ELTS-Net: An enhanced liver tumor segmentation network with augmented receptive field and global contextual information.

The liver is one of the organs with the highest incidence rate in the human body, and late-stage liver cancer is basically incurable. Therefore, early diagnosis and lesion location of liver cancer are of important clinical value. This study proposes an enhanced network architecture ELTS-Net based on the 3D U-Net model, to address the limitations of conventional image segmentation methods and the underutilization of image spatial features by the 2D U-Net network structure. ELTS-Net expands upon the original network by incorporating dilated convolutions to increase the receptive field of the convolutional kernel. Additionally, an attention residual module, comprising an attention mechanism and residual connections, replaces the original convolutional module, serving as the primary components of the encoder and decoder. This design enables the network to capture contextual information globally in both channel and spatial dimensions. Furthermore, deep supervision modules are integrated between different levels of the decoder network, providing additional feedback from deeper intermediate layers. This constrains the network weights to the target regions and optimizing segmentation results. Evaluation on the LiTS2017 dataset shows improvements in evaluation metrics for liver and tumor segmentation tasks compared to the baseline 3D U-Net model, achieving 95.2% liver segmentation accuracy and 71.9% tumor segmentation accuracy, with accuracy improvements of 0.9% and 3.1% respectively. The experimental results validate the superior segmentation performance of ELTS-Net compared to other comparison models, offering valuable guidance for clinical diagnosis and treatment.

AA-WGAN: Attention augmented Wasserstein generative adversarial network with application to fundus retinal vessel segmentation.

In this paper, a novel attention augmented Wasserstein generative adversarial network (AA-WGAN) is proposed for fundus retinal vessel segmentation, where a U-shaped network with attention augmented convolution and squeeze-excitation module is designed to serve as the generator. In particular, the complex vascular structures make some tiny vessels hard to segment, while the proposed AA-WGAN can effectively handle such imperfect data property, which is competent in capturing the dependency among pixels in the whole image to highlight the regions of interests via the applied attention augmented convolution. By applying the squeeze-excitation module, the generator is able to pay attention to the important channels of the feature maps, and the useless information can be suppressed as well. In addition, gradient penalty method is adopted in the WGAN backbone to alleviate the phenomenon of generating large amounts of repeated images due to excessive concentration on accuracy. The proposed model is comprehensively evaluated on three datasets DRIVE, STARE, and CHASE_DB1, and the results show that the proposed AA-WGAN is a competitive vessel segmentation model as compared with several other advanced models, which obtains the accuracy of 96.51%, 97.19% and 96.94% on each dataset, respectively. The effectiveness of the applied important components is validated by ablation study, which also endows the proposed AA-WGAN with considerable generalization ability.

Progressive attention integration-based multi-scale efficient network for medical imaging analysis with application to COVID-19 diagnosis.

In this paper, a novel deep learning-based medical imaging analysis framework is developed, which aims to deal with the insufficient feature learning caused by the imperfect property of imaging data. Named as multi-scale efficient network (MEN), the proposed method integrates different attention mechanisms to realize sufficient extraction of both detailed features and semantic information in a progressive learning manner. In particular, a fused-attention block is designed to extract fine-grained details from the input, where the squeeze-excitation (SE) attention mechanism is applied to make the model focus on potential lesion areas. A multi-scale low information loss (MSLIL)-attention block is proposed to compensate for potential global information loss and enhance the semantic correlations among features, where the efficient channel attention (ECA) mechanism is adopted. The proposed MEN is comprehensively evaluated on two COVID-19 diagnostic tasks, and the results show that as compared with some other advanced deep learning models, the proposed method is competitive in accurate COVID-19 recognition, which yields the best accuracy of 98.68% and 98.85%, respectively, and exhibits satisfactory generalization ability as well.

AGGN: Attention-based glioma grading network with multi-scale feature extraction and multi-modal information fusion.

In this paper, a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) oriented novel attention-based glioma grading network (AGGN) is proposed. By applying the dual-domain attention mechanism, both channel and spatial information can be considered to assign weights, which benefits highlighting the key modalities and locations in the feature maps. Multi-branch convolution and pooling operations are applied in a multi-scale feature extraction module to separately obtain shallow and deep features on each modality, and a multi-modal information fusion module is adopted to sufficiently merge low-level detailed and high-level semantic features, which promotes the synergistic interaction among different modality information. The proposed AGGN is comprehensively evaluated through extensive experiments, and the results have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed AGGN in comparison to other advanced models, which also presents high generalization ability and strong robustness. In addition, even without the manually labeled tumor masks, AGGN can present considerable performance as other state-of-the-art algorithms, which alleviates the excessive reliance on supervised information in the end-to-end learning paradigm.

A generalized framework of feature learning enhanced convolutional neural network for pathology-image-oriented cancer diagnosis.

In this paper, a feature learning enhanced convolutional neural network (FLE-CNN) is proposed for cancer detection from histopathology images. To build a highly generalized computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system, an information refinement unit employing depth- and point-wise convolutions is meticulously designed, where a dual-domain attention mechanism is adopted to focus primarily on the important areas. By deploying a residual fusion unit, context information is further integrated to extract highly discriminative features with strong representation ability. Experimental results demonstrate the merits of the proposed FLE-CNN in terms of feature extraction, which has achieved average sensitivity, specificity, precision, accuracy and F1 score of 0.9992, 0.9998, 0.9992, 0.9997 and 0.9992 in a five-class cancer detection task, and in comparison to some other advanced deep learning models, above indicators have been improved by 1.23%, 0.31%, 1.24%, 0.5% and 1.26%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed FLE-CNN provides satisfactory results in three important diagnosis, which further validates that FLE-CNN is a competitive CAD model with high generalization ability.

Segment alignment based cross-subject motor imagery classification under fading data.

Motor imagery (MI) aims to use brain imagination without actual body activities to support motor learning, and machine learning algorithms such as common spatial patterns (CSP) are proven effective in the analysis of MI signals. In the conventional machine learning-based approaches, there are two main difficulties in feature extraction and recognition of MI signals: high personalization and data fading. The high personalization problem is due to the multi-subject nature when collecting MI signals, and the data fading problem as a recurring issue in MI signal quality is first raised by us but is not widely discussed at present. Aiming to solve the above two mentioned problems, a cross-subject fading data classification approach with segment alignment is proposed to classify the fading data of one single target with the model trained with the normal data of multiple sources in this paper. he effectiveness of proposed method is verified via two experiments: a dataset-based experiment with the dataset from BCI Competition and a lab-based experiment designed and conducted by us. The experimental results obtained from both experiments show that the proposed method can obtain optimal classification performance effectively under different fading levels with data from different subjects.

Synthetic augmentation for semantic segmentation of class imbalanced biomedical images: A data pair generative adversarial network approach.

In recent years, deep learning (DL) has been recognized very useful in the semantic segmentation of biomedical images. Such an application, however, is significantly hindered by the lack of pixel-wise annotations. In this work, we propose a data pair generative adversarial network (DPGAN) for the purpose of synthesizing concurrently the diverse biomedical images and the segmentation labels from random latent vectors. First, a hierarchical structure is constructed consisting of three variational auto-encoder generative adversarial networks (VAEGANs) with an extra discriminator. Subsequently, to alleviate the influence from the imbalance between lesions and non-lesions areas in biomedical segmentation data sets, we divide the DPGAN into three stages, namely, background stage, mask stage and advanced stage, with each stage deploying a VAEGAN. In such a way, a large number of new segmentation data pairs are generated from random latent vectors and then used to augment the original data sets. Finally, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed DPGAN, experiments are carried out on a vestibular schwannoma data set, a kidney tumor data set and a skin cancer data set. The results indicate that, in comparison to other state-of-the-art GAN-based methods, the proposed DPGAN shows better performance in the generative quality, and meanwhile, gains an effective boost on semantic segmentation of class imbalanced biomedical images.

H∞ State Estimation for BAM Neural Networks With Binary Mode Switching and Distributed Leakage Delays Under Periodic Scheduling Protocol.

This article is concerned with the H∞ state estimation problem for a class of bidirectional associative memory (BAM) neural networks with binary mode switching, where the distributed delays are included in the leakage terms. A couple of stochastic variables taking values of 1 or 0 are introduced to characterize the switching behavior between the redundant models of the BAM neural network, and a general type of neuron activation function (i.e., the sector-bounded nonlinearity) is considered. In order to prevent the data transmissions from collisions, a periodic scheduling protocol (i.e., round-robin protocol) is adopted to orchestrate the transmission order of sensors. The purpose of this work is to develop a full-order estimator such that the error dynamics of the state estimation is exponentially mean-square stable and the H∞ performance requirement of the output estimation error is also achieved. Sufficient conditions are established to ensure the existence of the required estimator by constructing a mode-dependent Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional. Then, the desired estimator parameters are obtained by solving a set of matrix inequalities. Finally, a numerical example is provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed estimator design method.

Passive filter design for fractional-order quaternion-valued neural networks with neutral delays and external disturbance.

The problem on passive filter design for fractional-order quaternion-valued neural networks (FOQVNNs) with neutral delays and external disturbance is considered in this paper. Without separating the FOQVNNs into two complex-valued neural networks (CVNNs) or the FOQVNNs into four real-valued neural networks (RVNNs), by constructing Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and using inequality technique, the delay-independent and delay-dependent sufficient conditions presented as linear matrix inequality (LMI) to confirm the augmented filtering dynamic system to be stable and passive with an expected dissipation are derived. One numerical example with simulations is furnished to pledge the feasibility for the obtained theory results.

l2-l∞ state estimation for delayed artificial neural networks under high-rate communication channels with Round-Robin protocol.

In this paper, the l2-l∞ state estimation problem is addressed for a class of delayed artificial neural networks under high-rate communication channels with Round-Robin (RR) protocol. To estimate the state of the artificial neural networks, numerous sensors are deployed to measure the artificial neural networks. The sensors communicate with the remote state estimator through a shared high-rate communication channel. In the high-rate communication channel, the RR protocol is utilized to schedule the transmission sequence of the numerous sensors. The aim of this paper is to design an estimator such that, under the high-rate communication channel and the RR protocol, the exponential stability of the estimation error dynamics as well as the l2-l∞ performance constraint are ensured. First, sufficient conditions are given which guarantee the existence of the desired l2-l∞ state estimator. Then, the estimator gains are obtained by solving two sets of matrix inequalities. Finally, numerical examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the developed l2-l∞ state estimation scheme.

Heat transport and entropy optimization in flow of magneto-Williamson nanomaterial with Arrhenius activation energy.

BACKGROUND: A newly developed approach in the field of nanotechnology for solving problems and collection of information is the use of nanoparticles. This idea has been further utilized in a better way in pharmaceutical industries. By using nanotechnology, the field of pharmaceutical science has been modernized and redeveloped. The use of nanotechnology in such industries has convinced the scientist to obtain more economical and easier applications. Therefore, with such effectiveness in mind, a theoretical study has been conducted to examine the effects of nonlinear radiative heat flux and magnetohydrodynamics for nanomaterial flow of Williamson fluid over a convectively heated stretchable surface. Brownian diffusion is utilized in mathematical modeling. Furthermore, heat source/sink, viscous dissipation and nonlinear radiative heat flux are examined. Convective boundary condition is implemented. Salient effects of chemical reaction and Arrhenius activation energy in mass transfer are considered. Total entropy rate is obtained through implementation of thermodynamics second law. METHODS: The nonlinear PDEs are reduced into ordinary ones by appropriate similarity transformations. A semi-analytical technique i.e., homotopy method is implemented to obtain the convergent series solutions. RESULTS: The obtained results indicate that the velocity of fluid particles increases versus higher fluid parameter. Schmidt number and activation energy variable have opposite effect on concentration. Entropy rate grows up with fluid parameter and Brinkman and Biot numbers while opposite trend is seen for Bejan number. CONCLUSIONS: Velocity of the material particles declines through larger estimations of magnetic variable while it upsurges for higher fluid parameter. Thermal distribution shows similar impact for radiative and magnetic variables. Mass concentration decreases against chemical reaction parameter while it increases via activation energy variable. Entropy and Bejan numbers show opposite impacts versus Brinkman number. Skin friction coefficient increases through larger Weissenberg number.

Investigation of physical aspects of cubic autocatalytic chemically reactive flow of second grade nanomaterial with entropy optimization.

BACKGROUND: Nanofluids have innovative characteristics that make them potentially beneficial in numerous applications in heat and mass transports like fuel cells, hybrid-powered engines, microelectronics, pharmaceutical processes, domestic refrigerator, engine cooling, heat exchanger, chiller and in boiler flue gas temperature decay. Nanomaterial increased the coefficient of heat transport and thermal performance compared to continuous phase liquid. Having such significance in mind, the nanofluid flow of second grade material over a convectively heated surface is examined here. Nano-fluid is electrically conducting. Energy expression is studied through Joule heating, heat source/sink and dissipation. In addition, thermophoresis and Brownian diffusion are investigated. Physical aspects of entropy optimization in nanomaterials with cubic autocatalysis chemical reaction are accounted. Through second law of thermodynamics the total entropy generation rate is computed. METHODS: The nonlinear governing PDE's are transformed to ordinary ones through transformations. Total residual error is calculated for momentum, energy and concentration equations using optimal homotopy analysis method (OHAM). RESULTS: Behaviors of different variables on velocity, Bejan number, concentration, temperature and entropy optimization are examined via graphs. Local skin friction coefficient (Cfx) and gradient of temperature (Nux)are examined graphically. Comparison between the recent and previous result is given. Temperature and velocity are enhanced significantly versus (λ1). Entropy generation rate boosts up for magnetic parameter and Brinkman number. CONCLUSIONS: The obtained outcomes show that velocity is higher via mixed convective variable. Temperature boosts up in presence of higher magnetic parameter, thermophoretic paraemter, Brinkman number and second grade parameter while Biot number decays. Concentration has increasing behavior via larger Brownian and homogeneous and heterogeneous parameters. Entropy rate and Bejan number have similar impact through diffusion parameters with respect to both homogeneous and heterogeneous reactions variables.

Exponential synchronization of semi-Markovian coupled neural networks with mixed delays via tracker information and quantized output controller.

In this paper, exponential synchronization of semi-Markovian coupled neural networks (NNs) with bounded time-varying delay and infinite-time distributed delay (mixed delays) is investigated. Since semi-Markov switching occurs by time-varying probability, it is difficult to capture its precise switching signal. To overcome this difficulty, a tracker is used to track the switching information with some accuracy. Then a quantized output controller (QOC) is designed by using the tracked information. Novel Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals (LKFs) with negative terms and delay-partitioning approach, which reduce the conservativeness of the obtained results, are utilized to obtain LMI conditions ensuring the exponential synchronization. Moreover, an algorithm is proposed to design the control gains. Our results include both those derived by mode-dependent and mode-independent control schemes as special cases. Finally, numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the methodology.

Observer-Based Consensus Control for Discrete-Time Multiagent Systems With Coding-Decoding Communication Protocol.

In this paper, the consensus control problem is investigated for a class of discrete-time networked multiagent systems (MASs) with the coding-decoding communication protocol (CDCP). Under a directed communication topology, an observer-based control scheme is proposed for each agent by utilizing the relative measurement outputs between the agent itself and its neighboring ones. The signal delivery is in a digital manner, which means that only the sequence of finite coded signals is sent from the observer to the controller. To be specific, the observed data is encoded to certain codewords by a designed coder via the CDCP, and the received codewords are then decoded by the corresponding decoder at the controller side. The purpose of the addressed problem is to design an observer-based controller such that the close-loop MAS achieves the expected consensus performance. First, with the help of the input-to-state stability theory, a theoretical framework for the detectability is established for analyzing and designing the CDCP. Then, under such a communication protocol, some sufficient conditions for the existence of the proposed observer-based controller are derived to guarantee the asymptotic consensus of the MASs. In addition, the controller parameter is explicitly determined in terms of the solution to certain matrix inequalities associated with the information of the communication topology. Finally, a simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed control strategy.

Adaptive Neural State-Feedback Tracking Control of Stochastic Nonlinear Switched Systems: An Average Dwell-Time Method.

In this paper, the problem of adaptive neural state-feedback tracking control is considered for a class of stochastic nonstrict-feedback nonlinear switched systems with completely unknown nonlinearities. In the design procedure, the universal approximation capability of radial basis function neural networks is used for identifying the unknown compounded nonlinear functions, and a variable separation technique is employed to overcome the design difficulty caused by the nonstrict-feedback structure. The most outstanding novelty of this paper is that individual Lyapunov function of each subsystem is constructed by flexibly adopting the upper and lower bounds of the control gain functions of each subsystem. Furthermore, by combining the average dwell-time scheme and the adaptive backstepping design, a valid adaptive neural state-feedback controller design algorithm is presented such that all the signals of the switched closed-loop system are in probability semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded, and the tracking error eventually converges to a small neighborhood of the origin in probability. Finally, the availability of the developed control scheme is verified by two simulation examples.

Synchronization in uncertain fractional-order memristive complex-valued neural networks with multiple time delays.

This paper considers the global asymptotical synchronization of fractional-order memristive complex-valued neural networks (FOMCVNN), with both parameter uncertainties and multiple time delays. Sufficient conditions of uncertain FOMCVNN, with multiple time delays, are established through the employment of comparison principle and Lyapunov direct method. A numerical example is used to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Boundedness and global robust stability analysis of delayed complex-valued neural networks with interval parameter uncertainties.

In this paper, the boundedness and robust stability for a class of delayed complex-valued neural networks with interval parameter uncertainties are investigated. By using Homomorphic mapping theorem, Lyapunov method and inequality techniques, sufficient condition to guarantee the boundedness of networks and the existence, uniqueness and global robust stability of equilibrium point is derived for the considered uncertain neural networks. The obtained robust stability criterion is expressed in complex-valued LMI, which can be calculated numerically using YALMIP with solver of SDPT3 in MATLAB. An example with simulations is supplied to show the applicability and advantages of the acquired result.

Stability analysis for discrete-time stochastic memristive neural networks with both leakage and probabilistic delays.

This paper is concerned with the globally exponential stability problem for a class of discrete-time stochastic memristive neural networks (DSMNNs) with both leakage delays as well as probabilistic time-varying delays. For the probabilistic delays, a sequence of Bernoulli distributed random variables is utilized to determine within which intervals the time-varying delays fall at certain time instant. The sector-bounded activation function is considered in the addressed DSMNN. By taking into account the state-dependent characteristics of the network parameters and choosing an appropriate Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, some sufficient conditions are established under which the underlying DSMNN is globally exponentially stable in the mean square. The derived conditions are made dependent on both the leakage and the probabilistic delays, and are therefore less conservative than the traditional delay-independent criteria. A simulation example is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed stability criterion.

Unified synchronization criteria in an array of coupled neural networks with hybrid impulses.

This paper investigates the problem of globally exponential synchronization of coupled neural networks with hybrid impulses. Two new concepts on average impulsive interval and average impulsive gain are proposed to deal with the difficulties coming from hybrid impulses. By employing the Lyapunov method combined with some mathematical analysis, some efficient unified criteria are obtained to guarantee the globally exponential synchronization of impulsive networks. Our method and criteria are proved to be effective for impulsively coupled neural networks simultaneously with synchronizing impulses and desynchronizing impulses, and we do not need to discuss these two kinds of impulses separately. Moreover, by using our average impulsive interval method, we can obtain an interesting and valuable result for the case of average impulsive interval Ta=∞. For some sparse impulsive sequences with Ta=∞, the impulses can happen for infinite number of times, but they do not have essential influence on the synchronization property of networks. Finally, numerical examples including scale-free networks are exploited to illustrate our theoretical results.

Finite-Time Synchronization of Networks via Quantized Intermittent Pinning Control.

This technical correspondence considers finite-time synchronization of dynamical networks by designing aperiodically intermittent pinning controllers with logarithmic quantization. The control scheme can greatly reduce control cost and save both communication channels and bandwidth. By using multiple Lyapunov functions and convex combination techniques, sufficient conditions formulated by a set of linear matrix inequalities are derived to guarantee that all the node systems are synchronized with an isolated trajectory in a finite settling time. Compared with existing results, the main characteristics of this paper are twofold: 1) quantized controller is used for finite-time synchronization and 2) the designed multiple Lyapunov functions are strictly decreasing. An optimal algorithm is proposed for the estimation of settling time. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical analysis.