493 research outputs found
Spinal cord gray matter segmentation using deep dilated convolutions
Gray matter (GM) tissue changes have been associated with a wide range of
neurological disorders and was also recently found relevant as a biomarker for
disability in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The ability to automatically
segment the GM is, therefore, an important task for modern studies of the
spinal cord. In this work, we devise a modern, simple and end-to-end fully
automated human spinal cord gray matter segmentation method using Deep
Learning, that works both on in vivo and ex vivo MRI acquisitions. We evaluate
our method against six independently developed methods on a GM segmentation
challenge and report state-of-the-art results in 8 out of 10 different
evaluation metrics as well as major network parameter reduction when compared
to the traditional medical imaging architectures such as U-Nets.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure
Unsupervised domain adaptation for medical imaging segmentation with self-ensembling
Recent advances in deep learning methods have come to define the
state-of-the-art for many medical imaging applications, surpassing even human
judgment in several tasks. Those models, however, when trained to reduce the
empirical risk on a single domain, fail to generalize when applied to other
domains, a very common scenario in medical imaging due to the variability of
images and anatomical structures, even across the same imaging modality. In
this work, we extend the method of unsupervised domain adaptation using
self-ensembling for the semantic segmentation task and explore multiple facets
of the method on a small and realistic publicly-available magnetic resonance
(MRI) dataset. Through an extensive evaluation, we show that self-ensembling
can indeed improve the generalization of the models even when using a small
amount of unlabelled data.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure
Safe Real-World Autonomous Driving by Learning to Predict and Plan with a Mixture of Experts
The goal of autonomous vehicles is to navigate public roads safely and
comfortably. To enforce safety, traditional planning approaches rely on
handcrafted rules to generate trajectories. Machine learning-based systems, on
the other hand, scale with data and are able to learn more complex behaviors.
However, they often ignore that agents and self-driving vehicle trajectory
distributions can be leveraged to improve safety. In this paper, we propose
modeling a distribution over multiple future trajectories for both the
self-driving vehicle and other road agents, using a unified neural network
architecture for prediction and planning. During inference, we select the
planning trajectory that minimizes a cost taking into account safety and the
predicted probabilities. Our approach does not depend on any rule-based
planners for trajectory generation or optimization, improves with more training
data and is simple to implement. We extensively evaluate our method through a
realistic simulator and show that the predicted trajectory distribution
corresponds to different driving profiles. We also successfully deploy it on a
self-driving vehicle on urban public roads, confirming that it drives safely
without compromising comfort. The code for training and testing our model on a
public prediction dataset and the video of the road test are available at
https://woven.mobi/safepathne
Hydatid disease of the liver: thirty years of surgical experience.
Hydatid disease of the liver is a relatively frequent disease. Although the natural history is almost completely known, several complications may occur. The aim of this study was to show that radical surgical resection of the hepatic hydatid cyst is a safe and very effective technique, based on our results after 30-year experience. A review of most significant studies was carried out. We retrospectively evaluated our surgical cases. From January 1973 to December 2003 we treated 216 patients, 98 males and 118 females. Survival was compared with the Kaplan-Meier test, using log-rank analysis to compare data. Differences with a p value less than 0.05 were considered significant. A total of 279 cysts were excised. We performed pericystectomy in 122 cases, 73 of which closed. We also performed 19 atypical resections, 10 segmentectomies, 20 lobectomies and 2 percutaneous treatments. In more than 90% of cases, preoperative data collection was completed by preoperative ultrasound. The cumulative morbidity was 13%. The recurrence rate amounted to 4.3% at 5 years and 7% at 10 years: of these, 6 occurred after non-radical surgery and 2 after total pericystectomy or liver resection (p < 0.001). Technical advances and accumulated experience permit safe treatment of hepatic hydatid cysts by radical resection, with an almost zero recurrence rate, making it the treatment of choice over partial resection. The utility of percutaneous treatment remains confined to limited indications, such as laparoscopy
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