XceptionUnetV1: A Lightweight DCNN for Biomedical Image Segmentation

Interstitial lung disease (ILD) refers to a group of various abnormal inflammations of lung tissues and early diagnosis of these disease patterns is crucial for the treatment. Yet it is difficult to make an accurate diagnosis due to the similarity among the clinical manifestations of these diseases. In order to assist the radiologists, computer-aided diagnosis systems have been developed. Besides, the potential of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is also expected to exert on the medical image analysis in recent years. In this paper, we design a new deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to achieve the classification task of ILD patterns. Furthermore, we also propose a novel two-stage transfer learning (TSTL) method to deal with the problem of the lack of training data, which leverages the knowledge learned from sufficient textural source data and auxiliary unlabeled lung CT data to the target domain. We adopt the unsupervised manner to learn the unlabeled data, by which the objective function composed of the prediction confidence and mutual information are optimized. The experimental results show that our proposed CNN architecture achieves desirable performance and outperforms most of the state-of-the-art ones. The comparative analysis demonstrates the promising feasibility and advantages of the proposed two-stage transfer learning strategy as well as the potential of the knowledge learning from lung CT data. Graphical Abstract The framework of the proposed two-stage transfer learning method.

Chaos Game Representation (CGR) is an emerging means of visualising and representing genomic and proteomic sequences. There exist many open questions related to its effective application to various computational tasks. In this work, we begin to address some of these questions by comparing four variants of the Chaos Game to generate CGR imagery as part of a multi-class classification task to identify the source organism for a given protein. We propose a novel nodal configuration for icosagon and 20-flake CGRs. Using two datasets, we performed fine-tuning using seven deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures and report modest performance over random among the 56 test conditions, highlighting certain shortcomings in effectively leveraging CGR in conjunction with deep CNN architectures. Many of the insights from this work will serve to orient subsequent protein-related studies involving CGR-based encoding and be generally applicable to disparate domains seeking to leverage CGR for sequence-type data.

The convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture has shown remarkable success in image classification and segmentation. Its popularity has increased promptly due to various factors such as exponential growth in computational resources, availability of benchmark datasets, supporting libraries, and open-source software. The efficiency of CNN architecture majorly depends on the complexity of the architecture, availability of datasets, and hyperparameter selection. But, due to the huge number of parameters in CNN architecture, its selection has completely remained ad hoc in the past works. In this article, a novel encoding technique has been proposed that can represent complex CNN architecture effectively. The article defines basic building blocks to represent CNN architecture such as the genesis block, transit block, agile block, and output block. This encoding structure is used to generate dynamic length chromosome structure and initialized using evolutionary algorithms. A comparative analysis is also presented that shows compared its effectiveness with existing encoding representations on the basis of the number of encoding parameters, training cost, and efficiency.

This work explores the suitability of various deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures for semantic segmentation of agricultural crops such as cotton, maize etc. from multi-spectral UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) data. Initially, the UAV data were preprocessed and training samples for each crop type were manually annotated from multiple UAV scenes. Different CNN architectures such as U-Net, SegNet and PSPNet (Pyramid Scene Parsing Network) were trained with various combinations of input spectral bands along with select band derived indices such as NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and EVI (Enhanced Vegetation Index) as additional features. The experimental results indicated that inclusion of NIR (near-infrared) band and NDVI in the input data yielded high segmentation accuracy of more than 90%. U-Net proved to be the best among the three architectures with 97% overall accuracy while dealing with three classes separation problem. This study demonstrated the scope of deep neural network based semantic segmentation techniques in crop classification from multi-spectral UAV data.KeywordsCrop classificationUAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)Multi-spectral dataDeep learningU-NetSegNetPSPNetImage analysis

Early and accurate identification of brain tumors is essential for determining effective treatment strategies and improving patient outcomes. Artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) techniques have shown promise in automating diagnostic tasks based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This study evaluates the performance of four pre-trained deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures for the automatic multi-class classification of brain tumors into four categories: Glioma, Meningioma, Pituitary, and No Tumor. The proposed approach utilizes the publicly accessible Brain Tumor MRI Msoud dataset, consisting of 7023 images, with 5712 provided for training and 1311 for testing. To assess the impact of data availability, subsets containing 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the training data were used. A stratified five-fold cross-validation technique was applied. The CNN architectures evaluated include DeiT3_base_patch16_224, Xception41, Inception_v4, and Swin_Tiny_Patch4_Window7_224, all fine-tuned using transfer learning. The training pipeline incorporated advanced preprocessing and image data augmentation techniques to enhance robustness and mitigate overfitting. Among the models tested, Swin_Tiny_Patch4_Window7_224 achieved the highest classification Accuracy of 99.24% on the test set using 75% of the training data. This model demonstrated superior generalization across all tumor classes and effectively addressed class imbalance issues. Furthermore, we deployed and benchmarked the best-performing DL model on embedded AI platforms (Jetson AGX Xavier and Orin Nano), demonstrating their capability for real-time inference and highlighting their feasibility for edge-based clinical deployment. The results highlight the strong potential of pre-trained deep CNN and transformer-based architectures in medical image analysis. The proposed approach provides a scalable and energy-efficient solution for automated brain tumor diagnosis, facilitating the integration of AI into clinical workflows.

In this paper, an efficient deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is proposed based on depthwise temporal convolution along with a robust end-to-end scheme to automatically detect and classify arrhythmia from denoised electrocardiogram (ECG) signal, which is termed as `DeepArrNet'. Firstly, considering the variational pattern of wavelet denoised ECG data, a realistic augmentation scheme is designed that offers a reduction in class imbalance as well as increased data variations. A structural unit, namely PTP (Pontwise-Temporal-Pointwise Convolution) unit, is designed with its variants where depthwise temporal convolutions with varying kernel sizes are incorporated along with prior and post pointwise convolution. Afterward, a deep neural network architecture is constructed based on the proposed structural unit where series of such structural units are stacked together while increasing the kernel sizes for depthwise temporal convolutions in successive units along with the residual linkage between units through feature addition. Moreover, multiple depthwise temporal convolutions are introduced with varying kernel sizes in each structural unit to make the process more efficient while strided convolutions are utilized in the residual linkage between subsequent units to compensate the increased computational complexity. This architecture provides the opportunity to explore the temporal features in between convolutional layers more optimally from different perspectives utilizing diversified temporal kernels. Extensive experimentations are carried out on two publicly available datasets to validate the proposed scheme that results in outstanding performances in all traditional evaluation metrics outperforming other state-of-the-art approaches.

Additive manufacturing (AM) provides design flexibility and allows rapid fabrications of parts with complex geometries. The presence of internal defects, however, can lead to deficit performance of the fabricated part. X-ray Computed Tomography (XCT) is a non-destructive inspection technique often used for AM parts. Although defects within AM specimens can be identified and segmented by manually thresholding the XCT images, the process can be tedious and inefficient, and the segmentation results can be ambiguous. The variation in the shapes and appearances of defects also poses difficulty in accurately segmenting defects. This paper describes an automatic defect segmentation method using U-Net based deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. Several models of U-Net variants are trained and validated on an AM XCT image dataset containing pores and cracks, achieving a best mean intersection over union (IOU) value of 0.993. Performance of various U-Net models is compared and analyzed. Specific to AM porosity segmentation with XCT images, several techniques in data augmentation and model development are introduced. This work demonstrates that, using XCT images, U-Net can be effectively applied for automatic segmentation of AM porosity with high accuracy. The method can potentially help improve quality control of AM parts in an industry setting.

Exudates are a common sign of diabetic retinopathy, which is a disease that affects the blood vessels in the retina. Early detection of exudates is critical to avoiding vision problems through continuous screening and treatment. In traditional clinical practice, the involved lesions are manually detected using photographs of the fundus. However, this task is cumbersome and time-consuming and requires intense effort due to the small size of the lesion and the low contrast of the images. Thus, computer-assisted diagnosis of retinal disease based on the detection of red lesions has been actively explored recently. In this paper, we present a comparison of deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures and propose a residual CNN with residual skip connections to reduce the parameter for the semantic segmentation of exudates in retinal images. A suitable image augmentation technique is used to improve the performance of network architecture. The proposed network can robustly segment exudates with high accuracy, which makes it suitable for diabetic retinopathy screening. A comparative performance analysis of three benchmark databases: E-ophtha, DIARETDB1, and Hamilton Ophthalmology Institute's Macular Edema, is presented. The proposed method achieves a precision of 0.95, 0.92, 0.97, accuracy of 0.98, 0.98, 0.98, sensitivity of 0.97, 0.95, 0.95, specificity of 0.99, 0.99, 0.99, and area under the curve of 0.97, 0.94, and 0.96, respectively. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: The research focuses on the detection and segmentation of exudates in diabetic retinopathy, a disease affecting the retina. Early detection of exudates is important to avoid vision problems and requires continuous screening and treatment. Currently, manual detection is time-consuming and requires intense effort. The authors compare qualitative results of the state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures and propose a computer-assisted diagnosis approach based on deep learning, using a residual CNN with residual skip connections to reduce parameters. The proposed method is evaluated on three benchmark databases and demonstrates high accuracy and suitability for diabetic retinopathy screening.

Due to the advent of modern embedded systems and mobile devices with constrained resources, there is a great demand for incredibly efficient deep neural networks for machine learning purposes. There is also a growing concern of privacy and confidentiality of user data within the general public when their data is processed and stored in an external server which has further fueled the need for developing such efficient neural networks for real-time inference on local embedded systems. The scope of our work presented in this paper is limited to image classification using a convolutional neural network. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a class of Deep Neural Network (DNN) widely used in the analysis of visual images captured by an image sensor, designed to extract information and convert it into meaningful representations for real-time inference of the input data. In this paper, we propose a neoteric variant of deep convolutional neural network architecture to ameliorate the performance of existing CNN architectures for real-time inference on embedded systems. We show that this architecture, dubbed CondenseNeXt, is remarkably efficient in comparison to the baseline neural network architecture, CondenseNet, by reducing trainable parameters and FLOPs required to train the network whilst maintaining a balance between the trained model size of less than 3.0 MB and accuracy trade-off resulting in an unprecedented computational efficiency.

Due to the smaller size, low cost, and easy operational features, small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs) become more popular for various defence as well as civil applications. They can also give threat to national security if intentionally operated by any hostile-actor(s). Since, all the SUAV targets have a high degree of resemblances in their micro-Doppler (m-D) space, their accurate detection/classification can be highly guaranteed by the appropriate deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) architecture. In this work, a lightweight novel DCNN model (named “DIAT-RadSATNet”) is designed for the accurate SUAV targets: RC plane, 3-short-blade rotor, 3-long-blade rotor, quadcopter, bionic bird, and mini-helicopter + bionic bird; detection/classification based on their m-D signatures. A diversified, X-band (10GHz) continuous wave (CW) radar based, open-field-collected m-D signatures dataset (named as “DIAT-μSAT”) is used for the design/testing of “DIAT-RadSATNet”. A set-of new design principles is proposed through which multi-factors: layers, #parameters, floating point operations (FLOPs), no. of blocks, filter dimension, memory size, no. of parallel paths, and accuracy; optimization is applied via a series of in-depth ablation studies. The novel “DIAT-RadSATNet” module consists of 0.45M trainable parameters, 40 layers, 2.21Mb memory size, 0.59G FLOPs, and 0.21s computation-time complexity. The detection/classification accuracy of “DIAT-RadSATNet”, based on the open-field unknown dataset experiments, falls within 97.1% and 97.3%. A comparative analysis with state-of-the-art (SOTA) DCNN models evidences the betterness, more efficiency, and more accuracy of our novel “DIAT-RadSATNet” architecture.

In this work, we propose a new deep convolution neural network (DCNN) architecture for semantic segmentation of aerial imagery. Taking advantage of recent research, we use split-attention networks (ResNeSt) as the backbone for high-quality feature expression. Additionally, a disentangled nonlocal (DNL) block is integrated into our pipeline to express the inter-pixel long-distance dependence and highlight the edge pixels simultaneously. Moreover, the depth-wise separable convolution and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) modules are combined to extract and fuse multiscale contextual features. Finally, an auxiliary edge detection task is designed to provide edge constraints for semantic segmentation. Evaluation of algorithms is conducted on two benchmarks provided by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS). Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of each module of our architecture. Precision evaluation based on the Potsdam benchmark shows that the proposed DCNN achieves competitive performance over the state-of-the-art methods.

Deep learning has already been proved as a powerful state-of-the-art technique for many image understanding tasks in computer vision and other applications including remote sensing (RS) image analysis. Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) offer a viable and economical alternative to a conventional sensor and platform for acquiring high spatial and high temporal resolution data with high operational flexibility. Coastal wetlands are among some of the most challenging and complex ecosystems for land cover prediction and mapping tasks because land cover targets often show high intra-class and low inter-class variances. In recent years, several deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures have been proposed for pixel-wise image labeling, commonly called semantic image segmentation. In this paper, some of the more recent deep CNN architectures proposed for semantic image segmentation are reviewed, and each model’s training efficiency and classification performance are evaluated by training it on a limited labeled image set. Training samples are provided using the hyper-spatial resolution UAS imagery over a wetland area and the required ground truth images are prepared by manual image labeling. Experimental results demonstrate that deep CNNs have a great potential for accurate land cover prediction task using UAS hyper-spatial resolution images. Some simple deep learning architectures perform comparable or even better than complex and very deep architectures with remarkably fewer training epochs. This performance is especially valuable when limited training samples are available, which is a common case in most RS applications.

Deep learning has been successfully applied in classification of white blood cells (WBCs), however, accuracy and processing time are found to be less than optimal hindering it from getting its full potential. This is due to imbalanced dataset, intra-class compactness, inter-class separability and overfitting problems. The main research idea is to enhance the classification and prediction accuracy of blood images while lowering processing time through the use of deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) architecture by using the modified loss function. The proposed system consists of a deep neural convolution network (DCNN) that will improve the classification accuracy by using modified loss function along with regularization. Firstly, images are pre-processed and fed through DCNN that contains different layers with different activation function for the feature extraction and classification. Along with modified loss function with regularization, weight function aids in the classification of WBCs by considering weights of samples belonging to each class for compensating the error arising due to imbalanced dataset. The processing time will be counted by each image to check the time enhancement. The classification accuracy and processing time are achieved using the dataset-master. Our proposed solution obtains better classification performance in the given dataset comparing with other previous methods. The proposed system enhanced the classification accuracy of 98.92% from 96.1% and a decrease in processing time from 0.354 to 0.216 s. Less time will be required by our proposed solution for achieving the model convergence with 9 epochs against the current convergence time of 13.5 epochs on average, epoch is the formation white blood cells (WBCs) and the development of granular cells. The proposed solution modified loss function to solve the adverse effect caused due to imbalance dataset by considering weight and use regularization technique for overfitting problem.

This paper addresses issues of brain tumor, glioma, grading from multi-sensor images. Different types of scanners (or sensors) like enhanced T1-MRI, T2-MRI and FLAIR, show different contrast and are sensitive to different brain tissues and fluid regions. Most existing works use 3D brain images from single sensor. In this paper, we propose a novel multistream deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture that extracts and fuses the features from multiple sensors for glioma tumor grading/subcategory grading. The main contributions of the paper are: (a) propose a novel multistream deep CNN architecture for glioma grading; (b) apply sensor fusion from T1-MRI, T2-MRI and/or FLAIR for enhancing performance through feature aggregation; (c) mitigate overfitting by using 2D brain image slices in combination with 2D image augmentation. Two datasets were used for our experiments, one for classifying low/high grade gliomas, another for classifying glioma with/without 1p19q codeletion. Experiments using the proposed scheme have shown good results (with test accuracy of 90.87% for former case, and 89.39 % for the latter case). Comparisons with several existing methods have provided further support to the proposed scheme. keywords: brain tumor classification, glioma, 1p19q codeletion, glioma grading, deep learning, multi-stream convolutional neural networks, sensor fusion, T1-MR image, T2-MR image, FLAIR.

As the aging of concrete structures becomes increasingly severe, crack detection has become a crucial aspect of maintaining their sustainable use. This paper investigates an automatic detection and analysis method for concrete cracks based on deep convolutional neural network architecture. The study utilized drones equipped with high-definition cameras to capture images of concrete structures such as bridges and roads, collecting over 10,000 original images containing cracks. Using Labelme software for point-by-point image annotation and applying data augmentation techniques like rotation and scaling, the dataset was expanded to 30,000 images to meet the requirements of deep learning model training. An improved AlexNet model was developed, replacing the fully connected layer with global average pooling to enhance robustness and reduce overfitting. The model achieved an average accuracy of 95.42% on the test set, outperforming traditional methods by 15%. The model also proved effective in noisy environments. Additionally, a semantic segmentation model based on Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) was introduced, incorporating atrous convolution and spatial pyramid pooling, achieving a pixel-level accuracy of 97.6%, surpassing benchmark models such as FCN and U-Net. The model accurately estimated crack width, with an error rate within ±2% compared to field measurements. This method improves detection efficiency and accuracy while reducing manual intervention, providing strong support for the maintenance of concrete structures.