Graph-BAS(3)Net: Boundary-Aware Semi-Supervised Segmentation Network with Bilateral Graph Convolution

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms have attracted much attentions in medical image segmentation by leveraging unlabeled data, which challenge in acquiring massive pixel-wise annotated samples. However, most of the existing SSLs neglected the geometric shape constraint in object, leading to unsatisfactory boundary and non-smooth of object. In this paper, we propose a novel boundary-aware semi-supervised medical image segmentation network, named Graph-BAS(3)Net, which incorporates the boundary information and learns duality constraints between semantics and geometrics in the graph domain. Specifically, the proposed method consists of two components: a multi-task learning framework BAS(3)Net and a graph-based cross-task module BGCM. The BAS(3)Net improves the existing GAN-based SSL by adding a boundary detection task, which encodes richer features of object shape and surface. Moreover, the BGCM further explores the co-occurrence relations between the semantics segmentation and boundary detection task, so that the network learns stronger semantic and geometric correspondences from both labeled and unlabeled data. Experimental results on the LiTS dataset and COVID-19 dataset confirm that our proposed Graph-BAS(3) Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in semi-supervised segmentation task.

Overview and applications of master protocol in clinical trials

Master protocol is a novel and more efficient design for clinical trial research than the traditional clinical trials. Usually a master protocol includes several sub-protocols which could investigate treatment effects of a single drug on several diseases or multiple drugs targeting a single disorder. This review compared master protocol with traditional trials in terms of the research design principle, application, and procedure flow as well as advantages and limitations. We also presented some examples of ongoing applications of master protocol designs including treatment of COVID-19 related illness. Finally, we discussed about potential implementation of master protocol in China especially under the COVID-19 pandemic with an evaluation on the relevant opportunities and challenges. © 2021, Chinese Journal of New Drugs Co. Ltd. All right reserved.

GRAPH-BASED PYRAMID GLOBAL CONTEXT REASONING WITH A SALIENCY-AWARE PROJECTION FOR COVID-19 LUNG INFECTIONS SEGMENTATION

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly spread in 2020, emerging a mass of studies for lung infection segmentation from CT images. Though many methods have been proposed for this issue, it is a challenging task because of infections of various size appearing in different lobe zones. To tackle these issues, we propose a Graph-based Pyramid Global Context Reasoning (Graph-PGCR) module, which is capable of modeling long-range dependencies among disjoint infections as well as adapt size variation. We first incorporate graph convolution to exploit long-term contextual information from multiple lobe zones. Different from previous average pooling or maximum object probability, we propose a saliency-aware projection mechanism to pick up infection-related pixels as a set of graph nodes. After graph reasoning, the relation-aware features are reversed back to the original coordinate space for the down-stream tasks. We further construct multiple graphs with different sampling rates to handle the size variation problem. To this end, distinct multi-scale long-range contextual patterns can be captured. Our Graph-PGCR module is plug-and-play, which can be integrated into any architecture to improve its performance. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed method consistently boost the performance of state-of-the-art backbone architectures on both of public and our private COVID-19 datasets.

Purification of rutin by supercritical fluid simulated moving bed chromatography

Recent studies have shown that rutin (Quercetin-3-O-rhamnosylglucoside) may have an inhibitory effect on COVID-19. Rutin can be extracted from Tartary buckwheat as an active pharmaceutical ingredient. Nevertheless, its purification is mainly hindered by Kaempferol-3-O-rutinoside (K3R) due to their similar molecular structures. This study intends to propose a simulated moving bed (SMB) chromatography process of rutin and K3R to achieve continuous production. True moving bed (TMB) and SMB models were established to numerically analyze and optimize this process. The system consists of a four-zone SMB with two columns in each zone. The effects of the switch interval, feed flowrate, desorbent flowrate, extract flowrate, raffinate flowrate, and recycle flowrate on the purity and yield of rutin and K3R were investigated and the optimized conditions were chosen as 5 min, 3.5, 40, 34, 9.5, and 24.5 L/min, respectively. Consequently, the purities of 99.64% and 99.25%, and the yields of 99.81% and 99.37% for rutin and K3R were obtained, respectively. The simulation results can provide a guidance for the future industrial application of SF-SMB to separate rutin and K3R.