Automatic Brain Tumor Segmentation using Cascaded Anisotropic Convolutional Neural Networks

A cascade of fully convolutional neural networks is proposed to segment multi-modal Magnetic Resonance (MR) images with brain tumor into background and three hierarchical regions: whole tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumor core. The cascade is designed to decompose the multi-class segmentation problem into a sequence of three binary segmentation problems according to the subregion hierarchy. The whole tumor is segmented in the first step and the bounding box of the result is used for the tumor core segmentation in the second step. The enhancing tumor core is then segmented based on the bounding box of the tumor core segmentation result. Our networks consist of multiple layers of anisotropic and dilated convolution filters, and they are combined with multi-view fusion to reduce false positives. Residual connections and multi-scale predictions are employed in these networks to boost the segmentation performance. Experiments with BraTS 2017 validation set show that the proposed method achieved average Dice scores of 0.7859, 0.9050, 0.8378 for enhancing tumor core, whole tumor and tumor core, respectively. The corresponding values for BraTS 2017 testing set were 0.7831, 0.8739, and 0.7748, respectively.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures. MICCAI Brats Challenge 201

A Model for Recognizing Key Factors and Applications Thereof to Engineering

This paper presents an approach to recognize key factors in data classification. Using collinearity diagnostics to delete the factors of repeated information and Logistic regression significant discriminant to select the factors which can effectively distinguish the two kinds of samples, this paper creates a model for recognizing key factors. The proposed model is demonstrated by using the 2044 observations in finical engineering. The experimental results demonstrate that the 13 indicators such as “marital status,” “net income of borrower,” and “Engel's coefficient” are the key factors to distinguish the good customers from the bad customers. By analyzing the experimental results, the performance of the proposed model is verified. Moreover, the proposed method is simple and easy to be implemented

Loan systems, financial ranking and fiscal positioning: Evidence from India

This paper examines the financial ranking and performance of banks by taking one bank as a sample case. We evaluate performance of bank through fiscal reserves it posses, its monetary arrangement, its liquidity and its competence to get used to transformation in the market in which it operates. The study provides some important insights about banks liquidity and its ability to change cash flows in future circumstance Keywords – Bank liquidity, financial ranking, fiscal positioning, Indi

A class of self-affine tiles in Rd\mathbb{R}^d that are dd-dimensional tame balls

We study a family of self-affine tiles in $\mathbb{R}^d$ ($d\ge2$) with noncollinear digit sets, which naturally generalizes a class studied originally by Deng and Lau in $\mathbb{R}^2$ and its extension to \mathbb{R}^3} by the authors. By using Brouwer's invariance of domain theorem, along with a tool which we call horizontal distance, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for the tiles to be $d$-dimensional tame balls. This answers positively the conjecture in an earlier paper by the authors stating that a member in a certain class of self-affine tiles is homeomorphic to a $d$-dimensional ball if and only if its interior is connected.Comment: 56 pages, 17 figure

Effects of the budgetary process on SME’s performance: An Exploratory study based on Selected SME’s in India

This research study is intended to find out the impact of budgeting on the performance of small and medium enterprises of India. Three major areas of the study are budgeting in SMEs, performance measurement in SMES and Small and Medium Enterprises. The budgeting process is explained and analyzed from the point of view of budgetary planning, budgetary sophistication and control. A sample of two hundred and sixty eight firms is selected from SME sector of India. The sample was selected from three districts of Mumbai, Pune and Solapur. Impact of budgeting on firm performance in these firms was tested through detailed analysis. Questionnaires and other statistical tools were used for analysis of the problem statement. A positive relationship between firm performance and budgeting process is found in this research study. The performance of Small and Medium Enterprises of India is further affected by the characteristics of the budget goals. The results add to the fact that higher performance can be achieved through more clear goals. Astonishingly budget goals that are difficult but achievable motivate employees to achieve budget goals. Moreover tight but achievable goals also increase employee’s motivation in achievement of budget objectives and it improved the performance of Small and Medium Enterprises of India. Another important result is that formal and tight control mechanism of control for budgetary process also tends to increase firm performance in the SME sector of India. It was very interesting to find out that budgetary process have greater impact on the performance of the firm in SME sector as compared to the budgetary control process. Furthermore budgeting planning affects the sales growth of firms in Small and Medium Enterprises more than the budgetary control phenomena. But the impact of budgetary planning on sales becomes very weak and in turn budgetary control strongly affects the profit in small and medium enterprises. Sales and budgetary sophistication have a statistically insignificant relationship and budget sophistication relationship with profit is even negative. The sophistication of budgetary tools includes acquiring and installation of costly financial modeling software, training and expensive training and follow up mechanism. This needs a huge investment which is difficult for Small and Medium Enterprises to acquire that much huge investment. If firm goes for these huge investments this increase in their expenses will decrease their net profit value. Budgetary goal clarity has a statistically insignificant relationship with the employee’s motivation level and further the budget goal difficulty and employee’s job involvement also shows a statistically insignificant relationship. As far as the firm size is concerned it affects sales insignificantly, however it impacts profit of the firm in SMEs sector. Medium sized firms showed a greater growth in their sales as compared to the smaller sized firms. Key Words: Small and Medium Enterprises, Budgeting, Firm Performance, Budget Contro

Semi-supervised Pathological Image Segmentation via Cross Distillation of Multiple Attentions

Segmentation of pathological images is a crucial step for accurate cancer diagnosis. However, acquiring dense annotations of such images for training is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) has the potential for reducing the annotation cost, but it is challenged by a large number of unlabeled training images. In this paper, we propose a novel SSL method based on Cross Distillation of Multiple Attentions (CDMA) to effectively leverage unlabeled images. Firstly, we propose a Multi-attention Tri-branch Network (MTNet) that consists of an encoder and a three-branch decoder, with each branch using a different attention mechanism that calibrates features in different aspects to generate diverse outputs. Secondly, we introduce Cross Decoder Knowledge Distillation (CDKD) between the three decoder branches, allowing them to learn from each other's soft labels to mitigate the negative impact of incorrect pseudo labels in training. Additionally, uncertainty minimization is applied to the average prediction of the three branches, which further regularizes predictions on unlabeled images and encourages inter-branch consistency. Our proposed CDMA was compared with eight state-of-the-art SSL methods on the public DigestPath dataset, and the experimental results showed that our method outperforms the other approaches under different annotation ratios. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/HiLab-git/CDMA}{https://github.com/HiLab-git/CDMA.}Comment: Provisional Accepted by MICCAI 202

Doping influence of spin dynamics and magnetoelectric effect in hexagonal Y0.7_{0.7}Lu0.3_{0.3}MnO3_{3}

We use inelastic neutron scattering to study spin waves and their correlation with the magnetoelectric effect in Y$_{0.7}$Lu$_{0.3}$MnO$_3$. In the undoped YMnO$_3$ and LuMnO$_3$, the Mn trimerization distortion has been suggested to play a key role in determining the magnetic structure and the magnetoelectric effect. In Y$_{0.7}$Lu$_{0.3}$MnO$_3$, we find a much smaller in-plane (hexagonal $ab$-plane) single ion anisotropy gap that coincides with a weaker in-plane dielectric anomaly at $T_N$. Since both the smaller in-plane anisotropy gap and the weaker in-plane dielectric anomaly are coupled to a weaker Mn trimerization distortion in Y$_{0.7}$Lu$_{0.3}$MnO$_3$ comparing to YMnO$_3$ and LuMnO$_3$, we conclude that the Mn trimerization is responsible for the magnetoelectric effect and multiferroic phenomenon in Y$_{1-y}$Lu$_{y}$MnO$_{3}$.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure