RS-Net: robust segmentation of green overlapped apples

Fruit detection and segmentation will be essential for future agronomic management, with applications in yield estimation, growth monitoring, intelligent picking, disease detection and etc. In order to more accurately and efficiently realize the recognition and segmentation of apples in natural orchards, a robust segmentation net framework specially developed for fruit production is proposed. This model was improved for the more challenging problem which segments the overlapped apples from the monochromatic background regardless of various corruptions. The method extends Mask R-CNN by embedding an attention mechanism for focusing more on the informative pixels but also suppressing the noise caused by adverse factors (occlusions, overlaps, etc.), which could be more suitable and robust for operating in complex natural environment. Specifically, the Gaussian non-local attention mechanism is transplanted into Mask R-CNN for refining the semantic features generated continuously by residual network and feature pyramid network, then the model forward processing based on the balanced feature levels and finally segments the regions where the apples are located. Experimental results verify the hypothesis of current work and show that the proposed method outperforms other start-of-the-art detection and segmentation models, the AP box and AP mask metric values have reached 85.6% and 86.2% in a reasonable run time, respectively, which can meet the precision and robustness of vision system in agronomic managemen

The Neuropathology of Fatal Cerebral Malaria in Malawian Children

We examined the brains of 50 Malawian children who satisfied the clinical definition of cerebral malaria (CM) during life; 37 children had sequestration of infected red blood cells (iRBCs) and no other cause of death, and 13 had a nonmalarial cause of death with no cerebral sequestration. For comparison, 18 patients with coma and no parasitemia were included. We subdivided the 37 CM cases into two groups based on the cerebral microvasculature pathology: iRBC sequestration only (CM1) or sequestration with intravascular and perivascular pathology (CM2). We characterized and quantified the axonal and myelin damage, blood-brain barrier (BBB) disruption, and cellular immune responses and correlated these changes with iRBC sequestration and microvascular pathology. Axonal and myelin damage was associated with ring hemorrhages and vascular thrombosis in the cerebral and cerebellar white matter and brainstem of the CM2 cases. Diffuse axonal and myelin damage were present in CM1 and CM2 cases in areas of prominent iRBC sequestration. Disruption of the BBB was associated with ring hemorrhages and vascular thrombosis in CM2 cases and with sequestration in both CM1 and CM2 groups. Monocytes with phagocytosed hemozoin accumulated within microvessels containing iRBCs in CM2 cases but were not present in the adjacent neuropil. These findings are consistent with a link between iRBC sequestration and intravascular and perivascular pathology in fatal pediatric CM, resulting in myelin damage, axonal injury, and breakdown of the BBB