Multi-kernel driven 3D convolutional neural network for automated detection of lung nodules in chest CT scans.

The accurate position detection of lung nodules is crucial in early chest computed tomography (CT)-based lung cancer screening, which helps to improve the survival rate of patients. Deep learning methodologies have shown impressive feature extraction ability in the CT image analysis task, but it is still a challenge to develop a robust nodule detection model due to the salient morphological heterogeneity of nodules and complex surrounding environment. In this study, a multi-kernel driven 3D convolutional neural network (MK-3DCNN) is proposed for computerized nodule detection in CT scans. In the MK-3DCNN, a residual learning-based encoder-decoder architecture is introduced to employ the multi-layer features of the deep model. Considering the various nodule sizes and shapes, a multi-kernel joint learning block is developed to capture 3D multi-scale spatial information of nodule CT images, and this is conducive to improving nodule detection performance. Furthermore, a multi-mode mixed pooling strategy is designed to replace the conventional single-mode pooling manner, and it reasonably integrates the max pooling, average pooling, and center cropping pooling operations to obtain more comprehensive nodule descriptions from complicated CT images. Experimental results on the public dataset LUNA16 illustrate that the proposed MK-3DCNN method achieves more competitive nodule detection performance compared to some state-of-the-art algorithms. The results on our constructed clinical dataset CQUCH-LND indicate that the MK-3DCNN has a good prospect in clinical practice.

MC-GAT: multi-layer collaborative generative adversarial transformer for cholangiocarcinoma classification from hyperspectral pathological images.

Accurate histopathological analysis is the core step of early diagnosis of cholangiocarcinoma (CCA). Compared with color pathological images, hyperspectral pathological images have advantages for providing rich band information. Existing algorithms of HSI classification are dominated by convolutional neural network (CNN), which has the deficiency of distorting spectral sequence information of HSI data. Although vision transformer (ViT) alleviates this problem to a certain extent, the expressive power of transformer encoder will gradually decrease with increasing number of layers, which still degrades the classification performance. In addition, labeled HSI samples are limited in practical applications, which restricts the performance of methods. To address these issues, this paper proposed a multi-layer collaborative generative adversarial transformer termed MC-GAT for CCA classification from hyperspectral pathological images. MC-GAT consists of two pure transformer-based neural networks including a generator and a discriminator. The generator learns the implicit probability of real samples and transforms noise sequences into band sequences, which produces fake samples. These fake samples and corresponding real samples are mixed together as input to confuse the discriminator, which increases model generalization. In discriminator, a multi-layer collaborative transformer encoder is designed to integrate output features from different layers into collaborative features, which adaptively mines progressive relations from shallow to deep encoders and enhances the discriminating power of the discriminator. Experimental results on the Multidimensional Choledoch Datasets demonstrate that the proposed MC-GAT can achieve better classification results than many state-of-the-art methods. This confirms the potentiality of the proposed method in aiding pathologists in CCA histopathological analysis from hyperspectral imagery.