MASANet: Multi-Angle Self-Attention Network for Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images

As an important research direction in the field of pattern recognition, semantic segmentation has become an important method for remote sensing image information extraction. However, due to the loss of global context information, the effect of semantic segmentation is still incomplete or misclassified. In this paper, we propose a multi-angle self-attention network (MASANet) to solve this problem. Specifically, we design a multi-angle self-attention module to enhance global context information, which uses three angles to enhance features and takes the obtained three features as the inputs of self-attention to further extract the global dependencies of features. In addition, atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and global average pooling (GAP) further improve the overall performance. Finally, we concatenate the feature maps of different scales obtained in the feature extraction stage with the corresponding feature maps output by ASPP to further extract multi-scale features. The experimental results show that MASANet achieves good segmentation performance on high-resolution remote sensing images. In addition, the comparative experimental results show that MASANet is superior to some state-of-the-art models in terms of some widely used evaluation criteria

The GUA-Speech System Description for CNVSRC Challenge 2023

This study describes our system for Task 1 Single-speaker Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) fixed track in the Chinese Continuous Visual Speech Recognition Challenge (CNVSRC) 2023. Specifically, we use intermediate connectionist temporal classification (Inter CTC) residual modules to relax the conditional independence assumption of CTC in our model. Then we use a bi-transformer decoder to enable the model to capture both past and future contextual information. In addition, we use Chinese characters as the modeling units to improve the recognition accuracy of our model. Finally, we use a recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM) for shallow fusion in the inference stage. Experiments show that our system achieves a character error rate (CER) of 38.09% on the Eval set which reaches a relative CER reduction of 21.63% over the official baseline, and obtains a second place in the challenge.Comment: CNVSRC 2023 Challeng

Safety and effectiveness of indocyanine green fluorescence imaging-guided laparoscopic hepatectomy for hepatic tumor: a systematic review and meta-analysis

IntroductionPrevious clinical investigations have reported inconsistent findings regarding the feasibility of utilizing indocyanine green fluorescence imaging (ICGFI) in laparoscopic liver tumor removal. This meta-analysis aims to comprehensively evaluate the safety and effectiveness of ICGFI in laparoscopic hepatectomy (LH).MethodsA systematic search of pertinent clinical studies published before January 30th, 2023 was conducted in databases including PubMed, Embase, Cochrane, and Web of Science. The search strategy encompassed key terms such as “indocyanine green fluorescence,” “ICG fluorescence,” “laparoscopic hepatectomy,” “hepatectomies,” “liver Neoplasms,” “hepatic cancer,” and “liver tumor.” Additionally, we scrutinized the reference lists of included articles to identify supplementary studies. we assessed the quality of the incorporated studies and extracted clinical data. Meta-analysis was performed using STATA v.17.0 software. Either a fixed-effects or a random-effects model was employed to compute combined effect sizes, accompanied by 95% confidence intervals (CIs), based on varying levels of heterogeneity.ResultsThis meta-analysis encompassed eleven retrospective cohort studies, involving 959 patients in total. Our findings revealed that, in comparison to conventional laparoscopic hepatectomy, patients receiving ICGFI-guided LH exhibited a higher R0 resection rate (OR: 3.96, 95% CI: 1.28, 12.25, I2 = 0.00%, P = 0.778) and a diminished incidence of intraoperative blood transfusion (OR: 0.42, 95% CI: 0.22, 0.81, I2 = 51.1%, P = 0.056). Additionally, they experienced shorter postoperative hospital stays (WMD: −1.07, 95% CI: −2.00, −0.14, I2 = 85.1%, P = 0.000). No statistically significant differences emerged between patients receiving ICGFI-guided LH vs. those undergoing conventional LH in terms of minimal margin width and postoperative complications.ConclusionICGFI-guided LH demonstrates marked superiority over conventional laparoscopic liver tumor resection in achieving R0 resection and reducing intraoperative blood transfusion rates. This technique appears to hold substantial promise. Nonetheless, further studies are needed to explore potential long-term benefits associated with patients undergoing ICGFI-guided LH.Systematic review registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/, identifier CRD 42023398195

MyoPS A Benchmark of Myocardial Pathology Segmentation Combining Three-Sequence Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Images

Assessment of myocardial viability is essential in diagnosis and treatment management of patients suffering from myocardial infarction, and classification of pathology on myocardium is the key to this assessment. This work defines a new task of medical image analysis, i.e., to perform myocardial pathology segmentation (MyoPS) combining three-sequence cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images, which was first proposed in the MyoPS challenge, in conjunction with MICCAI 2020. The challenge provided 45 paired and pre-aligned CMR images, allowing algorithms to combine the complementary information from the three CMR sequences for pathology segmentation. In this article, we provide details of the challenge, survey the works from fifteen participants and interpret their methods according to five aspects, i.e., preprocessing, data augmentation, learning strategy, model architecture and post-processing. In addition, we analyze the results with respect to different factors, in order to examine the key obstacles and explore potential of solutions, as well as to provide a benchmark for future research. We conclude that while promising results have been reported, the research is still in the early stage, and more in-depth exploration is needed before a successful application to the clinics. Note that MyoPS data and evaluation tool continue to be publicly available upon registration via its homepage (www.sdspeople.fudan.edu.cn/zhuangxiahai/0/myops20/)

A compendium of genetic regulatory effects across pig tissues

The Farm Animal Genotype-Tissue Expression (FarmGTEx) project has been established to develop a public resource of genetic regulatory variants in livestock, which is essential for linking genetic polymorphisms to variation in phenotypes, helping fundamental biological discovery and exploitation in animal breeding and human biomedicine. Here we show results from the pilot phase of PigGTEx by processing 5,457 RNA-sequencing and 1,602 whole-genome sequencing samples passing quality control from pigs. We build a pig genotype imputation panel and associate millions of genetic variants with five types of transcriptomic phenotypes in 34 tissues. We evaluate tissue specificity of regulatory effects and elucidate molecular mechanisms of their action using multi-omics data. Leveraging this resource, we decipher regulatory mechanisms underlying 207 pig complex phenotypes and demonstrate the similarity of pigs to humans in gene expression and the genetic regulation behind complex phenotypes, supporting the importance of pigs as a human biomedical model.</p

A Review on Heterogeneous Nanostructures: A Strategy for Superior Mechanical Properties in Metals

Generally, strength and ductility are mutually exclusive in homogeneous metals. Nanostructured metals can have much higher strength when compared to their coarse-grained counterparts, while simple microstructure refinement to nanoscale generally results in poor strain hardening and limited ductility. In recent years, heterogeneous nanostructures in metals have been proven to be a new strategy to achieve unprecedented mechanical properties that are not accessible to their homogeneous counterparts. Here, we review recent advances in overcoming this strength&#8722;ductility trade-off by the designs of several heterogeneous nanostructures in metals: heterogeneous grain/lamellar/phase structures, gradient structure, nanotwinned structure and structure with nanoprecipitates. These structural heterogeneities can induce stress/strain partitioning between domains with dramatically different strengths, strain gradients and geometrically necessary dislocations near domain interfaces, and back-stress strengthening/hardening for high strength and large ductility. This review also provides the guideline for optimizing the mechanical properties in heterogeneous nanostructures by highlighting future challenges and opportunities

Deformation induced hcp nano-lamella and its size effect on the strengthening in a CoCrNi medium-entropy alloy

Deformation-induced hcp nano-lamellae with various widths and interspacings were observed in the CoCrNi medium-entropy alloy (MEA) under high strain rate and cryogenic temperature in the present study. Higher hardness was found in the cryogenic-deformed samples compared to the room temperature-deformed samples without hcp phase. Then, size effects of embedded hcp nano-lamellae on the tensile behaviors in the fcc CoCrNi MEA were investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. The overall strengthening was found to have two components: phase strengthening and extra interface strengthening, and the interface strengthening was observed to be always stronger than the phase strengthening. Both overall strengthening and interface strengthening were found to increase with increasing width and decreasing interspacing of embedded hcp nano-lamellae. The samples with small spaced hcp nano-lamellae are even stronger than the pure hard hcp phase due to the extra interface strengthening. The samples with larger width of embedded hcp nano-lamellae can provide stronger resistance for dislocation slip and transmission. Nanotwins were observed to be formed in the embedded hcp nano-lamellae. Higher density of phase boundaries and newly formed twin boundaries can provide more barriers for dislocation glide in the other slip systems, resulting in higher strength for samples with smaller interspacing. (C) 2021 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The editorial office of Journal of Materials Science & Technology