85 research outputs found
BiRA-Net: Bilinear Attention Net for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common retinal disease that leads to
blindness. For diagnosis purposes, DR image grading aims to provide automatic
DR grade classification, which is not addressed in conventional research
methods of binary DR image classification. Small objects in the eye images,
like lesions and microaneurysms, are essential to DR grading in medical
imaging, but they could easily be influenced by other objects. To address these
challenges, we propose a new deep learning architecture, called BiRA-Net, which
combines the attention model for feature extraction and bilinear model for
fine-grained classification. Furthermore, in considering the distance between
different grades of different DR categories, we propose a new loss function,
called grading loss, which leads to improved training convergence of the
proposed approach. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the
superior performance of the proposed approach.Comment: Accepted at ICIP 201
PG-VTON: A Novel Image-Based Virtual Try-On Method via Progressive Inference Paradigm
Virtual try-on is a promising computer vision topic with a high commercial
value wherein a new garment is visually worn on a person with a photo-realistic
effect. Previous studies conduct their shape and content inference at one
stage, employing a single-scale warping mechanism and a relatively
unsophisticated content inference mechanism. These approaches have led to
suboptimal results in terms of garment warping and skin reservation under
challenging try-on scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel
virtual try-on method via progressive inference paradigm (PGVTON) that
leverages a top-down inference pipeline and a general garment try-on strategy.
Specifically, we propose a robust try-on parsing inference method by
disentangling semantic categories and introducing consistency. Exploiting the
try-on parsing as the shape guidance, we implement the garment try-on via
warping-mapping-composition. To facilitate adaptation to a wide range of try-on
scenarios, we adopt a covering more and selecting one warping strategy and
explicitly distinguish tasks based on alignment. Additionally, we regulate
StyleGAN2 to implement re-naked skin inpainting, conditioned on the target skin
shape and spatial-agnostic skin features. Experiments demonstrate that our
method has state-of-the-art performance under two challenging scenarios. The
code will be available at https://github.com/NerdFNY/PGVTON
A Cross-Scale Hierarchical Transformer with Correspondence-Augmented Attention for inferring Bird's-Eye-View Semantic Segmentation
As bird's-eye-view (BEV) semantic segmentation is simple-to-visualize and
easy-to-handle, it has been applied in autonomous driving to provide the
surrounding information to downstream tasks. Inferring BEV semantic
segmentation conditioned on multi-camera-view images is a popular scheme in the
community as cheap devices and real-time processing. The recent work
implemented this task by learning the content and position relationship via the
vision Transformer (ViT). However, the quadratic complexity of ViT confines the
relationship learning only in the latent layer, leaving the scale gap to impede
the representation of fine-grained objects. And their plain fusion method of
multi-view features does not conform to the information absorption intention in
representing BEV features. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel
cross-scale hierarchical Transformer with correspondence-augmented attention
for semantic segmentation inferring. Specifically, we devise a hierarchical
framework to refine the BEV feature representation, where the last size is only
half of the final segmentation. To save the computation increase caused by this
hierarchical framework, we exploit the cross-scale Transformer to learn feature
relationships in a reversed-aligning way, and leverage the residual connection
of BEV features to facilitate information transmission between scales. We
propose correspondence-augmented attention to distinguish conducive and
inconducive correspondences. It is implemented in a simple yet effective way,
amplifying attention scores before the Softmax operation, so that the
position-view-related and the position-view-disrelated attention scores are
highlighted and suppressed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method
has state-of-the-art performance in inferring BEV semantic segmentation
conditioned on multi-camera-view images
Recurrent Temporal Revision Graph Networks
Temporal graphs offer more accurate modeling of many real-world scenarios
than static graphs. However, neighbor aggregation, a critical building block of
graph networks, for temporal graphs, is currently straightforwardly extended
from that of static graphs. It can be computationally expensive when involving
all historical neighbors during such aggregation. In practice, typically only a
subset of the most recent neighbors are involved. However, such subsampling
leads to incomplete and biased neighbor information. To address this
limitation, we propose a novel framework for temporal neighbor aggregation that
uses the recurrent neural network with node-wise hidden states to integrate
information from all historical neighbors for each node to acquire the complete
neighbor information. We demonstrate the superior theoretical expressiveness of
the proposed framework as well as its state-of-the-art performance in
real-world applications. Notably, it achieves a significant +9.6% improvement
on averaged precision in a real-world Ecommerce dataset over existing methods
on 2-layer models
Remnant cholesterol is associated with cardiovascular mortality
Background: Genetic, observational, and clinical intervention studies indicate that circulating levels of remnant cholesterol (RC) are associated with cardiovascular diseases. However, the predictive value of RC for cardiovascular mortality in the general population remains unclear. Methods: Our study population comprised 19,650 adults in the United States from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) (1999–2014). RC was calculated from non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (non-HDL-C) minus low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) determined by the Sampson formula. Multivariate Cox regression, restricted cubic spline analysis, and subgroup analysis were applied to explore the relationship of RC with cardiovascular mortality. Results: The mean age of the study cohort was 46.4 ± 19.2 years, and 48.7% of participants were male. During a median follow-up of 93 months, 382 (1.9%) cardiovascular deaths occurred. In a fully adjusted Cox regression model, log RC was significantly associated with cardiovascular mortality [hazard ratio (HR) 2.82; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.17–6.81]. The restricted cubic spline curve indicated that log RC had a linear association with cardiovascular mortality (p for non-linearity = 0.899). People with higher LDL-C (≥130 mg/dL), higher RC [≥25.7/23.7 mg/dL in males/females corresponding to the LDL-C clinical cutoff point (130 mg/dL)] and abnormal HDL-C (<40/50 mg/dL in males/females) levels had a higher risk of cardiovascular mortality (HR 2.18; 95% CI 1.13–4.21 in males and HR 2.19; 95% CI 1.24–3.88 in females) than the reference group (lower LDL-C, lower RC and normal HDL-C levels). Conclusions: Elevated RC levels were associated with cardiovascular mortality independent of traditional risk factors
Practice, Knowledge, and Barriers for Screening of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Among High-Risk Chinese Patients
Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is among the leading causes of cancer deaths in China. Considering its poor prognosis when diagnosed late, Chinese guidelines recommend biannual screening for HCC with abdominal ultrasound and serum α-fetoprotein (AFP) test for high-risk populations. Objectives: To investigate the practice, knowledge, and self-perceived barriers for HCC screening among high-risk hospital patients in China. Methods: An interview-based questionnaire was conducted among Chinese patients with chronic hepatitis B and/or chronic hepatitis C infection from outpatient clinics at 2 tertiary medical institutions in Shanghai and Wuhan, China. Findings: Among 352 participating patients, 50.0% had routine screening, 23.3% had irregular screening, and 26.7% had incomplete or no screening. Significant determinants for screening included higher level of education, underlying liver cirrhosis, a family history of HCC, and better knowledge concerning viral hepatitis, HCC, and HCC screening guidelines. Moreover, factors associated with better knowledge were younger age, female gender, urban residency, education level of college or above, annual household income of greater than 150,000 RMB, and longer duration of hepatitis infection. The 3 most common barriers reported for not receiving screening were not aware that screening for HCC exists (41.5%), no symptoms or discomfort (38.3%), and lack of recommendation from physicians (31.9%). Conlusions: Health care professionals and community leaders should actively inform patients regarding the benefits of HCC screening through design of educational programs. Such interventions are expected to increase knowledge about HCC and HCC screening, as well as improve screening adherence and earlier diagnosis
MRI radiomics-based decision support tool for a personalized classification of cervical disc degeneration: a two-center study
Objectives: To develop and validate an MRI radiomics-based decision support tool for the automated grading of cervical disc degeneration.Methods: The retrospective study included 2,610 cervical disc samples of 435 patients from two hospitals. The cervical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analysis of patients confirmed cervical disc degeneration grades using the Pfirrmann grading system. A training set (1,830 samples of 305 patients) and an independent test set (780 samples of 130 patients) were divided for the construction and validation of the machine learning model, respectively. We provided a fine-tuned MedSAM model for automated cervical disc segmentation. Then, we extracted 924 radiomic features from each segmented disc in T1 and T2 MRI modalities. All features were processed and selected using minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) and multiple machine learning algorithms. Meanwhile, the radiomics models of various machine learning algorithms and MRI images were constructed and compared. Finally, the combined radiomics model was constructed in the training set and validated in the test set. Radiomic feature mapping was provided for auxiliary diagnosis.Results: Of the 2,610 cervical disc samples, 794 (30.4%) were classified as low grade and 1,816 (69.6%) were classified as high grade. The fine-tuned MedSAM model achieved good segmentation performance, with the mean Dice coefficient of 0.93. Higher-order texture features contributed to the dominant force in the diagnostic task (80%). Among various machine learning models, random forest performed better than the other algorithms (p < 0.01), and the T2 MRI radiomics model showed better results than T1 MRI in the diagnostic performance (p < 0.05). The final combined radiomics model had an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.95, an accuracy of 89.51%, a precision of 87.07%, a recall of 98.83%, and an F1 score of 0.93 in the test set, which were all better than those of other models (p < 0.05).Conclusion: The radiomics-based decision support tool using T1 and T2 MRI modalities can be used for cervical disc degeneration grading, facilitating individualized management
Lipopolysaccharide-Induced Dephosphorylation of AMPK-Activated Protein Kinase Potentiates Inflammatory Injury via Repression of ULK1-Dependent Autophagy
AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is a crucial metabolic regulator with profound modulatory activities on inflammation. Although the anti-inflammatory benefits of AMPK activators were well documented in experimental studies, the pathological significance of endogenous AMPK in inflammatory disorders largely remains unknown. This study investigated the phosphorylation status of endogenous AMPK and the potential roles of AMPK in mice with lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced lethal inflammation. The results indicated that LPS dose-dependently decreased the phosphorylation level of AMPK and its target protein acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC). Reactivation of AMPK with the AMPK activator A-769662 suppressed LPS-induced elevation of interleukin 6, alleviated histological abnormalities in lung and improved the survival of LPS-challenged mice. Treatment with A-769662 restored LPS-induced suppression of autophagy, inhibition of autophagy by 3-MA reversed the beneficial effects of A-769662. Treatment with A-769662 suppressed LPS-induced activation of mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), co-administration of mTOR activator abolished the beneficial effects of A-769662, and the suppressive effects of A-769662 on uncoordinated-51-like kinase 1 (ULK1) phosphorylation. Inhibition of ULK1 removed the beneficial effects of A-769662. These data indicated that LPS-induced dephosphorylation of AMPK could result in weakened inhibition of mTOR and repression of ULK1-dependent autophagy, which might potentiate the development of LPS-induced inflammatory injury. These data suggest that pharmacological restoration of AMPK activation might be a beneficial approach for the intervention of inflammatory disorders
Lattice-contraction triggered synchronous electrochromic actuator.
Materials with synchronous capabilities of color change and actuation have prospects for application in biomimetic dual-stealth camouflage and artificial intelligence. However, color/shape dual-responsive devices involve stimuli that are difficult to control such as gas, light or magnetism, and the devices show poor coordination. Here, a flexible composite film with electrochromic/actuating (238° bending angle) dual-responsive phenomena, excellent reversibility, high synchronization, and fast response speed (< 5 s) utilizes a single active component, W18O49 nanowires. From in situ synchrotron X-ray diffraction, first principles calculations/numerical simulations, and a series of control experiments, the actuating mechanism for macroscopic deformation is elucidated as pseudocapacitance-based reversible lattice contraction/recovery of W18O49 nanowires (i.e. nanostructure change at the atomic level) during lithium ion intercalation/de-intercalation. In addition, we demonstrate the W18O49 nanowires in a solid-state ionic polymer-metal composite actuator that operates stably in air with a significant pseudocapacitive actuation
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