23,176 research outputs found
Medical imaging analysis with artificial neural networks
Given that neural networks have been widely reported in the research community of medical imaging, we provide a focused literature survey on recent neural network developments in computer-aided diagnosis, medical image segmentation and edge detection towards visual content analysis, and medical image registration for its pre-processing and post-processing, with the aims of increasing awareness of how neural networks can be applied to these areas and to provide a foundation for further research and practical development. Representative techniques and algorithms are explained in detail to provide inspiring examples illustrating: (i) how a known neural network with fixed structure and training procedure could be applied to resolve a medical imaging problem; (ii) how medical images could be analysed, processed, and characterised by neural networks; and (iii) how neural networks could be expanded further to resolve problems relevant to medical imaging. In the concluding section, a highlight of comparisons among many neural network applications is included to provide a global view on computational intelligence with neural networks in medical imaging
Toward the next generation of research into small area effects on health : a synthesis of multilevel investigations published since July 1998.
To map out area effects on health research, this study had the following aims: (1) to inventory multilevel investigations of area effects on self rated health, cardiovascular diseases and risk factors, and mortality among adults; (2) to describe and critically discuss methodological approaches employed and results observed; and (3) to formulate selected recommendations for advancing the study of area effects on health. Overall, 86 studies were inventoried. Although several innovative methodological approaches and analytical designs were found, small areas are most often operationalised using administrative and statistical spatial units. Most studies used indicators of area socioeconomic status derived from censuses, and few provided information on the validity and reliability of measures of exposures. A consistent finding was that a significant portion of the variation in health is associated with area context independently of individual characteristics. Area effects on health, although significant in most studies, often depend on the health outcome studied, the measure of area exposure used, and the spatial scale at which associations are examined
MILD-Net: Minimal Information Loss Dilated Network for Gland Instance Segmentation in Colon Histology Images
The analysis of glandular morphology within colon histopathology images is an
important step in determining the grade of colon cancer. Despite the importance
of this task, manual segmentation is laborious, time-consuming and can suffer
from subjectivity among pathologists. The rise of computational pathology has
led to the development of automated methods for gland segmentation that aim to
overcome the challenges of manual segmentation. However, this task is
non-trivial due to the large variability in glandular appearance and the
difficulty in differentiating between certain glandular and non-glandular
histological structures. Furthermore, a measure of uncertainty is essential for
diagnostic decision making. To address these challenges, we propose a fully
convolutional neural network that counters the loss of information caused by
max-pooling by re-introducing the original image at multiple points within the
network. We also use atrous spatial pyramid pooling with varying dilation rates
for preserving the resolution and multi-level aggregation. To incorporate
uncertainty, we introduce random transformations during test time for an
enhanced segmentation result that simultaneously generates an uncertainty map,
highlighting areas of ambiguity. We show that this map can be used to define a
metric for disregarding predictions with high uncertainty. The proposed network
achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GlaS challenge dataset and on a
second independent colorectal adenocarcinoma dataset. In addition, we perform
gland instance segmentation on whole-slide images from two further datasets to
highlight the generalisability of our method. As an extension, we introduce
MILD-Net+ for simultaneous gland and lumen segmentation, to increase the
diagnostic power of the network.Comment: Initial version published at Medical Imaging with Deep Learning
(MIDL) 201
Nonstimulated early visual areas carry information about surrounding context
Even within the early sensory areas, the majority of the input to any given cortical neuron comes from other cortical neurons. To extend our knowledge of the contextual information that is transmitted by such lateral and feedback connections, we investigated how visually nonstimulated regions in primary visual cortex (V1) and visual area V2 are influenced by the surrounding context. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and pattern-classification methods to show that the cortical representation of a nonstimulated quarter-field carries information that can discriminate the surrounding visual context. We show further that the activity patterns in these regions are significantly related to those observed with feed-forward stimulation and that these effects are driven primarily by V1. These results thus demonstrate that visual context strongly influences early visual areas even in the absence of differential feed-forward thalamic stimulation
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