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Abstract Counting high‐density objects quickly and accurately is a popular area of research. Crowd counting has significant social and economic value and is a major focus in artificial intelligence. Despite many advancements in this field, many of them are not widely known, especially in terms of research data. The authors proposed a three‐tier standardised dataset taxonomy (TSDT). The Taxonomy divides datasets into small‐scale, large‐scale and hyper‐scale, according to different application scenarios. This theory can help researchers make more efficient use of datasets and improve the performance of AI algorithms in specific fields. Additionally, the authors proposed a new evaluation index for the clarity of the dataset: average pixel occupied by each object (APO). This new evaluation index is more suitable for evaluating the clarity of the dataset in the object counting task than the image resolution. Moreover, the authors classified the crowd counting methods from a data‐driven perspective: multi‐scale networks, single‐column networks, multi‐column networks, multi‐task networks, attention networks and weak‐supervised networks and introduced the classic crowd counting methods of each class. The authors classified the existing 36 datasets according to the theory of three‐tier standardised dataset taxonomy and discussed and evaluated these datasets. The authors evaluated the performance of more than 100 methods in the past five years on different levels of popular datasets. Recently, progress in research on small‐scale datasets has slowed down. There are few new datasets and algorithms on small‐scale datasets. The studies focused on large or hyper‐scale datasets appear to be reaching a saturation point. The combined use of multiple approaches began to be a major research direction. The authors discussed the theoretical and practical challenges of crowd counting from the perspective of data, algorithms and computing resources. The field of crowd counting is moving towards combining multiple methods and requires fresh, targeted datasets. Despite advancements, the field still faces challenges such as handling real‐world scenarios and processing large crowds in real‐time. Researchers are exploring transfer learning to overcome the limitations of small datasets. The development of effective algorithms for crowd counting remains a challenging and important task in computer vision and AI, with many opportunities for future research.

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 This paper proposes applying a novel deep‐learning model, TBDLNet, to recognize CT images to classify multidrug‐resistant and drug‐sensitive tuberculosis automatically. The pre‐trained ResNet50 is selected to extract features. Three randomized neural networks are used to alleviate the overfitting problem. The ensemble of three RNNs is applied to boost the robustness via majority voting. The proposed model is evaluated by five‐fold cross‐validation. Five indexes are selected in this paper, which are accuracy, sensitivity, precision, F1‐score, and specificity. The TBDLNet achieves 0.9822 accuracy, 0.9815 specificity, 0.9823 precision, 0.9829 sensitivity, and 0.9826 F1‐score, respectively. The TBDLNet is suitable for classifying multidrug‐resistant tuberculosis and drug‐sensitive tuberculosis. It can detect multidrug‐resistant pulmonary tuberculosis as early as possible, which helps to adjust the treatment plan in time and improve the treatment effect.

Recently, large language models such as ChatGPT have made huge strides in understanding and generating human-like text and have demonstrated considerable success in natural language processing. These foundation models also perform well in computer vision. However, there is a growing need to use these technologies for specific medical tasks, especially for identifying cancer in images. This paper looks at how these foundation models, such as the segment anything model, could be used for cancer segmentation, discussing the potential benefits and challenges of applying large foundation models to help with cancer diagnoses.

Grey wolf optimizer (GWO) is a highly valued heuristic algorithm in many fields. However, for some complex problems, especially high‐dimensional and multimodal problems, the basic algorithm has limited computational power and cannot get a satisfactory answer. In order to find a better solution, an improved algorithm based on GWO is proposed herein. Gaussian barebone, random selection and chaotic game mechanisms are introduced into the GWO algorithm to enhance the global search ability. The GWO enhanced by three mechanisms is called CBRGWO. To verify the performance of CBRGWO, using IEEE CEC 2017 as a test function, CBRGWO is compared to five GWO variants, five basic algorithms, six advanced algorithms, and four champion algorithms. CBRGWO is evaluated using the Friedman test and Wilcoxon signed‐rank test. Then, the stability of CBRGWO is analyzed. To verify that CBRGWO is still effective in practical application, CBRGWO is applied to five engineering problems and a water quality prediction problem. The experimental findings indicate that CBRGWO maintains excellent optimization ability in practical engineering problems.

Goal: As an essential human-machine interactive task, emotion recognition has become an emerging area over the decades. Although previous attempts to classify emotions have achieved high performance, several challenges remain open: 1) How to effectively recognize emotions using different modalities remains challenging. 2) Due to the increasing amount of computing power required for deep learning, how to provide real-time detection and improve the robustness of deep neural networks is important. Method: In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based multimodal emotion recognition (MER) called Deep-Emotion, which can adaptively integrate the most discriminating features from facial expressions, speech, and electroencephalogram (EEG) to improve the performance of the MER. Specifically, the proposed Deep-Emotion framework consists of three branches, i.e., the facial branch, speech branch, and EEG branch. Correspondingly, the facial branch uses the improved GhostNet neural network proposed in this paper for feature extraction, which effectively alleviates the overfitting phenomenon in the training process and improves the classification accuracy compared with the original GhostNet network. For work on the speech branch, this paper proposes a lightweight fully convolutional neural network (LFCNN) for the efficient extraction of speech emotion features. Regarding the study of EEG branches, we proposed a tree-like LSTM (tLSTM) model capable of fusing multi-stage features for EEG emotion feature extraction. Finally, we adopted the strategy of decision-level fusion to integrate the recognition results of the above three modes, resulting in more comprehensive and accurate performance. Result and Conclusions: Extensive experiments on the CK+, EMO-DB, and MAHNOB-HCI datasets have demonstrated the advanced nature of the Deep-Emotion method proposed in this paper, as well as the feasibility and superiority of the MER approach.

Goal: Deep learning techniques have made significant progress in medical image analysis. However, obtaining ground truth labels for unlabeled medical images is challenging as they often outnumber labeled images. Thus, training a high-performance model with limited labeled data has become a crucial challenge. Methods: This study introduces an underlying knowledge-based semi-supervised framework called UKSSL, consisting of two components: MedCLR extracts feature representations from the unlabeled dataset; UKMLP utilizes the representation and fine-tunes it with the limited labeled dataset to classify the medical images. Results: UKSSL evaluates on the LC25000 and BCCD datasets, using only 50% labeled data. It gets precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy of 98.9% on LC25000 and 94.3%, 94.5%, 94.3%, and 94.1% on BCCD, respectively. These results outperform other supervised-learning methods using 100% labeled data. Conclusions: The UKSSL can efficiently extract underlying knowledge from the unlabeled dataset and perform better using limited labeled medical images.

With psoriasis and eczema being the two most common diseases worldwide, achieving automatic diagnosis could be useful for healthcare cyber-physical system. However, creating such an automatic classification system is still challenging since it cannot learn positional and spatial information from unstable training. In this paper, we propose a novel abscissa-ordinate focused network (AOFNet) with active label smoothing for the identification of psoriasis and eczema from images. The AOFNet incorporates the developed abscissa-ordinate focused module that focuses on abscissa-ordinate information and leverages the attention mechanism to enhance the network’s ability to learn positional and spatial details, resulting in improved classification performance. Additionally, the adoption of an active label smoothing approach effectively mitigates the problem of overconfidence and effectively captures the dynamic changes that occur during training, thereby providing an added boost to the overall performance of the network. To evaluate the proposed healthcare cyber-physical system, extensive experiments are conducted on the clinical psoriasis and eczema dataset, and the results demonstrate that the designed system could gain comparable classification performance.

Abstract Automatic brain tumour segmentation in MRI scans aims to separate the brain tumour's endoscopic core, edema, non‐enhancing tumour core, peritumoral edema, and enhancing tumour core from three‐dimensional MR voxels. Due to the wide range of brain tumour intensity, shape, location, and size, it is challenging to segment these regions automatically. UNet is the prime three‐dimensional CNN network performance source for medical imaging applications like brain tumour segmentation. This research proposes a context aware 3D ARDUNet (Attentional Residual Dropout UNet) network, a modified version of UNet to take advantage of the ResNet and soft attention. A novel residual dropout block (RDB) is implemented in the analytical encoder path to replace traditional UNet convolutional blocks to extract more contextual information. A unique Attentional Residual Dropout Block (ARDB) in the decoder path utilizes skip connections and attention gates to retrieve local and global contextual information. The attention gate enabled the Network to focus on the relevant part of the input image and suppress irrelevant details. Finally, the proposed Network assessed BRATS2018, BRATS2019, and BRATS2020 to some best‐in‐class segmentation approaches. The proposed Network achieved dice scores of 0.90, 0.92, and 0.93 for the whole tumour. On BRATS2018, BRATS2019, and BRATS2020, tumour core is 0.90, 0.92, 0.93, and enhancing tumour is 0.92, 0.93, 0.94.

Abstract Supervised learning aims to build a function or model that seeks as many mappings as possible between the training data and outputs, where each training data will predict as a label to match its corresponding ground‐truth value. Although supervised learning has achieved great success in many tasks, sufficient data supervision for labels is not accessible in many domains because accurate data labelling is costly and laborious, particularly in medical image analysis. The cost of the dataset with ground‐truth labels is much higher than in other domains. Therefore, it is noteworthy to focus on weakly supervised learning for medical image analysis, as it is more applicable for practical applications. In this review, the authors give an overview of the latest process of weakly supervised learning in medical image analysis, including incomplete, inexact, and inaccurate supervision, and introduce the related works on different applications for medical image analysis. Related concepts are illustrated to help readers get an overview ranging from supervised to unsupervised learning within the scope of machine learning. Furthermore, the challenges and future works of weakly supervised learning in medical image analysis are discussed.

Abstract Facial expression recognition (FER) is widely used in many fields. To further improve the accuracy of FER, this paper proposes a method based on double‐code LBP‐layer spatial‐attention network (DLSANet). The backbone model for the DLSANet is an emotion network (ENet), which is modified with a double‐code LBP (DLBP) layer and a spatial attention module. The DLBP layer is at the front of the first convolutional layer. More valuable features can be extracted by inputting the image processed by DLBP into convolutional layers. The JAFFE and CK+ datasets are used, which contain seven expressions: happiness, anger, disgust, neutral, fear, sadness, and surprise. The average of fivefold cross‐validation shows that DLSANet achieves a recognition accuracy of 93.81% and 98.68% on the JAFFE and CK+ datasets. The experiment reveals that the DLSANet can produce better classification results than state‐of‐the‐art methods.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, over 760 million confirmed cases and over 6.8 million deaths have been reported globally, according to the World Health Organization. While the SARS-CoV-2 virus carried by COVID-19 patients can be identified though the reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test with high accuracy, clinical misdiagnosis between COVID-19 and pneumonia patients remains a challenge. Therefore, we developed a novel CovC-ReDRNet model to distinguish COVID-19 patients from pneumonia patients as well as normal cases. ResNet-18 was introduced as the backbone model and tailored for the feature representation afterward. In our feature-based randomized neural network (RNN) framework, the feature representation automatically pairs with the deep random vector function link network (dRVFL) as the optimal classifier, producing a CovC-ReDRNet model for the classification task. Results based on five-fold cross-validation reveal that our method achieved 94.94%, 97.01%, 97.56%, 96.81%, and 95.84% MA sensitivity, MA specificity, MA accuracy, MA precision, and MA F1-score, respectively. Ablation studies evidence the superiority of ResNet-18 over different backbone networks, RNNs over traditional classifiers, and deep RNNs over shallow RNNs. Moreover, our proposed model achieved a better MA accuracy than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, the highest score of which was 95.57%. To conclude, our CovC-ReDRNet model could be perceived as an advanced computer-aided diagnostic model with high speed and high accuracy for classifying and predicting COVID-19 diseases.

Alzheimer’s and related diseases are significant health issues of this era. The interdisciplinary use of deep learning in this field has shown great promise and gathered considerable interest. This paper surveys deep learning literature related to Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, and related diseases from 2010 to early 2023. We identify the major types of unsupervised, supervised, and semi-supervised methods developed for various tasks in this field, including the most recent developments, such as the application of recurrent neural networks, graph-neural networks, and generative models. We also provide a summary of data sources, data processing, training protocols, and evaluation methods as a guide for future deep learning research into Alzheimer’s disease. Although deep learning has shown promising performance across various studies and tasks, it is limited by interpretation and generalization challenges. The survey also provides a brief insight into these challenges and the possible pathways for future studies.

In recent decades, the term “ecosystem” has garnered substantial attention in scholarly and managerial discourse, featuring prominently in academic and applied contexts. While individual scholars have made significant contributions to the study of various types of ecosystem, there appears to be a research gap marked by a lack of comprehensive synthesis and refinement of findings across diverse ecosystems. This paper systematically addresses this gap through a hybrid methodology, employing bibliometric and content analyses to systematically review the literature from 1993 to 2023. The primary research aim is to critically examine theoretical studies on different ecosystem types, specifically focusing on business, innovation, and platform ecosystems. The methodology of this study involves a content review of the identified literature, combining quantitative bibliometric analyses to differentiate patterns and content analysis for in-depth exploration. The core findings center on refining and summarizing the definitions of business, innovation, and platform ecosystems, shedding light on both commonalities and distinctions. Notably, the research unveils shared characteristics such as openness and diversity across these ecosystems while highlighting significant differences in terms of participants and objectives. Furthermore, the paper delves into the interconnections within these three ecosystem types, offering insights into their dynamics and paving the way for discussions on future research directions. This comprehensive examination not only advances our understanding of business, innovation, and platform ecosystems but also lays the groundwork for future scholarly inquiries in this dynamic and evolving field.

Cell counting and segmentation are critical tasks in biology and medicine. The traditional methods for cell counting are labor‐intensive, time‐consuming, and prone to human errors. Recently, deep learning‐based cell counting methods have become a trend, including point‐based counting methods, such as cell detection and cell density prediction, and non‐point‐based counting, such as cell number regression prediction. However, the point‐based counting method heavily relies on well‐annotated datasets, which are scarce and difficult to obtain. On the other hand, nonpoint‐based counting is less interpretable. The task of cell counting by dividing it into two subtasks is approached: cell number prediction and cell distribution prediction. To accomplish this, a deep learning network for spatial‐based super‐resolution reconstruction (SSRNet) is proposed that predicts the cell count and segments the cell distribution contour. To effectively train the model, an optimized multitask loss function (OM loss) is proposed that coordinates the training of multiple tasks. In SSRNet, a spatial‐based super‐resolution fast upsampling module (SSR‐upsampling) is proposed for feature map enhancement and one‐step upsampling, which can enlarge the deep feature map by 32 times without blurring and achieves fine‐grained detail and fast processing. SSRNet uses an optimized encoder network. Compared with the classic U‐Net, SSRNet's running memory read and write consumption is only 1/10 of that of U‐Net, and the total number of multiply and add calculations is 1/20 of that of U‐Net. Compared with the traditional sampling method, SSR‐upsampling can complete the upsampling of the entire decoder stage at one time, reducing the complexity of the network and achieving better performance. Experiments demonstrate that the method achieves state‐of‐the‐art performance in cell counting and segmentation tasks. The method achieves nonpoint‐based counting, eliminating the need for exact position annotation of each cell in the image during training. As a result, it has demonstrated excellent performance on cell counting and segmentation tasks. The code is public on GitHub (https://github.com/Roin626/SSRnet).

(Aim) Gene expression data is typically high dimensional with a limited number of samples and contain many features that are unrelated to the disease of interest. Existing unsupervised feature selection algorithms primarily focus on the significance of features in maintaining the data structure while not taking into account the redundancy among features. Determining the appropriate number of significant features is another challenge. (Method) In this paper, we propose a clustering-guided unsupervised feature selection (CGUFS) algorithm for gene expression data that addresses these problems. Our proposed algorithm introduces three improvements over existing algorithms. For the problem that existing clustering algorithms require artificially specifying the number of clusters, we propose an adaptive k-value strategy to assign appropriate pseudo-labels to each sample by iteratively updating a change function. For the problem that existing algorithms fail to consider the redundancy among features, we propose a feature grouping strategy to group highly redundant features. For the problem that the existing algorithms cannot filter the redundant features, we propose an adaptive filtering strategy to determine the feature combinations to be retained by calculating the potentially effective features and potentially redundant features of each feature group. (Result) Experimental results show that the average accuracy (ACC) and matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) indexes of the C4.5 classifier on the optimal features selected by the CGUFS algorithm reach 74.37% and 63.84%, respectively, significantly superior to the existing algorithms. (Conclusion) Similarly, the average ACC and MCC indexes of the Adaboost classifier on the optimal features selected by the CGUFS algorithm are significantly superior to the existing algorithms. In addition, statistical experiment results show significant differences between the CGUFS algorithm and the existing algorithms.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a terrible and degenerative disease commonly occurring in the elderly. Early detection can prevent patients from further damage, which is crucial in treating AD. Over the past few decades, it has been demonstrated that neuroimaging can be a critical diagnostic tool for AD, and the feature fusion of different neuroimaging modalities can enhance diagnostic performance. Most previous studies in multimodal feature fusion have only concatenated the high-level features extracted by neural networks from various neuroimaging images simply. However, a major problem of these studies is overlooking the low-level feature interactions between modalities in the feature extraction stage, resulting in suboptimal performance in AD diagnosis. In this paper, we develop a dual-branch vision transformer with cross-attention and graph pooling, namely CsAGP, which enables multi-level feature interactions between the inputs to learn a shared feature representation. Specifically, we first construct a brand-new cross-attention fusion module (CAFM), which processes MRI and PET images by two independent branches of differing computational complexity. These features are fused merely by the cross-attention mechanism to enhance each other. After that, a concise graph pooling algorithm-based Reshape-Pooling-Reshape (RPR) framework is developed for token selection to reduce token redundancy in the proposed model. Extensive experiments on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database demonstrated that the suggested method obtains 99.04%, 97.43%, 98.57%, and 98.72% accuracy for the classification of AD vs. CN, AD vs. MCI, CN vs. MCI, and AD vs. CN vs. MCI, respectively.

To address the problems of under-segmentation and over-segmentation of small organs in medical image segmentation. We present a novel medical image segmentation network model with Depth Separable Gating Transformer and a Three-branch Attention module (DSGA-Net). Firstly, the model adds a Depth Separable Gated Visual Transformer (DSG-ViT) module into its Encoder to enhance (i) the contextual links among global, local, and channels and (ii) the sensitivity to location information. Secondly, a Mixed Three-branch Attention (MTA) module is proposed to increase the number of features in the up-sampling process. Meanwhile, the loss of feature information is reduced when restoring the feature image to the original image size. By validating Synapse, BraTs2020, and ACDC public datasets, the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of the results of DSGA-Net reached 81.24%,85.82%, and 91.34%, respectively. Moreover, the Hausdorff Score (HD) decreased to 20.91% and 5.27% on the Synapse and BraTs2020. There are 10.78% and 0.69% decreases compared to the Baseline TransUNet. The experimental results indicate that DSGA-Net achieves better segmentation than most advanced methods.

Real-time monitoring of rock stability during the mining process is critical. This paper first proposed a RIME algorithm (CCRIME) based on vertical and horizontal crossover search strategies to improve the quality of the solutions obtained by the RIME algorithm and further enhance its search capabilities. Then, by constructing a binary version of CCRIME, the key parameters of FKNN were optimized using a binary conversion method. Finally, a discrete CCRIME-based BCCRIME was developed, which uses an S-shaped function transformation approach to address the feature selection issue by converting the search result into a real number that can only be zero or one. The performance of CCRIME was examined in this study from various perspectives, utilizing 30 benchmark functions from IEEE CEC2017. Basic algorithm comparison tests and sophisticated variant algorithm comparison experiments were also carried out. In addition, this paper also used collected microseismic and blasting data for classification prediction to verify the ability of the BCCRIME-FKNN model to process real data. This paper provides new ideas and methods for real-time monitoring of rock mass stability during deep well mineral resource mining.

Image segmentation methods have received widespread attention in face image recognition, which can divide each pixel in the image into different regions and effectively distinguish the face region from the background for further recognition. Threshold segmentation, a common image segmentation method, suffers from the problem that the computational complexity shows exponential growth with the increase in the segmentation threshold level. Therefore, in order to improve the segmentation quality and obtain the segmentation thresholds more efficiently, a multi-threshold image segmentation framework based on a meta-heuristic optimization technique combined with Kapur’s entropy is proposed in this study. A meta-heuristic optimization method based on an improved grey wolf optimizer variant is proposed to optimize the 2D Kapur’s entropy of the greyscale and nonlocal mean 2D histograms generated by image computation. In order to verify the advancement of the method, experiments compared with the state-of-the-art method on IEEE CEC2020 and face image segmentation public dataset were conducted in this paper. The proposed method has achieved better results than other methods in various tests at 18 thresholds with an average feature similarity of 0.8792, an average structural similarity of 0.8532, and an average peak signal-to-noise ratio of 24.9 dB. It can be used as an effective tool for face segmentation.

The Hunger Games Search (HGS) is an innovative optimizer that operates without relying on gradients and utilizes a population-based approach. It draws inspiration from the collaborative foraging activities observed in social animals in their natural habitats. However, despite its notable strengths, HGS is subject to limitations, including inadequate diversity, premature convergence, and susceptibility to local optima. To overcome these challenges, this study introduces two adjusted strategies to enhance the original HGS algorithm. The first adaptive strategy combines the Logarithmic Spiral (LS) technique with Opposition-based Learning (OBL), resulting in the LS-OBL approach. This strategy plays a pivotal role in reducing the search space and maintaining population diversity within HGS, effectively augmenting the algorithm’s exploration capabilities. The second adaptive strategy, the dynamic Rosenbrock Method (RM), contributes to HGS by adjusting the search direction and step size. This adjustment enables HGS to escape from suboptimal solutions and enhances its convergence accuracy. Combined, these two strategies form the improved algorithm proposed in this study, referred to as RLHGS. To assess the efficacy of the introduced strategies, specific experiments are designed to evaluate the impact of LS-OBL and RM on enhancing HGS performance. The experimental results unequivocally demonstrate that integrating these two strategies significantly enhances the capabilities of HGS. Furthermore, RLHGS is compared against eight state-of-the-art algorithms using 23 well-established benchmark functions and the CEC2020 test suite. The experimental results consistently indicate that RLHGS outperforms the other algorithms, securing the top rank in both test suites. This compelling evidence substantiates the superior functionality and performance of RLHGS compared to its counterparts. Moreover, RLHGS is applied to address four constrained real-world engineering optimization problems. The final results underscore the effectiveness of RLHGS in tackling such problems, further supporting its value as an efficient optimization method.

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the field of computer science theory and technology [...]

According to the World Health Organisation, falling is a major health problem with potentially fatal implications. Each year, thousands of people die as a result of falls, with seniors making up 80% of these fatalities. The automatic detection of falls may reduce the severity of the consequences. Our study focuses on developing a vision-based fall detection system. Our work proposes a new feature descriptor that results in a new fall detection framework. The body geometry of the subject is analyzed and patterns that help to distinguish falls from non-fall activities are identified in our proposed method. An AlphaPose network is employed to identify 17 keypoints on the human skeleton. Thirteen keypoints are used in our study, and we compute two additional keypoints. These 15 keypoints are divided into five segments, each of which consists of a group of three non-collinear points. These five segments represent the left hand, right hand, left leg, right leg and craniocaudal section. A novel feature descriptor is generated by extracting the distances from the segmented parts, angles within the segmented parts and the angle of inclination for every segmented part. As a result, we may extract three features from each segment, giving us 15 features per frame that preserve spatial information. To capture temporal dynamics, the extracted spatial features are arranged in the temporal sequence. As a result, the feature descriptor in the proposed approach preserves the spatio-temporal dynamics. Thus, a feature descriptor of size [m×15] is formed where m is the number of frames. To recognize fall patterns, machine learning approaches such as decision trees, random forests, and gradient boost are applied to the feature descriptor. Our system was evaluated on the UPfall dataset, which is a benchmark dataset. It has shown very good performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Objective: The only possible solution to increase the patients’ fatality rate is lung cancer early-stage detection. Recently, deep learning techniques became the most promising methods in medical image analysis compared with other numerous computer-aided diagnostic techniques. However, deep learning models always get lower performance when the model is overfitting. Methods: We present a Lung Cancer Data Augmented Ensemble (LCDAE) framework to solve the overfitting and lower performance problems in the lung cancer classification tasks. The LCDAE has 3 parts: The Lung Cancer Deep Convolutional GAN, which can synthesize images of lung cancer; A Data Augmented Ensemble model (DA-ENM), which ensembled 6 fine-tuned transfer learning models for training, testing, and validating on a lung cancer dataset; The third part is a Hybrid Data Augmentation (HDA) which combines all the data augmentation techniques in the LCDAE. Results: By comparing with existing state-of-the-art methods, the LCDAE obtains the best accuracy of 99.99%, the precision of 99.99%, and the F1-score of 99.99%. Conclusion: Our proposed LCDAE can overcome the overfitting issue for the lung cancer classification tasks by applying different data augmentation techniques, our method also has the best performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

The immune ability of the elderly is not strong, and the functions of the body are in a stage of degeneration, the ability to clear PM2.5 is reduced, and the cardiopulmonary system is easily affected. Accurate prediction of PM2.5 can provide guidance for the travel of the elderly, thereby reducing the harm of PM2.5 to the elderly. In PM2.5 prediction, existing works usually used shallow graph neural network (GNN) and temporal extraction module to model spatial and temporal dependencies, respectively, and do not uniformly model temporal and spatial dependencies. In addition, shallow GNN cannot capture long-range spatial correlations. External characteristics such as air humidity are also not considered. We propose a spatial-temporal graph ordinary differential equation network (STGODE-M) to tackle these problems. We capture spatial-temporal dynamics through tensor-based ordinary differential equation, so we can build deeper networks and exploit spatial-temporal features simultaneously. In addition, in the construction of the adjacency matrix, we not only used the Euclidean distance between the stations, but also used the wind direction data. Besides, we propose an external feature fusion strategy that uses air humidity as an auxiliary feature for feature fusion, since air humidity is also an important factor affecting PM2.5 concentration. Finally, our model is evaluated on the home-based care parks atmospheric dataset, and the experimental results show that our STGODE-M can more fully capture the spatial-temporal characteristics of PM2.5, achieving superior performance compared to the baseline. Therefore, it can provide better guarantee for the healthy travel of the elderly.

Bionic artificial neural networks (BANNs) are a type of artificial neural network (ANN) [...]

Image classification is typically a research area that trains an algorithm for accurately identifying subjects in images that have never been seen before. Training a model to recognize images within a dataset is significant as image classification generally has several applications in medicine, face detection, image reconstruction, etc. In spite of such applications, the main difficulty in this area involves the computation in the classification process, which is vast, leading to slow speed of classification. Moreover, as conventional image classification approaches have fallen short in terms of attaining high accuracy, an optimal model is needed. To resolve this, quantum computing has been developed. Due to their parallel computing ability, quantum-based algorithms could accomplish the classification of vast amounts of image data. This has theoretically confirmed the feasibility and advantages of incorporating a quantum computing-based system with traditional image classification methodologies. Considering this, the present study quantizes the layers of the proposed parallel encoded Inception module to improvise the network performance. This study exposes the flexibility of DL (deep learning)-based quantum state computational methodologies for missing computations by creating a pipeline for denoising, state estimation, and imputation. Furthermore, controlled parameterized rotations are regarded for entanglement, a vital component in quantum perceptron structure. The proposed approach not only possesses the unique features of quantum mechanics, but it also maintains the weight sharing of the kernel. Finally, the MNIST (Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology) and Fashion MNIST image classification outcomes are attained by measuring the quantum state. Overall performance is assessed to prove its effectiveness in image classification.

Background: Blood is responsible for delivering nutrients to various organs, which store important health information about the human body. Therefore, the diagnosis of blood can indirectly help doctors judge a person’s physical state. Recently, researchers have applied deep learning (DL) to the automatic analysis of blood cells. However, there are still some deficiencies in these models. Methods: To cope with these issues, we propose a novel network for the multi-classification of blood cells, which is called DLBCNet. A new specifical model for blood cells (BCGAN) is designed to generate synthetic images. The pre-trained ResNet50 is implemented as the backbone model, which serves as the feature extractor. The extracted features are fed to the proposed ETRN to improve the multi-classification performance of blood cells. Results: The average accuracy, average sensitivity, average precision, average specificity, and average f1-score of the proposed model are 95.05%, 93.25%, 97.75%, 93.72%, and 95.38%, accordingly. Conclusions: The performance of the proposed model surpasses other state-of-the-art methods in reported classification results.

Diabetic retinopathy seems to be the cause of micro-vascular retinal alterations. It remains a leading reason for blindness and vision loss in adults around the age of 20 to 74. Screening for this disease has become vital in identifying referable cases that require complete ophthalmic evaluation and treatment to avoid permanent loss of vision. The computer-aided design could ease this screening process, which requires limited time, and assist clinicians. The main complexity in classifying images involves huge computation, leading to slow classification. Certain image classification approaches integrating quantum computing have recently evolved to resolve this. With its parallel computing ability, quantum computing could assist in effective classification. The notion of integrating quantum computing with conventional image classification methods is theoretically feasible and advantageous. However, as existing image classification techniques have failed to procure high accuracy in classification, a robust approach is needed. The present research proposes a quantum-based deep convolutional neural network to avert these pitfalls and identify disease grades from the Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset. Typically, quantum computing could make use of the maximum number of entangled qubits for image reconstruction without any additional information. This study involves conceptual enhancement by proposing an optimized structural system termed an optimized multiple-qbit gate quantum neural network for the classification of DR. In this case, multiple qubits are regarded as the ability of qubits in multiple states to exist concurrently, which permits performance improvement with the distinct additional qubit. The overall performance of this system is validated in accordance with performance metrics, and the proposed method achieves 100% accuracy, 100% precision, 100% recall, 100% specificity, and 100% f1-score.

Based on deep learning technology, this paper proposes a two-stage colorectal image feature mining and fast recognition model to achieve fully automatic medical image pathology discrimination. Drawing on the ideas of multi-factor Meta-regression analysis widely used in the medical field and the model aggregation framework based on Bayesian prior probability theory, a prognostic model of colorectal tumors suitable for various situations and scenarios is constructed. And using a combination of public data sets and real data sets, design two sets of experiments to verify these models from different angles. The algorithm was used to select one, four, and five related features from three sequences to construct three sets of prediction models. The application of the six algorithms failed to obtain a better predictive model (AUC value range 0.439 ~ 0.640). The algorithm (AUC value 0.750± 0.137) and the algorithm (AUC value 0.764± 0.128) can be used to obtain models with better predictive performance, and the four models are less effective (AUC value

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is an eye abnormality caused by chronic diabetes that affected patients worldwide. Hard exudate is an important and observable sign of DR and can be used for early diagnosis. In this paper, an automatic hard exudates segmentation method is proposed in order to aid ophthalmologists to diagnose DR in the early stage. We utilized the SLIC superpixel algorithm to generate sample patches, thus overcoming the difficulty of the limited and imbalanced dataset. Furthermore, a U-net based network architecture with inception modules and residual connections is proposed to conduct end-to-end hard exudate segmentation, and focal loss is utilized as the loss function. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the IDRiD dataset to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The reported sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy achieve 96.38%, 97.14%, and 97.95% respectively, which demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of our method. The achieved segmentation results prove the potential of the method for clinical diagnosis.

Glomerulosclerosis is a pathomorphological feature of glomerular lesions. Early detection, accurate judgement and effective prevention of the glomeruli is crucial not only for people with kidney disease, but also for the general population. We proposed a method in combination of traditional image analysis with modern machine learning diagnosis system model based on GoogLeNet for recognizing and distinguishing different categories of glomerulus in order to efficiently capture the important structures as well as to minimize manual effort and supervision. We proposed a novel deep learning model based on GoogLeNet with added batch-normalization layers to extract useful features and subsequently entered the features into SoftMax for classification. We also incorporated Bayesian Optimization algorithm and k-fold cross validation in this system for achieving a more reliable result. Our method has eventually achieved an overall accuracy of 95.04±4.99%, and F1 score of 94.44±3.11% for no glomerulus category, 96.73±5.23% for normal glomerulus category and 93.66±7.82% for globally sclerosed glomerulus category, which means this method can accurately determine the degree of glomerulosclerosis with little supervision. The experimental result also shows that this method has better performance when compared with other state-of art methods.

A fully automated design is proposed in this work employing optimal deep learning features for classifying gastrointestinal infections. Here, three prominent infections– ulcer, bleeding, polyp and a healthy class are considered as class labels. In the initial stage, the contrast is improved by fusing bi-directional histogram equalization with top-hat filtering output. The resultant fusion images are then passed to ResNet101 pre-trained model and trained once again using deep transfer learning. However, there are challenges involved in extracting deep learning features including impertinent information and redundancy. To mitigate this problem, we took advantage of two metaheuristic algorithms– Enhanced Crow Search and Differential Evolution. These algorithms are implemented in parallel to obtain optimal feature vectors. Following this, a maximum correlation-based fusion approach is applied to fuse optimal vectors from the previous step to obtain an enhanced vector. This final vector is given as input to Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) classifier for final classification. The proposed method is evaluated on a combined database. It accomplished an accuracy of 99.46%, which shows significant improvement over preceding techniques and other neural network architectures.

Reversible data hiding (RDH), a promising data-hiding technique, is widely examined in domains such as medical image transmission, satellite image transmission, crime investigation, cloud computing, etc. None of the existing RDH schemes addresses a solution from a real-time aspect. A good compromise between the information embedding rate and computational time makes the scheme suitable for real-time applications. As a solution, we propose a novel RDH scheme that recovers the original image by retaining its quality and extracting the hidden data. Here, the cover image gets encrypted using a stream cipher and is partitioned into non-overlapping blocks. Secret information is inserted into the encrypted blocks of the cover image via a controlled local pixel-swapping approach to achieve a comparatively good payload. The new scheme MPSA allows the data hider to hide two bits in every encrypted block. The existing reversible data-hiding schemes modify the encrypted image pixels leading to a compromise in image security. However, the proposed work complements the support of encrypted image security by maintaining the same entropy of the encrypted image in spite of hiding the data. Experimental results illustrate the competency of the proposed work accounting for various parameters, including embedding rate and computational time.

The earlier prediction of heart diseases and appropriate treatment are important for preventing cardiac failure complications and reducing the mortality rate. The traditional prediction and classification approaches have resulted in a minimum rate of prediction accuracy and hence to overcome the pitfalls in existing systems, the present research is aimed to perform the prediction of heart diseases with quantum learning. When quantum learning is employed in ML (Machine Learning) and DL (Deep Learning) algorithms, complex data can be performed efficiently with less time and a higher accuracy rate. Moreover, the proposed ML and DL algorithms possess the ability to adapt to predictions with alterations in the dataset integrated with quantum computing that provides robustness in the earlier detection of chronic diseases. The Cleveland heart disease dataset is being pre-processed for the checking of missing values to avoid incorrect predictions and also for improvising the rate of accuracy. Further, SVM (Support Vector Machine), DT (Decision Tree) and RF (Random Forest) are used to perform classification. Finally, disease prediction is performed with the proposed instance-based quantum ML and DL method in which the number of qubits is computed with respect to features and optimized with instance-based learning. Additionally, a comparative assessment is provided for quantifying the differences between the standard classification algorithms with quantum-based learning in order to determine the significance of quantum-based detection in heart failure. From the results, the accuracy of the proposed system using instance-based quantum DL and instance-based quantum ML is found to be 98% and 83.6% respectively.

Myocardial infarction (MI) occurs when an artery supplying blood to the heart is abruptly occluded. The “gold standard” method for imaging MI is cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with intravenously administered gadolinium-based contrast (with damaged areas apparent as late gadolinium enhancement [LGE]). However, no “gold standard” fully automated method for the quantification of MI exists. In this work, we propose an end-to-end fully automatic system (MyI-Net) for the detection and quantification of MI in MRI images. It has the potential to reduce uncertainty due to technical variability across labs and the inherent problems of data and labels. Our system consists of four processing stages designed to maintain the flow of information across scales. First, features from raw MRI images are generated using feature extractors built on ResNet and MoblieNet architectures. This is followed by atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to produce spatial information at different scales to preserve more image context. High-level features from ASPP and initial low-level features are concatenated at the third stage and then passed to the fourth stage where spatial information is recovered via up-sampling to produce final image segmentation output into: (i) background, (ii) heart muscle, (iii) blood and (iv) LGE areas. Our experiments show that the model named MI-ResNet50-AC provides the best global accuracy (97.38%), mean accuracy (86.01%), weighted intersection over union (IoU) of 96.47%, and bfscore of 64.46% for the global segmentation. However, in detecting only LGE tissue, a smaller model, MI-ResNet18-AC, exhibited higher accuracy (74.41%) than MI-ResNet50-AC (64.29%). New models were compared with state-of-the-art models and manual quantification. Our models demonstrated favorable performance in global segmentation and LGE detection relative to the state-of-the-art, including a four-fold better performance in matching LGE pixels to contours produced by clinicians.

According to the World Health Organization statistics, as of 25 October 2022, there have been 625,248,843 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 65,622,281 deaths worldwide. The spread and severity of COVID-19 are alarming. The economy and life of countries worldwide have been greatly affected. The rapid and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 directly affects the spread of the virus and the degree of harm. Currently, the classification of chest X-ray or CT images based on artificial intelligence is an important method for COVID-19 diagnosis. It can assist doctors in making judgments and reduce the misdiagnosis rate. The convolutional neural network (CNN) is very popular in computer vision applications, such as applied to biological image segmentation, traffic sign recognition, face recognition, and other fields. It is one of the most widely used machine learning methods. This paper mainly introduces the latest deep learning methods and techniques for diagnosing COVID-19 using chest X-ray or CT images based on the convolutional neural network. It reviews the technology of CNN at various stages, such as rectified linear units, batch normalization, data augmentation, dropout, and so on. Several well-performing network architectures are explained in detail, such as AlexNet, ResNet, DenseNet, VGG, GoogleNet, etc. We analyzed and discussed the existing CNN automatic COVID-19 diagnosis systems from sensitivity, accuracy, precision, specificity, and F1 score. The systems use chest X-ray or CT images as datasets. Overall, CNN has essential value in COVID-19 diagnosis. All of them have good performance in the existing experiments. If expanding the datasets, adding GPU acceleration and data preprocessing techniques, and expanding the types of medical images, the performance of CNN will be further improved. This paper wishes to make contributions to future research.

The brain lesions images of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients are slightly different from the Magnetic Resonance Imaging of normal people, and the classification effect of general image recognition technology is not ideal. Alzheimer’s datasets are small, making it difficult to train large-scale neural networks. In this paper, we propose a network model (WS-AMN) that fuses weak supervision and an attention mechanism. The weakly supervised data augmentation network is used as the basic model, the attention map generated by weakly supervised learning is used to guide the data augmentation, and an attention module with channel domain and spatial domain is embedded in the residual network to focus on the distinctive channels and spaces of images respectively. The location information enhances the corresponding features of related features and suppresses the influence of irrelevant features.The results show that the F1-score is 99.63%, the accuracy is 99.61%. Our model provides a high-performance solution for accurate classification of AD.

Traditional medical sensors/monitors can measure pressure, airflow, force, oxygen, pulse, temperature, etc [...]

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which assists doctors in determining clinical staging and expected surgical range, has high medical value. A large number of MRI images require a large amount of storage space and the transmission bandwidth of the PACS system in offline storage and remote diagnosis. Therefore, high-quality compression of MRI images is very research-oriented. Current compression methods for MRI images with high compression ratio cause loss of information on lesions, leading to misdiagnosis; compression methods for MRI images with low compression ratio does not achieve the desired effect. Therefore, a fast fractal-based compression algorithm for MRI images is proposed in this paper. First, three-dimensional (3D) MRI images are converted into a two-dimensional (2D) image sequence, which facilitates the image sequence based on the fractal compression method. Then, range and domain blocks are classified according to the inherent spatiotemporal similarity of 3D objects. By using self-similarity, the number of blocks in the matching pool is reduced to improve the matching speed of the proposed method. Finally, a residual compensation mechanism is introduced to achieve compression of MRI images with high decompression quality. The experimental results show that compression speed is improved by 2-3 times, and the PSNR is improved by nearly 10. It indicates the proposed algorithm is effective and solves the contradiction between high compression ratio and high quality of MRI medical images.

Due to the space inconsistency between benchmark image and segmentation result in many existing semantic segmentation algorithms for abdominal CT images, an improved model based on the basic framework of DeepLab-v3 is proposed, and Pix2pix network is introduced as the generation adversarial model. Our proposed model realizes the segmentation framework combining deep feature with multi-scale semantic feature. In order to improve the generalization ability and training accuracy of the model, this paper proposes a combination of the traditional multi-classification cross-entropy loss function with the content loss function of generator output and the adversarial loss function of discriminator output. A large number of qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that the performance of our proposed semantic segmentation algorithm is better than the existing algorithms, and can improve the segmentation efficiency while ensuring the space consistency of the semantics segmentation for abdominal CT images.

Vigilance or sustained attention is an important aspect for people who engaged in long time attention demanding tasks such as monotonous monitoring and driving. Vigilance detection has been an important topic in the field of brain-computer interface (BCI) research. However, the study is limited due to the low SNR (Signal-Noise Ratio) nature of EEG. Common spatial pattern (CSP) is a one of the most effective algorithms for feature extraction method in the BCI study area. The CSP seeks for an optimal projection direction (spatial filter) by maximizing the variance of one class and simultaneously minimizing the variance of the other class. There is one drawbacks exists in the traditional CSP, that is, the CSP is proposed relies on the assumption that data in each class follow the Gaussian distribution. However, this assumption is not always true for EEG data in practice, especially in the research of vigilance detection based EEG (e.g. during sleep). Thus, traditional CSP suffers performance degradation in case of non-Gaussian distributions. In this paper, we extend the traditional CSP to the general version and proposed nonparametric CSP (NCSP) algorithms which do not explicitly rely on the assumption of the underlying class Gaussian distribution and we then develop a new efficient algorithm based on matrix deflation to solve the proposed NCSP algorithm and its extensions-nonparametric multi-class CSP (NMCSP). Experimental results on EEG-based vigilance estimation and motor imagery recognition task demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithms.

Multi-channel receiving technique has been proved to be a promising approach for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to achieve simultaneous high-resolution and wide-swath (HRWS) imaging. With the support of digital beamforming (DBF) technique, ambiguity-free signal can be reconstructed from the Doppler aliased data received by along-track channels with high fidelity. However, in practice, a key factor that affects the precision of spectrum reconstruction and deteriorates the quality of final image is the inevitable mismatch between receiving channels. Thus, channel calibration is recognized as a crucial step prior to DBF. In this paper, we propose a novel channel calibration algorithm for multi-channel HRWS-SAR system. Instead of using signal subspace projection or other matrix decomposition methods adopted in most of the existing HRWS-SAR channel calibration algorithms, it tries to find ambiguity-free “sample signal” to be used in the estimation of channel error directly from the original Doppler ambiguous data. We demonstrate that, by applying sub-aperture operation to the original data, unambiguous multi-channel signal corresponding to isolated ground scatterers can be extracted, and thereby can be utilized to accurately estimate and calibrate the azimuth-variant channel mismatch. Experimental results from a four-channel and a three-channel airborne SAR systems are employed to validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm in practical processing.

Cerebral micro-bleed (CMB) is small perivascular hemosiderin deposits from leakage through cerebral small vessels. They can result from cerebra-vascular disease, dementia, or simply from normal aging. It can be visualized via the susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI). Based on the SWI, we propose to use different structures of the CNN with rank-based average pooling to detect the CMB, and compare this method used in this paper to the current state-of-the-art methods. We can find that the CNN with five layers obtains the best performance, with a sensitivity of 96.94%, a specificity of 97.18%, and an accuracy of 97.18%.

Machine learning has been successfully applied to many areas of science and engineering. Some examples include time series prediction, optical character recognition, signal and image classification in biomedical applications for diagnosis and prognosis and so on. In the theory of semi-supervised learning, we have a training set and an unlabeled data, that are employed to fit a prediction model or learner, with the help of an iterative algorithm, such as the expectation-maximization algorithm. In this paper, a novel non-parametric approach of the so-called case-based statistical learning is proposed in a low-dimensional classification problem. This supervised feature selection scheme analyzes the discrete set of outcomes in the classification problem by hypothesis-testing and makes assumptions on these outcome values to obtain the most likely prediction model at the training stage. A novel prediction model is described in terms of the output scores of a confidence-based support vector machine classifier under class-hypothesis testing. To have a more accurate prediction by considering the unlabeled points, the distribution of unlabeled examples must be relevant for the classification problem. The estimation of the error rates from a well-trained support vector machines allows us to propose a non-parametric approach avoiding the use of Gaussian density function-based models in the likelihood ratio test.

Cerebral micro-bleedings (CMBs) are small chronic brain hemorrhages that have many side effects. For example, CMBs can result in long-term disability, neurologic dysfunction, cognitive impairment and side effects from other medications and treatment. Therefore, it is important and essential to detect CMBs timely and in an early stage for prompt treatment. In this research, because of the limited labeled samples, it is hard to train a classifier to achieve high accuracy. Therefore, we proposed employing Densely connected neural network (DenseNet) as the basic algorithm for transfer learning to detect CMBs. To generate the subsamples for training and test, we used a sliding window to cover the whole original images from left to right and from top to bottom. Based on the central pixel of the subsamples, we could decide the target value. Considering the data imbalance, the cost matrix was also employed. Then, based on the new model, we tested the classification accuracy, and it achieved 97.71%, which provided better performance than the state of art methods.

Table of contents 01 The influence of soil salt content on the photosynthetic characteristics of spring wheat with trickle irrigation Lei Pei, Zhenhua Wang, Jinzhu Zhang, Wenhao Li 02 Comparing growth of fast-growing and slow-growing endophytes in plants via ergosterol quantification Adeline SY Ting, Yiing Y Chow, Sadequr Rahman 03 Transcriptome and digital gene expression analysis identifies putative triterpene saponin-biosynthetic genes of Panax notoginseng Rongchang Wei 04 Chitosan-assisted isolation and antioxidant evaluation of flavonoids from Sophora japonica L. Zhang Hu, Sidong Li, Chuyan Li, Zijuan Li 05 Two kinds of new characteristics of the ektexine ornamentation of ginkgo pollen Guoxia Wang, Yuzhen Yang, Gang Chen, Qing Luo 06 Analysis of nutrient and medicinal ingredients of Ginkgo pollen in different regions Guoxia Wang, Ruixia Liu, Yuzhen Yang, Lipei Chen 07 Photosynthetic performance of greening seedlings of seven species to drought stress Zhiyang Lie, Tongtong Zhou, Weilong Huang, Li Xue 08 Changes of fluorescence parameters of greening seedlings of seven species under drought stress Jie Li, Zhuomin Wang, Li Xue 09 Mammalian sex hormone affects regeneration capacity and enzymes activity of Triticale L in vitro culture Ismail Bezirganoglu, Pınar Uysal 10 Fractional Fourier entropy increases the recognition rate of fruit type detection Shuihua Wang, Zhihai Lu, Jiquan Yang, Yudong Zhang, John Liu, Ling Wei, Shufang Chen, Preetha Phillips, Zhengchao Dong 11 Banana-peanut intercropping reduces Fusarium wilt disease in banana from enhancing soil bacterial microorganisms and leaf nutrition Hong Li, Xutong Wang, Fengliang Zhao, Guisheng Yang 12 Manganese stress impairs stem ureide nitrogen fixation in yardlong-bean plants in the acidic environment Hong Li 13 A new pest control method for Rhytidodera bowringii Larvae Haijie Huang, Li Zhao, Weijian Huang, Jinhui Wang, Zhongrun Zhang 14 Research on the seed-like Fruits of Subg. Sclarea of Salvia of Labiatae in China Xiaojuan Li, Ning Xu, Guofu Zhou, Ming Wan, Qi Lin, Fanyun Meng, Jianxiu Li 15 Three pulling resistance models of pioneer plant in landslide area Yichang Chen, Koayung Yu, Chunpin Chang 16 The comparison of physiological and biochemical mechanisms of Reaumuria soongorica and Salsola passerine in different growth pattern Zijuan Zhou, Peixi Su, Rui Shi, Tingting Xie 17 Resources use efficiency of the cosmopolitan plant Potentilla anserina L. in different alpine habitats in China Rui Shi, Peixi Su, Zijuan Zhou 18 Cloning of PPDK gene from Red Amaranand transformation of Alfalfa Xuelan Liu, Yan Zhang, Xiangfa Wei 19 Variation and cluster analysis of morphological characters and nutrient content of Chucrasia tabularis seed Chong Wu, Yanlei Yin, Lijuan Feng, Xuemei Yang, Fei Wang 20 Effect of the planting density of the areca nut on the growth of intercropped Vanilla Hua Wang, Huifa Zhuang, Zihui Zhu, Hui Wang

Aim: To detect pathological brain conditions early is a core procedure for patients so as to have enough time for treatment. Traditional manual detection is either cumbersome, or expensive, or time-consuming. We aim to offer a system that can automatically identify pathological brain images in this paper. Method: We propose a novel image feature, viz., Fractional Fourier Entropy (FRFE), which is based on the combination of Fractional Fourier Transform (FRFT) and Shannon entropy. Afterwards, the Welch’s t-test (WTT) and Mahalanobis distance (MD) were harnessed to select distinguishing features. Finally, we introduced an advanced classifier: twin support vector machine (TSVM). Results: A 10 × K-fold stratified cross validation test showed that this proposed “FRFE + WTT + TSVM” yielded an accuracy of 100.00%, 100.00%, and 99.57% on datasets that contained 66, 160, and 255 brain images, respectively. Conclusions: The proposed “FRFE + WTT + TSVM” method is superior to 20 state-of-the-art methods.

To develop an automatic tea-category identification system with a high recall rate, we proposed a computer-vision and machine-learning based system, which did not require expensive signal acquiring devices and time-consuming procedures. We captured 300 tea images using a 3-CCD digital camera, and then extracted 64 color histogram features and 16 wavelet packet entropy (WPE) features to obtain color information and texture information, respectively. Principal component analysis was used to reduce features, which were fed into a fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM). Winner-take-all (WTA) was introduced to help the classifier deal with this 3-class problem. The 10 × 10-fold stratified cross-validation results show that the proposed FSVM + WTA method yields an overall recall rate of 97.77%, higher than 5 existing methods. In addition, the number of reduced features is only five, less than or equal to existing methods. The proposed method is effective for tea identification.

Fruit classification is quite difficult because of the various categories and similar shapes and features of fruit. In this work, we proposed two novel machine-learning based classification methods. The developed system consists of wavelet entropy (WE), principal component analysis (PCA), feedforward neural network (FNN) trained by fitness-scaled chaotic artificial bee colony (FSCABC) and biogeography-based optimization (BBO), respectively. The K-fold stratified cross validation (SCV) was utilized for statistical analysis. The classification performance for 1653 fruit images from 18 categories showed that the proposed “WE + PCA + FSCABC-FNN” and “WE + PCA + BBO-FNN” methods achieve the same accuracy of 89.5%, higher than state-of-the-art approaches: “(CH + MP + US) + PCA + GA-FNN ” of 84.8%, “(CH + MP + US) + PCA + PSO-FNN” of 87.9%, “(CH + MP + US) + PCA + ABC-FNN” of 85.4%, “(CH + MP + US) + PCA + kSVM” of 88.2%, and “(CH + MP + US) + PCA + FSCABC-FNN” of 89.1%. Besides, our methods used only 12 features, less than the number of features used by other methods. Therefore, the proposed methods are effective for fruit classification.