A recent study from GLOBOCAN disclosed that during 2018 two million women worldwide had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Currently, mammography, magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, and biopsies are the main screening techniques, which require either, expensive devices or personal qualified; but some countries still lack access due to economic, social, or cultural issues. As an alternative diagnosis methodology for breast cancer, this study presents a computer-aided diagnosis system based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) using thermal images. We demonstrate that CNNs are faster, reliable and robust when compared with different techniques. We study the influence of data pre-processing, data augmentation and database size on several CAD models. Among the 57 patients database, our CNN models obtained a higher accuracy (92%) and F1-score (92%) that outperforms several state-of-the-art architectures such as ResNet50, SeResNet50, and Inception. This study exhibits that a CAD system that implements data-augmentation techniques reach identical performance metrics in comparison with a system that uses a bigger database (up to 33%) but without data-augmentation. Finally, this study proposes a computer-aided system for breast cancer diagnosis but also, it stands as baseline research on the influence of data-augmentation and database size for breast cancer diagnosis from thermal images with CNNs

Breast cancer is a disease that threat many women’s life, thus, the early and accurate detection play a key role in reducing the mortality rate. Mammography stands as the reference technique for breast cancer screening; nevertheless, many countries still lack access to mammograms due to economic, social and cultural issues. Last advances in computational tools, infra-red cameras and devices for bio-impedance quantification allowed the development of parallel techniques like, thermography, infra-red imaging and electrical impedance tomography, these being faster, reliable and cheaper. In the last decades, these have been considered as complement procedures for breast cancer diagnosis, where many studies concluded that false positive and false negative rates are greatly reduced. This work aims to review the last breakthroughs about the three above-mentioned techniques describing the benefits of mixing several computational skills to obtain a better global performance. In addition, we provide a comparison between several machine learning techniques applied to breast cancer diagnosis going from logistic regression, decision trees and random forest to artificial, deep and convolutional neural networks. Finally, it is mentioned several recommendations for 3D breast simulations, pre-processing techniques, biomedical devices in the research field, prediction of tumour location and size.

In this paper we propose a novel virtual simulation-pilot engine for speeding up air traffic controller (ATCo) training by integrating different state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools. The virtual simulation-pilot engine receives spoken communications from ATCo trainees, and it performs automatic speech recognition and understanding. Thus, it goes beyond only transcribing the communication and can also understand its meaning. The output is subsequently sent to a response generator system, which resembles the spoken read-back that pilots give to the ATCo trainees. The overall pipeline is composed of the following submodules: (i) an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that transforms audio into a sequence of words; (ii) a high-level air traffic control (ATC)-related entity parser that understands the transcribed voice communication; and (iii) a text-to-speech submodule that generates a spoken utterance that resembles a pilot based on the situation of the dialogue. Our system employs state-of-the-art AI-based tools such as Wav2Vec 2.0, Conformer, BERT and Tacotron models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work fully based on open-source ATC resources and AI tools. In addition, we develop a robust and modular system with optional submodules that can enhance the system’s performance by incorporating real-time surveillance data, metadata related to exercises (such as sectors or runways), or even a deliberate read-back error to train ATCo trainees to identify them. Our ASR system can reach as low as 5.5% and 15.9% absolute word error rates (WER) on high- and low-quality ATC audio. We also demonstrate that adding surveillance data into the ASR can yield a callsign detection accuracy of more than 96%.

Voice communication between air traffic controllers (ATCos) and pilots is critical for ensuring safe and efficient air traffic control (ATC). The handling of these voice communications requires high levels of awareness from ATCos and can be tedious and error-prone. Recent attempts aim at integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into ATC communications in order to lessen ATCos’s workload. However, the development of data-driven AI systems for understanding of spoken ATC communications demands large-scale annotated datasets, which are currently lacking in the field. This paper explores the lessons learned from the ATCO2 project, which aimed to develop an unique platform to collect, preprocess, and transcribe large amounts of ATC audio data from airspace in real time. This paper reviews (i) robust automatic speech recognition (ASR), (ii) natural language processing, (iii) English language identification, and (iv) contextual ASR biasing with surveillance data. The pipeline developed during the ATCO2 project, along with the open-sourcing of its data, encourages research in the ATC field, while the full corpus can be purchased through ELDA. ATCO2 corpora is suitable for developing ASR systems when little or near to no ATC audio transcribed data are available. For instance, the proposed ASR system trained with ATCO2 reaches as low as 17.9% WER on public ATC datasets which is 6.6% absolute WER better than with “out-of-domain” but gold transcriptions. Finally, the release of 5000 h of ASR transcribed speech—covering more than 10 airports worldwide—is a step forward towards more robust automatic speech understanding systems for ATC communications.

The traditional detection methods have the disadvantages of radiation exposure, high cost, and shortage of medical resources, which restrict the popularity of early screening for breast cancer. An inexpensive, accessible, and friendly way to detect is urgently needed. Infrared thermography, an emerging means to breast cancer detection, is extremely sensitive to tissue abnormalities caused by inflammation and vascular proliferation. In this work, combined with the temperature and texture features, we designed a breast cancer detection system based on smart phone with infrared camera, achieving the accuracy of 99.21 % with the k-Nearest Neighbor classifier. We compared the diagnostic results of the low resolution, originated from the phone camera, with the high resolution of the conventional infrared camera. It was found that the accuracy and sensitivity decreased slightly, but both of them were over than 98 %. The proposed breast cancer detection system not only has excellent performance but also dramatically saves the detection cost, and its prospect will be fascinating.

Voice communication is the main channel to exchange information between pilots and Air-Traffic Controllers (ATCos). Recently, several projects have explored the employment of speech recognition technology to automatically extract spoken key information such as call signs, commands, and values, which can be used to reduce ATCos’ workload and increase performance and safety in Air-Traffic Control (ATC)-related activities. Nevertheless, the collection of ATC speech data is very demanding, expensive, and limited to the intrinsic speakers’ characteristics. As a solution, this paper presents ATCO${}^2$, a project that aims to develop a unique platform to collect, organize, and pre-process ATC data collected from air space. Initially, the data are gathered directly through publicly accessible radio frequency channels with VHF receivers and LiveATC, which can be considered as an “unlimited-source” of low-quality data. The ATCO${}^2$ project explores employing context information such as radar and air surveillance data (collected with ADS-B and Mode S) from the OpenSky Network (OSN) to correlate call signs automatically extracted from voice communication with those available from ADS-B channels, to eventually increase the overall call sign detection rates. More specifically, the timestamp and location of the spoken command (issued by the ATCo by voice) are extracted, and a query is sent to the OSN server to retrieve the call sign tags in ICAO format for the airplanes corresponding to the given area. Then, a word sequence provided by an automatic speech recognition system is fed into a Natural Language Processing (NLP) based module together with the set of call signs available from the ADS-B channels. The NLP module extracts the call sign, command, and command arguments from the spoken utterance.