscle contractions at low force levels.

Chest X-ray (CXR) is a low-cost medical imaging technique. It is a common procedure for the identification of many respiratory diseases compared to MRI, CT, and PET scans. This paper presents the use of generative adversarial networks (GAN) to perform the task of lung segmentation on a given CXR. GANs are popular to generate realistic data by learning the mapping from one domain to another. In our work, the generator of the GAN is trained to generate a segmented mask of a given input CXR. The discriminator distinguishes between a ground truth and the generated mask, and updates the generator through the adversarial loss measure. The objective is to generate masks for the input CXR, which are as realistic as possible compared to the ground truth masks. The model is trained and evaluated using four different discriminators referred to as D1, D2, D3, and D4, respectively. Experimental results on three different CXR datasets reveal that the proposed model is able to achieve a dice-score of 0.9740, and IOU score of 0.943, which are better than other reported state-of-the art results., Comment: Volume 8, August 2020, Pages 153535 - 153545

This study presents a novel method to recognize human physical activities using CNN followed by LSTM. Achieving high accuracy by traditional machine learning algorithms, (such as SVM, KNN and random forest method) is a challenging task because the data acquired from the wearable sensors like accelerometer and gyroscope is a time-series data. So, to achieve high accuracy, we propose a multi-head CNN model comprising of three CNNs to extract features for the data acquired from different sensors and all three CNNs are then merged, which are followed by an LSTM layer and a dense layer. The configuration of all three CNNs is kept the same so that the same number of features are obtained for every input to CNN. By using the proposed method, we achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, which is comparable to traditional machine learning algorithms and other deep neural network algorithms., Comment: IEEE ICET 2019