Sub-picometer sensitivity and effect of anisotropic atomic vibrations on Ti L₂,₃-edge spectrum of SrTiO₃

The effect of temperature on the electron energy-loss Ti L₂, ₃-edge spectrum of SrTiO₃ was ascertained using monochromated scanning transmission electron microscopy. The results demonstrate that the spectrum is sensitive to structural changes involving volume expansion on the sub-picometer level, and the sensitivity is superior to that obtainable using conventional electron microscopy. Experimental spectra could be accurately reproduced by multiplet calculations that incorporated anisotropic atomic vibrations of oxygen atoms. This spectral technique could represent a powerful tool for investigating infinitesimal structural changes and atomic vibrations at local regions, such as interfaces

Computer-aided detection development based on semi-supervised learning with medical chart information

本研究では主に、教師あり機械学習の枠組みにカルテデータの病変情報を融合し、病変領域教教師ラベルのない医用画像上に高精度な教師ラベルを自動付与する手法を提案し実験的に検討を行った。提案法は、病変位置座標と病変長径のみから複数の3次元拡張U-Netを用いて病変領域教師ラベルを推定するものである。肺結節を対象とした検証実験では、Solid、GGO、Mixed-GGOの3種類の結節いずれも良好なDice係数を伴う推定教師ラベルを取得できた。また病変領域抽出に重要な画素識別の検討も行った。教師無し画素異常検知に基づくFDG-PET/CT像上の多種病変検出処理を提案し、論文にて発表した。In this research, we mainly proposed and experimentally investigated a method for automatically assigning highly accurate teacher labels on medical images without lesion region teacher labels by fusing lesion information from medical record data into a supervised machine learning framework. The proposed method estimates lesion area teacher labels from extremely rough and weak teacher data, consisting of lesion position coordinates and lesion length diameter, by using multiple 3D U-Nets. Validation experiments by CT image data, including lung nodules, showed that the estimated teacher labels with good Dice coefficients were obtained for all three types of nodules: solid nodules, GGO nodules, and Mixed-GGO nodules. We also investigated pixel discrimination, which is essential for lesion area extraction. A multi-species lesion detection process on FDG-PET/CT images based on unsupervised pixel anomaly detection was proposed and published as a journal article.研究分野：画像診断支

Machine Learning-Based Diagnosis in Laser Resonance Frequency Analysis for Implant Stability of Orthopedic Pedicle Screws

Evaluation of the initial stability of implants is essential to reduce the number of implant failures of pedicle screws after orthopedic surgeries. Laser resonance frequency analysis (L-RFA) has been recently proposed as a viable diagnostic scheme in this regard. In a previous study, L-RFA was used to demonstrate the diagnosis of implant stability of monoaxial screws with a fixed head. However, polyaxial screws with movable heads are also frequently used in practice. In this paper, we clarify the characteristics of the laser-induced vibrational spectra of polyaxial screws which are required for making L-RFA diagnoses of implant stability. In addition, a novel analysis scheme of a vibrational spectrum using L-RFA based on machine learning is demonstrated and proposed. The proposed machine learning-based diagnosis method demonstrates a highly accurate prediction of implant stability (peak torque) for polyaxial pedicle screws. This achievement will contribute an important analytical method for implant stability diagnosis using L-RFA for implants with moving parts and shapes used in various clinical situations

Development of Automatic Visceral Fat Volume Calculation Software for CT Volume Data

Objective. To develop automatic visceral fat volume calculation software for computed tomography (CT) volume data and to evaluate its feasibility. Methods. A total of 24 sets of whole-body CT volume data and anthropometric measurements were obtained, with three sets for each of four BMI categories (under 20, 20 to 25, 25 to 30, and over 30) in both sexes. True visceral fat volumes were defined on the basis of manual segmentation of the whole-body CT volume data by an experienced radiologist. Software to automatically calculate visceral fat volumes was developed using a region segmentation technique based on morphological analysis with CT value threshold. Automatically calculated visceral fat volumes were evaluated in terms of the correlation coefficient with the true volumes and the error relative to the true volume. Results. Automatic visceral fat volume calculation results of all 24 data sets were obtained successfully and the average calculation time was 252.7 seconds/case. The correlation coefficients between the true visceral fat volume and the automatically calculated visceral fat volume were over 0.999. Conclusions. The newly developed software is feasible for calculating visceral fat volumes in a reasonable time and was proved to have high accuracy

Tin Ion Directed Morphology Evolution of Copper Sulfide Nanoparticles and Tuning of Their Plasmonic Properties via Phase Conversion

Copper-deficient copper sulfide (Cu_2–<i>x</i>S) nanoparticles (NPs) have been investigated as important hole-based plasmonic materials because of their size, morphology, and carrier density-dependent localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) properties. Morphology and carrier density are two important parameters to determine their LSPR properties. Here, we demonstrate that the foreign metal ion, Sn⁴⁺, directs the growth of djurleite Cu₃₁S₁₆ from nanodisk to tetradecahedron along the [100] direction. To control the LSPR properties by tuning the carrier density, the djurleite Cu₃₁S₁₆ nanoparticles were pseudomorphically converted into more copper-deficient (higher carrier density) roxbyite Cu₇S₄ NPs by heat treatment in the presence of amine. The roxbyite Cu₇S₄ NPs exhibited a shorter and stronger LSPR peak while retaining the morphology of the djurleite Cu₃₁S₁₆ NPs

Performance improvement of automated melanoma diagnosis system by data augmentation

Color information is an important tool for diagnosing melanoma. In this study, we used a hyper-spectral imager (HSI), which can measure color information in detail, to develop an automated melanoma diagnosis system. In recent years, the effectiveness of deep learning has become more widely accepted in the field of image recognition. We therefore integrated the deep convolutional neural network with transfer learning into our system. We tried data augmentation to demonstrate how our system improves diagnostic performance. 283 melanoma lesions and 336 non-melanoma lesions were used for the analysis. The data measured by HSI, called the hyperspectral data (HSD), were converted to a single-wavelength image averaged over plus or minus 3 nm. We used GoogLeNet which was pre-trained by ImageNet and then was transferred to analyze the HSD. In the transfer learning, we used not only the original HSD but also artificial augmentation dataset to improve the melanoma classification performance of GoogLeNet. Since GoogLeNet requires three-channel images as input, three wavelengths were selected from those single-wavelength images and assigned to three channels in wavelength order from short to long. The sensitivity and specificity of our system were estimated by 5-fold cross-val-idation. The results of a combination of 530, 560, and 590 nm (combination A) and 500, 620, and 740 nm (com-bination B) were compared. We also compared the diagnostic performance with and without the data augmentation. All images were augmented by inverting the image vertically and/or horizontally. Without data augmentation, the respective sensitivity and specificity of our system were 77.4% and 75.6% for combination A and 73.1% and 80.6% for combination B. With data augmentation, these numbers improved to 79.9% and 82.4% for combination A and 76.7% and 82.2% for combination B. From these results, we conclude that the diagnostic performance of our system has been improved by data augmentation. Furthermore, our system suc-ceeds to differentiate melanoma with a sensitivity of almost 80%

Automatic diagnosis of melanoma using hyperspectral data and GoogLeNet

Background: Melanoma is a type of superficial tumor. As advanced melanoma has a poor prognosis, early detection and therapy are essential to reduce melanoma-related deaths. To that end, there is a need to develop a quantitative method for diagnosing melanoma. This paper reports the development of such a diagnostic system using hyperspectral data (HSD) and a convolutional neural network, which is a type of machine learning. Materials and Methods: HSD were acquired using a hyperspectral imager, which is a type of spectrometer that can simultaneously capture information about wavelength and position. GoogLeNet pre-trained with Imagenet was used to model the convolutional neural network. As many CNNs (including GoogLeNet) have three input channels, the HSD (involving 84 channels) could not be input directly. For that reason, a “Mini Network” layer was added to reduce the number of channels from 84 to 3 just before the GoogLeNet input layer. In total, 619 lesions (including 278 melanoma lesions and 341 non-melanoma lesions) were used for training and evaluation of the network. Results and Conclusion: The system was evaluated by 5-fold cross-validation, and the results indicate sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of 69.1%, 75.7%, and 72.7% without data augmentation, 72.3%, 81.2%, and 77.2% with data augmentation, respectively. In future work, it is intended to improve the Mini Network and to increase the number of lesions