Design and Assessment of Convolutional Neural Network Based Methods for Vitiligo Diagnosis

A deep learning fusion network trained with clinical and high-frequency ultrasound images in the multi-classification of skin diseases in comparison with dermatologists: a prospective and multicenter study

Automatic prediction of citrus fruit diseases requires the selection of a suitable classification model among various Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. The CNN models are the most effective for image classification. However, more than one CNN model occasionally performs closer to each other. Choosing the best classification model requires considerable effort in this situation. In this study, 17 CNN models were used for citrus fruit disease identification. Citrus fruit diseases include anthracnose, blackspot, canker, scab, and healthy. In this research, the performance of CNN models was analysed, and a two-phase statistical analysis was carried out to determine which CNN model provided the most accurate predictions of citrus crop disease. The 17 CNN models used were AlexNet, Darknet, Densenet, efficientnet, nasnetlarge, googlenet, inceptionresnetv2, inceptionv3, mobilenetv2, nasnetmobile, Xception, squeezenet, resnet18, resnet50, resnet101, vgg16, and vgg19. The two-phase statistical analysis was Duncan's multiple range test, followed by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test is the second one. Again, in order to do a statistical analysis, nine different indicators, including “accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, FPR, F1 Score, MCC, Kappa, and computing time”, were taken into consideration. After the execution of 17 CNN models and twophase statistical analysis, it was revealed that resnet101 is superior among CNN models for citrus fruit disease prediction.

Among the many deep learning methods, the convolutional neural network (CNN) model has an excellent performance in image recognition. Research on identifying and classifying image datasets using CNN is ongoing. Animal species recognition and classification with CNN is expected to be helpful for various applications. However, sophisticated feature recognition is essential to classify quasi-species with similar features, such as the quasi-species of parrots that have a high color similarity. The purpose of this study is to develop a vision-based mobile application to classify endangered parrot species using an advanced CNN model based on transfer learning (some parrots have quite similar colors and shapes). We acquired the images in two ways: collecting them directly from the Seoul Grand Park Zoo and crawling them using the Google search. Subsequently, we have built advanced CNN models with transfer learning and trained them using the data. Next, we converted one of the fully trained models into a file for execution on mobile devices and created the Android package files. The accuracy was measured for each of the eight CNN models. The overall accuracy for the camera of the mobile device was 94.125%. For certain species, the accuracy of recognition was 100%, with the required time of only 455 ms. Our approach helps to recognize the species in real time using the camera of the mobile device. Applications will be helpful for the prevention of smuggling of endangered species in the customs clearance area.

Understanding the learning mechanism of convolutional neural networks in spectral analysis

Accurately identifying epileptogenic zone (EZ) using high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) is a challenge that must be mastered to transfer HFOs into clinical use. We analyzed the ability of a convolutional neural network (CNN) model to distinguish EZ and non-EZ HFOs. Nineteen medically intractable epilepsy patients with good surgical outcomes 2 years after surgery were studied. Five-minute interictal intracranial electroencephalogram epochs of slow-wave sleep were selected randomly. Then 5 s segments of ripples (80–200 Hz) and fast ripples (FRs, 200–500 Hz) were detected automatically. The EZs and non-EZs were identified using the surgery resection range. We innovatively converted all epochs into four types of images using two scales: original waveforms, filtered waveforms, wavelet spectrum images, and smoothed pseudo Wigner–Ville distribution (SPWVD) spectrum images. Two scales were fixed and fitted scales. We then used a CNN model to classify the HFOs into EZ and non-EZ categories. As a result, 7,000 epochs of ripples and 2,000 epochs of FRs were randomly selected from the EZ and non-EZ data for analysis. Our CNN model can distinguish EZ and non-EZ HFOs successfully. Except for original ripple waveforms, the results from CNN models that are trained using fixed-scale images are significantly better than those from models trained using fitted-scale images (p < 0.05). Of the four fixed-scale transformations, the CNN based on the adjusted SPWVD (ASPWVD) produced the best accuracies (80.89 ± 1.43% and 77.85 ± 1.61% for ripples and FRs, respectively, p < 0.05). The CNN using ASPWVD transformation images is an effective deep learning method that can be used to classify EZ and non-EZ HFOs.

This study comparatively evaluates the performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Vision Transformer (ViT), and Swin Transformer architectures for diagnosing plant leaf diseases. The experimental framework was evaluated using model effectiveness, F1 scores, and confusion matrices on the PlantVillage dataset, which contains 55,448 images from 39 different classes. The results show that the Swin Transformer achieved the highest diagnostic performance with a 100% F1 score, outperforming both CNN and ViT models. These findings confirm the high potential of transformer-based architectures for automated disease detection in agriculture.

Millions of clinicians rely daily on automated preliminary electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation. Critical comparisons of machine learning-based automated analysis against clinically accepted standards of care are lacking. To use readily available 12-lead ECG data to train and apply an explainability technique to a convolutional neural network (CNN) that achieves high performance against clinical standards of care. This cross-sectional study was conducted using data from January 1, 2003, to December 31, 2018. Data were obtained in a commonly available 12-lead ECG format from a single-center tertiary care institution. All patients aged 18 years or older who received ECGs at the University of California, San Francisco, were included, yielding a total of 365 009 patients. Data were analyzed from January 1, 2019, to March 2, 2021. A CNN was trained to predict the presence of 38 diagnostic classes in 5 categories from 12-lead ECG data. A CNN explainability technique called LIME (Linear Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations) was used to visualize ECG segments contributing to CNN diagnoses. Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity were calculated for the CNN in the holdout test data set against cardiologist clinical diagnoses. For a second validation, 3 electrophysiologists provided consensus committee diagnoses against which the CNN, cardiologist clinical diagnosis, and MUSE (GE Healthcare) automated analysis performance was compared using the F1 score; AUC, sensitivity, and specificity were also calculated for the CNN against the consensus committee. A total of 992 748 ECGs from 365 009 adult patients (mean [SD] age, 56.2 [17.6] years; 183 600 women [50.3%]; and 175 277 White patients [48.0%]) were included in the analysis. In 91 440 test data set ECGs, the CNN demonstrated an AUC of at least 0.960 for 32 of 38 classes (84.2%). Against the consensus committee diagnoses, the CNN had higher frequency-weighted mean F1 scores than both cardiologists and MUSE in all 5 categories (CNN frequency-weighted F1 score for rhythm, 0.812; conduction, 0.729; chamber diagnosis, 0.598; infarct, 0.674; and other diagnosis, 0.875). For 32 of 38 classes (84.2%), the CNN had AUCs of at least 0.910 and demonstrated comparable F1 scores and higher sensitivity than cardiologists, except for atrial fibrillation (CNN F1 score, 0.847 vs cardiologist F1 score, 0.881), junctional rhythm (0.526 vs 0.727), premature ventricular complex (0.786 vs 0.800), and Wolff-Parkinson-White (0.800 vs 0.842). Compared with MUSE, the CNN had higher F1 scores for all classes except supraventricular tachycardia (CNN F1 score, 0.696 vs MUSE F1 score, 0.714). The LIME technique highlighted physiologically relevant ECG segments. The results of this cross-sectional study suggest that readily available ECG data can be used to train a CNN algorithm to achieve comparable performance to clinical cardiologists and exceed the performance of MUSE automated analysis for most diagnoses, with some exceptions. The LIME explainability technique applied to CNNs highlights physiologically relevant ECG segments that contribute to the CNN's diagnoses.

Distinguishing pericarpium citri reticulatae of different origins using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy combined with convolutional neural networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance in complex machine learning tasks such as classification and regression problems. A reliable neural network structure plays a decisive role in CNN studies. Through comparing and analyzing the structure of neural networks, a model structure for better visualization performance has been discovered, and such a method supports the development of deep learning research. These studies are of particular importance in end-to-end systems for autonomous driving to imitate human driving, where the interpretability of the system is limited. Because of the uncertainty of the ground truth, for the determination of human steering in an image, it is difficult to accurately compare the visualization performance of different CNN models or different visualization methods. For practical applications, however, an objective and quantitative measure for assessing visualization performance is necessary. Therefore, a method to evaluate the visualization performance of CNN models using a driver model instead of human drivers is proposed, to generate a data set which can be used to determine the decisional point (ground truth) in the input image. Then, an exclusive method is also put forth, to quantitatively calculate the relationship between the decisional point (ground truth) and the visualization results produced by CNN models. In this paper, five CNN models as an autonomous steering controller are designed based on PilotNet, and the visualization abilities of each CNN models is compared by three evaluation indicators. By comparing the visualization performance of five different CNN models, it is shown that the proposed method can successfully assess the visualization level of the CNN model.

Identification of crops is an important topic in the agricultural domain. Hyperspectral remote sensing data are very useful for crop feature extraction and classification. Remote sensing data is an unstructured data and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can work on unstructured data efficiently. This paper presents an evaluation of CNN for crop classification using the Indian Pines standard dataset obtained from the AVIRIS sensor and the study area dataset obtained from the EO-1hyperion sensor. Optimized CNN has been tuned by training the model on different parameters. It has been compared with two classification algorithms: Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Convolutional Autoencoder. According to the test results, the proposed optimized CNN model provided better results as compared to the other two methods. CNN has given 97 ± 0.58% overall accuracy for the Indian Pines standard dataset and 78 ± 2.43% for our study area dataset.

The Part 1 prequel to this review evaluated the evolution of modelling techniques used in evaluation of fruit quality over the past three decades and noted a progression towards the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this review, Part 2, the use of CNNs for NIR fruit quality evaluation is explored, given the success of CNNs in various other fields, such as image, video, speech, and audio processing, and the availability of large (open source) datasets of fruit spectra and reference quality attribute, which is required for the training of CNN models. The review provides an overview of deep learning and the CNN architectures and techniques used in NIR spectroscopy for regression modelling, with advantages and disadvantages identified. Studies using CNN for NIR based fruit quality evaluation are then critically examined. Eight publications have presented on models using the same open-source mango dry matter calibration and test set, enabling inter-method comparisons. CNN models have been demonstrated to be accurate, precise and robust. Techniques of transfer learning for CNN models offer an alternative solution to model updating and calibration transfer methods applied in traditional chemometrics. The review has highlighted crucial areas that require resolution and exploration in this application through future research, including, (i) data requirements for training a CNN (ii) optimal spectral pre-processing for CNN (iii) CNN architecture and hyper-parameter selection and tuning for fruit quality evaluation (iv) CNN model interpretability and explainability. Future studies must conduct clearer comparison to partial least squares (PLS) regression and shallow ANNs to better assess the prospective benefit of using CNN, a more complex model. The potential for visualisation of spectra relevance to the CNN model using techniques such as GradCam, currently employed in visualising 2D-CNN models, remains to be explored.

Empirical-statistical Downscaling (SD) techniques are valuable tools able to generate high-resolution climate information needed to carry out impact studies. In this regard, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are promising SD techniques capable of handling large amounts of data and extracting relevant predictor information for each particular site. These characteristics of the CNN represent a major advantage over traditional SD methods, which typically rely on human-guided predictor selection. Notwithstanding, an adequate tuning of the CNN is key for optimising their potential.In southern South America (SSA), CNNs has proven to be skilful in representing daily extreme temperatures and extrapolating into future scenarios. Although the selection of the activation function introduces a source of uncertainty in the future projections.&amp;#160;In this context, this study aims to explore the use of CNNs as a statistical downscaling tool to simulate the wet bulb temperature (Tw) over SSA, a multivariate heat-stress index estimated from temperature and humidity. Tw has been widely used as a heat-stress proxy in different parts of the world, however, its characterisation and modelling in SSA remain as a pending task. To this end, four different CNN architectures regarding the activation function (ReLU or linear), domain size and configuration of the CNN layers were tested. All CNN models were trained during summer days using a cross-validation (CV) scheme in the period 1991-2020 and then evaluated in four unseen summers between 2021 and 2024. For comparison purposes, CNN models were similarly trained and validated to simulate maximum temperature (Tx).&amp;#160;Overall, CNN models well represented all the features evaluated, including the heat-waves that took place in the summers evaluated independently. In particular, CNN models presents a better performance in simulating Tw than Tx with smaller errors in terms of mean and extremes aspects. Regarding the domain size, for both temperatures, the configuration with the smaller domain yields the best results. Also in this latter case, the reduction of the number of filter size in the last layer slightly improves the representation of Tx. When considering the large domain, the differences between the CNNs based on different activation functions increase, and CNN models with linear configuration outperform the ones with ReLu.&amp;#160;The findings of this work reinforces the potential of CNNs for climate downscaling in SSA, especially for its use to simulate multivariate impact indices.

Purpose: This research aims to develop an automatic pneumothorax detection system using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to classify thoracic radiography images. By leveraging CNN's effectiveness in identifying medical abnormalities, the system seeks to enhance diagnostic accuracy, reduce evaluation time, and minimize subjective interpretation errors. The output will provide a predicted label of "pneumothorax" or "non-pneumothorax," facilitating faster clinical treatment and improving diagnostic services while supporting radiologists in making more accurate and efficient decisions for this critical condition. Methods: This research employs an experimental deep learning approach using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to detect pneumothorax in thoracic radiography images. The CNN model is trained on an annotated dataset with preprocessing steps, including zooming, brightness adjustment, flipping and format adjustment, followed by performance evaluation using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score metrics. Result: The results showed that the CNN model detected pneumothorax with 79.59% accuracy, a loss of 1.3056, and 1,092 correct predictions out of 1,372 test data. Precision was 51.12%, recall 78.62%, and F1 score 61.96%, confirming the system's potential, though further optimization is needed. Novelty: The novelty of this research lies in developing an automated pneumothorax detection system using a CNN architecture, improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. Despite high accuracy, precision and recall can be improved. Future research can focus on optimizing the model and applying data augmentation techniques.

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Outdoor ultrafine particles (UFP; 100 nm) and black carbon (BC) vary greatly within cities and may have adverse impacts on human health such as cardiovascular mortality and brain tumour incidence. Traditional regression methods for estimating spatial distributions of ambient air pollution depend on extensive, curated geospatial information system databases. This has resulted in a disparity wherein little is known about local air pollution in the data-sparse settings of low- and middle- income countries. We used a hybrid approach to develop new models to estimate within-city spatial variations in outdoor UFP and BC concentrations across Bucaramanga, Colombia. METHODS: We conducted a large-scale mobile monitoring campaign over twenty days in 2019. Land use regression (LUR) models were developed using land use parameters from curated and open-source databases. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models were developed using Google Maps satellite view and street view images. Combined models were developed by combining predictions from the LUR and CNN models. After training in the training and validation sets, predictions were generated in the test set and compared to measured values. RESULTS:The combined UFP model (R2=0.54) outperformed the CNN (R2=0.47) and land use regression (LUR) models (R2=0.47) on their own. Similarly, the combined BC model also outperformed the CNN and LUR BC models (R2 = 0.51 vs 0.43 and 0.45 respectively). Spatial variations in model performance were more stable for the CNN and combined models compared to the LUR models suggesting that the combined approach may be less likely to contribute to differential exposure measurement error in epidemiological studies. CONCLUSIONS:Estimates from these models can then be applied to population-based cohorts in order to evaluate population health risks. Additionally, our findings demonstrated that satellite and street-level images can be combined with a traditional LUR modelling approach to improve predictions of within-city spatial variations in outdoor UFP and BC concentrations. KEYWORDS: Ultrafine particles, Black Carbon, Deep learning, Images, Land use regression

Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a promising image recognition technique for winter road surface condition (RSC), a measure that is crucial for winter maintenance operations. In the past, researchers have designed RSC CNN models that displayed acceptable results but did so focusing solely on obtaining high classification accuracy without any consideration for efficiency. Furthermore, when it comes to model development itself, architecture design requires expertise in CNN as well as rich knowledge in the investigated problem itself. To rectify these issues, this paper proposes an innovative approach to automatically design RSC CNN architecture without compromising classification accuracy. The proposed approach uses a weighted sum method, which provides the freedom of choosing relative importance level between accuracy and efficiency. Once the relative importance has been set, one of the most successful and widely adopted heuristics, namely, simulated annealing (SA), is employed to generate (sub)optimal solutions. Results show that both accuracy and efficiency of the automatically generated CNNs are better or at least comparable to the two selected state-of-the-art CNN models, ResNet50 and MobileNet, achieving as high as 93.44% classification accuracy. Ultimately, the outcome of this study fills the gap in existing CNN design methods that do not consider the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency while providing insight into the effect varying architectures have on CNN model performance.