Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Uncertainty-Guided Voxel-Level Supervised Contrastive Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Semi-supervised learning reduces overfitting and facilitates medical image segmentation by regularizing the learning of limited well-annotated data with the knowledge provided by a large amount of unlabeled data. However, there are many misuses and underutilization of data in conventional semi-supervised methods. On the one hand, the model will deviate from the empirical distribution under the training of numerous unlabeled data. On the other hand, the model treats labeled and unlabeled data differently and does not consider inter-data information. In this paper, a semi-supervised method is proposed to exploit unlabeled data to further narrow the gap between the semi-supervised model and its fully-supervised counterpart. Specifically, the architecture of the proposed method is based on the mean-teacher framework, and the uncertainty estimation module is improved to impose constraints of consistency and guide the selection of feature representation vectors. Notably, a voxel-level supervised contrastive learning module is devised to establish a contrastive relationship between feature representation vectors, whether from labeled or unlabeled data. The supervised manner ensures that the network learns the correct knowledge, and the dense contrastive relationship further extracts information from unlabeled data. The above overcomes data misuse and underutilization in semi-supervised frameworks. Moreover, it favors the feature representation with intra-class compactness and inter-class separability and gains extra performance. Extensive experimental results on the left atrium dataset from Atrial Segmentation Challenge demonstrate that the proposed method has superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods.
A meta-inspired termite queen algorithm for global optimization and engineering design problems

This paper proposes a novel bio-inspired termite queen algorithm (TQA) to solve optimization problems by simulating the division of labor in termite populations under a queen’s rule. TQA is benchmarked on a set of 23 functions to test its performance at solving global optimization problems, and applied to six real-world engineering design problems to verify its reliability and effectiveness. Comparative simulation studies with other algorithms are conducted, from whose results it is observed that TQA satisfactorily solves global optimization problems and engineering design problems.
The role and effectiveness of augmented reality in patient education: A systematic review of the literature

To provide an overview of the existing research concerning the use and effects of AR in patient education. Following PRISMA guidelines four electronic databases were systematically searched. Inclusion criteria: empirical studies using any type of AR intervention in patient education across all medical specialties. Quality assessment of the retrieved literature was carried out. Ten papers, comprising 788 patients, were identified and included (Randomized controlled trial (RCT)(n = 3), non-randomized controlled trial (n = 3), before-and-after study (n = 3), and qualitative survey (n = 1)). Retrieved literature showed itself to be highly heterogeneous. The studied population included patients suffering from a diverse spectrum of chronic diseases (e.g., prostate cancer, diabetes mellitus, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy). Quantitative results indicated that the use of AR had a positive effect on knowledge retention and patient satisfaction. Qualitative findings suggested that patients liked the technology and felt comfortable with its use for educational purposes. The quality of the retrieved results was shown to be moderate to low. The limited evidence of this topic suggests the possible potential of AR in patient education. More research, using high-quality study designs and more evidence-based interventions, is needed to fully appreciate the value of AR on patient education.
Improving projected fuzzy K-means clustering via robust learning

Fuzzy K-Means clustering has been an attractive research area for many multimedia tasks. Due to the interference of the noise and outliers, the performance of fuzzy K-Means clustering has been limited. In this paper, a projected fuzzy K-Means clustering method, referred to as Robust Projected Fuzzy K-Means (RPFKM) is proposed as a response to such a challenge. RPFKM improves fuzzy K-Means clustering in three perspectives. First, unlike existing fuzzy K-Means algorithms where the clustering process is conducted in the original space, RPFKM learns the fuzzy membership relationship between samples and prototypes in the low-dimensional space to eliminate the influence of the noise and irrelevant features. Second, it employs the ℓ21 norm to reduce the contribution of outliers to the learning of prototypes. Third, it also considers the sensitivity of fuzzy clustering to the number of reduced dimensions, and the reconstruction term is introduced to hold the main energy of the original data. Furthermore, an iterative re-weighted algorithm is developed to solve the proposed method. The evaluation results of our proposed method and the state-of-the-art methods on real-world and synthetic data sets show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.
PGDENet: Progressive Guided Fusion and Depth Enhancement Network for RGB-D Indoor Scene Parsing

Scene parsing is a fundamental task in computer vision. Various RGB-D (color and depth) scene parsing methods based on fully convolutional networks have achieved excellent performance. However, color and depth information are different in nature and existing methods cannot optimize the cooperation of high-level and low-level information when aggregating modal information, which introduces noise or loss of key information in the aggregated features and generates inaccurate segmentation maps. The features extracted from the depth branch are weak because of the low quality of the depth map, which results in unsatisfactory feature representation. To address these drawbacks, we propose a progressive guided fusion and depth enhancement network (PGDENet) for RGB-D indoor scene parsing. First, high-quality RGB images are used to improve depth data through a depth enhancement module, in which the depth maps are strengthened in terms of channel and spatial correlations. Then, we integrate information from the RGB and enhance depth modalities using a progressive complementary fusion module, in which we start with high-level semantic information and move down layerwise to guide the fusion of adjacent layers while reducing hierarchy-based differences. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public indoor scene datasets, and the results show that the proposed PGDENet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in RGB-D scene parsing.
Augmented hunger games search algorithm using logarithmic spiral opposition-based learning for function optimization and controller design

This paper explains the construction of a novel augmented hunger games search algorithm using a logarithmic spiral opposition-based learning technique. The proposed algorithm (LsOBL-HGS) is used as an efficient tool for both function optimization and controller design. To assess the performance of the algorithm for function optimization, benchmark functions from the CEC2017 test suite were employed and comparisons were made with available and good performing algorithms. In terms of controller design, the proposed LsOBL-HGS algorithm was utilized to design a FOPID controlled magnetic ball suspension system. Comparative assessments were also performed for FOPID controller design, as well using other state-of-the-art methods reported for the magnetic ball suspension system. The results showed that the proposed LsOBL-HGS algorithm has good capability for FOPID controller design employed in a magnetic ball suspension system as it provided an improvement of more than 13% in terms of the transient response-related parameters and more than 34% in terms of bandwidth compared to the best-reported approach used for comparisons.
A Comprehensive Survey on Program Synthesis With Evolutionary Algorithms

The automatic generation of computer programs is one of the main applications with practical relevance in the field of evolutionary computation. With program synthesis techniques not only software developers could be supported in their everyday work but even users without any programming knowledge could be empowered to automate repetitive tasks and implement their own new functionality. In recent years, many novel program synthesis approaches based on evolutionary algorithms have been proposed and evaluated on common benchmark problems. Therefore, we identify and discuss in this survey the relevant evolutionary program synthesis approaches in the literature and provide an in-depth analysis of their performance. The most influential approaches we identify are stack-based, grammar-guided, as well as linear genetic programming (GP). For the stack-based approaches, we identify 37 in-scope papers, and for the grammar-guided and linear GP approaches, we identify 12 and 5 papers, respectively. Furthermore, we find that these approaches perform well on benchmark problems if there is a simple mapping from the given input to the correct output. On problems where this mapping is complex, e.g., if the problem consists of several subproblems or requires iteration/recursion for a correct solution, results tend to be worse. Consequently, for future work, we encourage researchers not only to use a program’s output for assessing the quality of a solution but also the way toward a solution (e.g., correctly solved subproblems).
Encoder deep interleaved network with multi-scale aggregation for RGB-D salient object detection

Recently, RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) has aroused widespread research interest. Existing RGB-D SOD approaches mainly consider the cross-modal information fusion in the decoder. And their multi-modal interaction mainly concentrates on the same level of features between RGB stream and depth stream. They do not deeply explore the coherence of multi-model features at different levels. In this paper, we design a two-stream deep interleaved encoder network to extract RGB and depth information and realize their mixing simultaneously. This network allows us to gradually learn multi-modal representation at different levels from shallow to deep. Moreover, to further fuse multi-modal features in the decoding stage, we propose a cross-modal mutual guidance module and a residual multi-scale aggregation module to implement the global guidance and local refinement of the salient region. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach performs favorably against most state-of-the-art methods under different evaluation metrics. During the testing stage, this model can run at a real-time speed of 93 FPS.
Distributed Grouping Cooperative Dynamic Task Assignment Method of UAV Swarm

Aiming at the problem of UAV swarms with distributed subsets performing cooperative reconnaissance-and-attack tasks on multi-targets in complex and uncertain combat scenarios, a distributed grouping cooperative dynamic task assignment method is proposed based on extended contract network protocol. The dynamic task assignment model for the UAV swarm with the topology of distributed subsets is established considering multiple constraints such as task cooperation, performing sequence, dynamic environment, communication topology, payload model, and UAV capability. According to the characteristics of multi-participants and multi-tasks in the process of UAV swarm executing tasks, the determination mechanism on cooperators and the selection mechanism of sequential tasks are proposed, and then the contract network protocol is extended. On the basis of the above, an event-triggered task assignment strategy for dynamic tasks is designed. The simulated results show that the proposed method can achieve the cooperative dynamic assignment of the UAV swarm to perform reconnaissance-and-attack tasks to multi-targets in complex and uncertain combat scenarios, improve the adaptiveness of the swarm under the sudden circumstance, and realize the optimization for task execution efficiency of the UAV swarm.
Interactive visualization literacy: The state-of-the-art

With the advent of novel visualization techniques to convey complex information, data visualization literacy is growing in importance. Two facets of literacy are user understanding and the discovery of visual patterns with the help of graphical representations. The research literature on visualization literacy provides useful guidance and important opportunities for further studies in this field. This survey examines and classifies prior research on visualization literacy that analyzes how well users understand novel data representations. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey paper with a focus on interactive visualization literacy. We categorize existing relevant research into unique subject groups that facilitate and inform comparisons of related literature and provide an overview of the same. Additionally, the survey/classification also provides an overview of the various evaluation techniques used in this field of research due to their challenging nature. Our novel classification enables researchers to find both mature and unexplored directions that may lead to future work. This survey serves as a valuable resource for both beginners and experienced researchers interested in the topic of visualization literacy.
H-ProSeg: Hybrid ultrasound prostate segmentation based on explainability-guided mathematical model

Accurate and robust prostate segmentation in transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) images is of great interest for image-guided prostate interventions and prostate cancer diagnosis. However, it remains a challenging task for various reasons, including a missing or ambiguous boundary between the prostate and surrounding tissues, the presence of shadow artifacts, intra-prostate intensity heterogeneity, and anatomical variations.Here, we present a hybrid method for prostate segmentation (H-ProSeg) in TRUS images, using a small number of radiologist-defined seed points as the prior points. This method consists of three subnetworks. The first subnetwork uses an improved principal curve-based model to obtain data sequences consisting of seed points and their corresponding projection index. The second subnetwork uses an improved differential evolution-based artificial neural network for training to decrease the model error. The third subnetwork uses the parameters of the artificial neural network to explain the smooth mathematical description of the prostate contour. The performance of the H-ProSeg method was assessed in 55 brachytherapy patients using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), Jaccard similarity coefficient (Ω), and accuracy (ACC) values.The H-ProSeg method achieved excellent segmentation accuracy, with DSC, Ω, and ACC values of 95.8%, 94.3%, and 95.4%, respectively. Meanwhile, the DSC, Ω, and ACC values of the proposed method were as high as 93.3%, 91.9%, and 93%, respectively, due to the influence of Gaussian noise (standard deviation of Gaussian function, σ = 50). Although the σ increased from 10 to 50, the DSC, Ω, and ACC values fluctuated by a maximum of approximately 2.5%, demonstrating the excellent robustness of our method.Here, we present a hybrid method for accurate and robust prostate ultrasound image segmentation. The H-ProSeg method achieved superior performance compared with current state-of-the-art techniques. The knowledge of precise boundaries of the prostate is crucial for the conservation of risk structures. The proposed models have the potential to improve prostate cancer diagnosis and therapeutic outcomes.
ISTFTNET: Fast and Lightweight Mel-Spectrogram Vocoder Incorporating Inverse Short-Time Fourier Transform

In recent text-to-speech synthesis and voice conversion systems, a mel-spectrogram is commonly applied as an intermediate representation, and the necessity for a mel-spectrogram vocoder is increasing. A mel-spectrogram vocoder must solve three inverse problems: recovery of the original-scale magnitude spectrogram, phase reconstruction, and frequency-to-time conversion. A typical convolutional mel-spectrogram vocoder solves these problems jointly and implicitly using a convolutional neural network, including temporal upsampling layers, when directly calculating a raw waveform. Such an approach allows skipping redundant processes during waveform synthesis (e.g., the direct reconstruction of high-dimensional original-scale spectrograms). By contrast, the approach solves all problems in a black box and cannot effectively employ the time-frequency structures existing in a mel-spectrogram. We thus propose iSTFTNet, which replaces some output-side layers of the mel-spectrogram vocoder with the inverse short-time Fourier transform (iSTFT) after sufficiently reducing the frequency dimension using upsampling layers, reducing the computational cost from black-box modeling and avoiding redundant estimations of high-dimensional spectrograms. During our experiments, we applied our ideas to three HiFi-GAN variants and made the models faster and more lightweight with a reasonable speech quality. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>
A novel wavelet decomposition and transformation convolutional neural network with data augmentation for breast cancer detection using digital mammogram

Research in deep learning (DL) has continued to provide significant solutions to the challenges of detecting breast cancer in digital images. Image preprocessing methods and architecture enhancement techniques have been proposed to improve the performance of DL models such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs). For instance, the wavelet decomposition function has been used for image feature extraction in CNNs due to its strong compactness. Additionally, CNN architectures have been optimized to improve the process of feature detection to support the classification process. However, these approaches still lack completeness, as no mechanism exists to discriminate features to be enhanced and features to be eliminated for feature enhancement. More so, no studies have approached the use of wavelet transform to restructure CNN architectures to improve the detection of discriminant features in digital mammography for increased classification accuracy. Therefore, this study addresses these problems through wavelet-CNN-wavelet architecture. The approach presented in this paper combines seam carving and wavelet decomposition algorithms for image preprocessing to find discriminative features. These features are passed as input to a CNN-wavelet structure that uses the new wavelet transformation function proposed in this paper. The CNN-wavelet architecture applied layers of wavelet transform and reduced feature maps to obtain features suggestive of abnormalities that support the classification process. Meanwhile, we synthesized image samples with architectural distortion using a generative adversarial network (GAN) model to argue for their training datasets' insufficiency. Experimentation of the proposed method was carried out using DDSM + CBIS and MIAS datasets. The results obtained showed that the new method improved the classification accuracy and lowered the loss function values. The study's findings demonstrate the usefulness of the wavelet transform function in restructuring CNN architectures for performance enhancement in detecting abnormalities leading to breast cancer in digital mammography.
SPARE: Self-supervised part erasing for ultra-fine-grained visual categorization

• We propose a novel framework SPARE that segments parts using only image-level category labels and produces discriminative part feature representations for ultra-fine-grained visual categorization. • A new self-supervised module is proposed to generate more diversified part segments with semantic meaning, and enhance the discriminability via predicting the contextual position of the erased parts. • Very encouraging experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of SPARE and the possibility in advancing research for ultra-fine-grained visual categorization. This paper presents SPARE, a s elf-supervised par t e rasing framework for ultra-fine-grained visual categorization. The key insight of our model is to learn discriminative representations by encoding a self-supervised module that performs random part erasing and prediction on the contextual position of the erased parts. This drives the network to exploit intrinsic structure of data, i.e. , understanding and recognizing the contextual information of the objects, thus facilitating more discriminative part-level representation. This also enhances the learning capability of the model by introducing more diversified training part segments with semantic meaning. We demonstrate that our approach is able to achieve strong performance on seven publicly available datasets covering ultra-fine-grained visual categorization and fine-grained visual categorization tasks.
Holographic encryption algorithm based on bit-plane decomposition and hyperchaotic Lorenz system

In recent years, many encryption algorithms based on chaotic systems have developed rapidly, and most of them only have simple confusion-diffusion structures, which only work on plaintext images. However, these algorithms will result in low encryption and small key space. This paper proposes a holographic encryption algorithm based on hyperchaotic Lorenz systems and bit-plane decomposition. Firstly, the plaintext image is converted into a phase-only hologram (also called kinoform) through an improved Gerchberg-Saxton(GS) algorithm. Secondly, perform bit-plane decomposition on the hologram, and perform Arnold scrambling on some of the decomposed sub-images; Finally, the sub-images are synthesized by bit-plane theory and XOR diffusion is taken to obtain the final encrypted image. The hyperchaotic Lorenz system generates the chaotic sequences acting on the scrambling and diffusion, and its key stream is related to the plaintext image through the SHA-256 hash function. Simulation results and performance analysis indicate that the encryption algorithm proposed in this paper has higher security performance and can resist different attacks efficiently.
A Blockchain Framework to Secure Personal Health Record (PHR) in IBM Cloud-Based Data Lake

The health system in today's real world is significant but difficult and overcrowded. These hurdles can be diminished using improved health record management and blockchain technology. These technologies can handle medical data to provide security by monitoring and maintaining patient records. The processing of medical data and patient records is essential to analyze the earlier prescribed medicines and to understand the severity of diseases. Blockchain technology can improve the security, performance, and transparency of sharing the medical records of the current healthcare system. This paper proposed a novel framework for personal health record (PHR) management using IBM cloud data lake and blockchain platform for an effective healthcare management process. The problem in the blockchain-based healthcare management system can be minimized with the utilization of the proposed technique. Significantly, the traditional blockchain system usually decreases the latency. Therefore, the proposed technique focuses on improving latency and throughput. The result of the proposed system is calculated based on various matrices, such as F1 Score, Recall, and Confusion matrices. Therefore, the proposed work scored high accuracy and provided better results than existing techniques.