Recognition of adherent polychaetes on oysters and scallops using Microsoft Azure Custom Vision

Oyster and scallop cultures have high growth rates in the Korean aquaculture industry. However, their production is declining because of the manual selection of polychaete-adherent oysters and scallops. In this study, an artificial intelligence model for automatic selection of polychaetes was developed using Microsoft Azure Custom Vision to improve the productivity of oysters and scallops. A camera booth was built to capture images of oysters and scallops from various angles. Polychaetes in the images were tagged. Transfer learning available with Custom Vision was performed on the acquired images. By repeating the training and evaluation, the number of training images was increased by analyzing the precision, recall, and mean average precision using the Compact [S1] and General [A1] domains of Custom Vision. This paper presents the artificial intelligence model developed for the automatic selection of polychaete-adherent oysters and scallops as well as the optimal model development method using Microsoft Azure Custom Vision

Clinical outcomes of balloon-occluded retrograde transvenous obliteration for the treatment of gastric variceal hemorrhage in Korean patients with liver cirrhosis: a retrospective multicenter study

Background/AimsThis study evaluated the clinical outcomes of balloon-occluded retrograde transvenous obliteration (BRTO) for the treatment of hemorrhage from gastric varices (GV) in Korean patients with liver cirrhosis (LC).MethodsWe retrospectively analyzed data from 183 LC patients who underwent BRTO for GV bleeding in 6 university-based hospitals between January 2001 and December 2010.ResultsOf the 183 enrolled patients, 49 patients had Child-Pugh (CP) class A LC, 105 had CP class B, and 30 had CP class C at the time of BRTO. BRTO was successfully performed in 177 patients (96.7%). Procedure-related complications (e.g., pulmonary thromboembolism and renal infarction) occurred in eight patients (4.4%). Among 151 patients who underwent follow-up examinations of GV, 79 patients (52.3%) achieved eradication of GV, and 110 patients (72.8%) exhibited marked shrinkage of the treated GV to grade 0 or I. Meanwhile, new-appearance or aggravation of esophageal varices (EV) occurred in 54 out of 136 patients who underwent follow-up endoscopy (41.2%). During the 36.0±29.2 months (mean±SD) of follow-up, 39 patients rebled (hemorrhage from GV in 7, EV in 18, nonvariceal origin in 4, and unknown in 10 patients). The estimated 3-year rebleeding-free rate was 74.8%, and multivariate analysis showed that CP class C was associated with rebleeding (odds ratio, 2.404; 95% confidence-interval, 1.013-5.704; P=0.047).ConclusionsBRTO can be performed safely and effectively for the treatment of GV bleeding. However, aggravation of EV or bleeding from EV is not uncommon after BRTO; thus, periodic endoscopy to follow-up of EV with or without prophylactic treatment might be necessary in LC patients undergoing BRTO

25th annual computational neuroscience meeting: CNS-2016

The same neuron may play different functional roles in the neural circuits to which it belongs. For example, neurons in the Tritonia pedal ganglia may participate in variable phases of the swim motor rhythms [1]. While such neuronal functional variability is likely to play a major role the delivery of the functionality of neural systems, it is difficult to study it in most nervous systems. We work on the pyloric rhythm network of the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion (STG) [2]. Typically network models of the STG treat neurons of the same functional type as a single model neuron (e.g. PD neurons), assuming the same conductance parameters for these neurons and implying their synchronous firing [3, 4]. However, simultaneous recording of PD neurons shows differences between the timings of spikes of these neurons. This may indicate functional variability of these neurons. Here we modelled separately the two PD neurons of the STG in a multi-neuron model of the pyloric network. Our neuron models comply with known correlations between conductance parameters of ionic currents. Our results reproduce the experimental finding of increasing spike time distance between spikes originating from the two model PD neurons during their synchronised burst phase. The PD neuron with the larger calcium conductance generates its spikes before the other PD neuron. Larger potassium conductance values in the follower neuron imply longer delays between spikes, see Fig. 17.Neuromodulators change the conductance parameters of neurons and maintain the ratios of these parameters [5]. Our results show that such changes may shift the individual contribution of two PD neurons to the PD-phase of the pyloric rhythm altering their functionality within this rhythm. Our work paves the way towards an accessible experimental and computational framework for the analysis of the mechanisms and impact of functional variability of neurons within the neural circuits to which they belong

Suppression Technique of HeLa Cell Proliferation Using Ultrasonic Power Amplifiers Integrated with a Series-Diode Linearizer

A series-diode linearizer scheme is developed, which can possibly generate higher voltage signals. To verify our proposed concept, ultrasonic power amplifiers with and without the linearizer were tested for HeLa cells proliferation in vitro. In general, ultrasonic stimulus initiates the process of cavitation which can cause cell lysis and disruption of cell attachment. The cavitation can also induce formation of free radicals so that a rigid membrane of malignant cancer cells have increased sensitivity to ultrasonic stimulus. The cell density of the control group increased up to almost 100% on Day 3. However, cell densities of the experimental group when using an isolated ultrasonic power amplifier, and ultrasonic power amplifiers integrated with the linearizer at 1 V and 5 V DC (direct current) bias could be suppressed more than that when using an ultrasonic power amplifier (90.7 ± 1.2%, 75.8 ± 3.5%, and 68.1 ± 1.1%, respectively). Additionally, the proliferation suppressing ratios of each experimental group confirmed that the cell density decrements of the experimental groups exhibited statistical significance compared to the control group (ultrasonic power amplifier = 8.87%, ultrasonic power amplifier with 1 V biased linearizer = 23.87%, and ultrasonic power amplifier with 5 V biased linearizer = 31.56%)

Therapeutic Effect Enhancement by Dual-Bias High-Voltage Circuit of Transmit Amplifier for Immersion Ultrasound Transducer Applications

The dual-bias high-voltage circuit of a transmit amplifier for immersion ultrasound transducer applications is proposed to enhance the therapeutic effect of human HeLa cells. High-voltage output signals generated from a transmit amplifier are typically preferable for immersion ultrasound transducers owing to their high sensitivity at the desired frequency. However, high-voltage output signals typically produce high-order harmonic distortions, thus triggering several unwanted high-order spectral signals in the ultrasound transducers. By reducing high-order harmonic distortions, we expect that improving the signal quality of excited pulses for immersion ultrasound transducers would be beneficial for the therapeutic effect on human cervical cancer HeLa cell suppression. Therefore, an additional bias circuit is developed to merge with the original bias circuit for transmit amplifier to control the harmonic distortions of the immersion ultrasonic transducer. To properly select the components of dual-bias high-voltage circuit, we need to calculate and measure the DC bias voltages of the transmit amplifier with and without dual-bias high-voltage circuit for different period of the time for therapeutic applications. To evaluate the performances of the developed circuit, pulse-echo measurements using a transmit amplifier with or without dual-bias high-voltage circuit were obtained. The measured second, third, and fourth harmonic distortions of the echo signals when using the transmit amplifier with dual-bias high-voltage circuit at 10 V DC bias voltage are lower than those when using the transmit amplifier only. Subsequently, the therapeutic effects using the enhanced performances of the transmit amplifier with dual-bias high-voltage circuit were verified and compared with those using the performances of the transmit amplifier by comparison of quantitative changes in HeLa cell concentrations. The control group without any ultrasonic induction increased the cell density up to about 100% on Day4, however the experimental groups with ultrasonic induction (TA = 91.2 ± 0.8%, TA+Dual-bias high-voltage circuit (0.8 V) = 78.8 ± 1.7% and TA+Dual-bias high-voltage circuit (10 V) = 66.3 ± 1.1%) showed statistically significant cell density changes compared to the control group. We confirmed that the therapeutic effect from using the dual-bias high-voltage circuit is improved. Therefore, it can be a potential candidate to improve the therapeutic effect of HeLa cells

Acoustic Stimulation by Shunt-Diode Pre-Linearizer using Very High Frequency Piezoelectric Transducer for Cancer Therapeutics

In this paper, we proposed cancer cell acoustic stimulation by shunt-diode pre-linearizer scheme using a very high frequency (≥100 MHz) piezoelectric transducer. To verify the concept of our proposed scheme, we performed pulse-echo detection, and accessed therapeutic effects of human cervical cancer cells exposed to acoustic stimulation experiments using 100 MHz focused piezoelectric transducer triggered by PA with and without the proposed shunt-diode pre-linearizer scheme. In the pulse-echo detection responses, the peak-to-peak voltage of the echo signal when using the PA with shunt-diode pre-linearizer (49.79 mV) was higher than that when using the PA alone (29.87 mV). In the experimental results, the cell densities of cancer cells on Day 4 when using no acoustic stimulation (control group), the very high-frequency piezoelectric transducer triggered by PA only and PA combined with proposed pre-linearizer schemes (1 V and 5 V DC bias voltages) showed 100%, 92.8 ± 4.2%, 84.2 ± 4.6%, and 78 ± 2.9%, respectively. Therefore, we confirmed that the shunt-diode pre-linearizer could improve the performances of the pulse signals of the PA, thus, enabling better therapeutic stimulation performances for cancer cell suppression

BUViTNet: Breast Ultrasound Detection via Vision Transformers

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have enhanced ultrasound image-based early breast cancer detection. Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently surpassed CNNs as the most effective method for natural image analysis. ViTs have proven their capability of incorporating more global information than CNNs at lower layers, and their skip connections are more powerful than those of CNNs, which endows ViTs with superior performance. However, the effectiveness of ViTs in breast ultrasound imaging has not yet been investigated. Here, we present BUViTNet breast ultrasound detection via ViTs, where ViT-based multistage transfer learning is performed using ImageNet and cancer cell image datasets prior to transfer learning for classifying breast ultrasound images. We utilized two publicly available ultrasound breast image datasets, Mendeley and breast ultrasound images (BUSI), to train and evaluate our algorithm. The proposed method achieved the highest area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) of 1 ± 0, Matthew’s correlation coefficient (MCC) of 1 ± 0, and kappa score of 1 ± 0 on the Mendeley dataset. Furthermore, BUViTNet achieved the highest AUC of 0.968 ± 0.02, MCC of 0.961 ± 0.01, and kappa score of 0.959 ± 0.02 on the BUSI dataset. BUViTNet outperformed ViT trained from scratch, ViT-based conventional transfer learning, and CNN-based transfer learning in classifying breast ultrasound images (p < 0.01 in all cases). Our findings indicate that improved transformers are effective in analyzing breast images and can provide an improved diagnosis if used in clinical settings. Future work will consider the use of a wide range of datasets and parameters for optimized performance

Transfer Learning in Breast Cancer Diagnoses via Ultrasound Imaging

Transfer learning is a machine learning approach that reuses a learning method developed for a task as the starting point for a model on a target task. The goal of transfer learning is to improve performance of target learners by transferring the knowledge contained in other (but related) source domains. As a result, the need for large numbers of target-domain data is lowered for constructing target learners. Due to this immense property, transfer learning techniques are frequently used in ultrasound breast cancer image analyses. In this review, we focus on transfer learning methods applied on ultrasound breast image classification and detection from the perspective of transfer learning approaches, pre-processing, pre-training models, and convolutional neural network (CNN) models. Finally, comparison of different works is carried out, and challenges—as well as outlooks—are discussed

Ultrasound-Responsive Nanocarriers for Breast Cancer Chemotherapy

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer and it is treated with surgical intervention, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or a combination of these regimens. Despite chemotherapy’s ample use, it has limitations such as bioavailability, adverse side effects, high-dose requirements, low therapeutic indices, multiple drug resistance development, and non-specific targeting. Drug delivery vehicles or carriers, of which nanocarriers are prominent, have been introduced to overcome chemotherapy limitations. Nanocarriers have been preferentially used in breast cancer chemotherapy because of their role in protecting therapeutic agents from degradation, enabling efficient drug concentration in target cells or tissues, overcoming drug resistance, and their relatively small size. However, nanocarriers are affected by physiological barriers, bioavailability of transported drugs, and other factors. To resolve these issues, the use of external stimuli has been introduced, such as ultrasound, infrared light, thermal stimulation, microwaves, and X-rays. Recently, ultrasound-responsive nanocarriers have become popular because they are cost-effective, non-invasive, specific, tissue-penetrating, and deliver high drug concentrations to their target. In this paper, we review recent developments in ultrasound-guided nanocarriers for breast cancer chemotherapy, discuss the relevant challenges, and provide insights into future directions