The most important issue that must be solved in designing a data gathering algorithm for wireless sensor networks (WSNS) is how to save sensor node energy while meeting the needs of applications/users. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-aware routing protocol (EAP) for a long-lived sensor network. EAP achieves a good performance in terms of lifetime by minimizing energy consumption for in-network communications and balancing the energy load among all the nodes. EAP introduces a new clustering parameter for cluster head election, which can better handle the heterogeneous energy capacities. Furthermore, it also introduces a simple but efficient approach, namely, intra-cluster coverage to cope with the area coverage problem. We use a simple temperature sensing application to evaluate the performance of EAP and results show that our protocol significantly outperforms LEACH and HEED in terms of network lifetime and the amount of data gathered.

Vehicular edge computing has been a promising paradigm to offer low-latency and high reliability vehicular services for users. Nevertheless, for compute-intensive vehicle applications, most previous researches cannot perform them efficiently due to both the inadequate of infrastructure construction and the computing resource bottleneck of the edge server. Motivated by the fact that there is a large number of outside parked vehicles with rich and underutilized resources in the urban area, we propose the idea of parking edge computing, which makes use of the parked vehicles to assist edge servers in offloaded task handling. Specifically, on-street and off-street parked vehicles are first organized into parking clusters to act as virtual edge servers, participating in offloaded tasks execution in our framework. Second, a novel task scheduling algorithm is designed to jointly decide edge server selection and resource assignment. Furthermore, a local task scheduling policy is proposed as well, which reasonably allocates parked vehicles to perform the tasks with the aim of further improving task offloading performance. Finally, a time-related trajectory prediction model based on the random forest model is built, which helps to send back output result accurately. Our framework not only requires no additional infrastructure investment but also provides adequate computing resources. Simulation results based on a real city map and realistic traffic situations demonstrate that our framework provides more efficient and stable offloading services, especially in a large number of task requests condition.

Diagnosing liver lesions is crucial for treatment choices and patient outcomes. This study develops an automatic diagnosis system for liver lesions using multiphase enhanced computed tomography (CT). A total of 4039 patients from six data centers are enrolled to develop Liver Lesion Network (LiLNet). LiLNet identifies focal liver lesions, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC), metastatic tumors (MET), focal nodular hyperplasia (FNH), hemangioma (HEM), and cysts (CYST). Validated in four external centers and clinically verified in two hospitals, LiLNet achieves an accuracy (ACC) of 94.7% and an area under the curve (AUC) of 97.2% for benign and malignant tumors. For HCC, ICC, and MET, the ACC is 88.7% with an AUC of 95.6%. For FNH, HEM, and CYST, the ACC is 88.6% with an AUC of 95.9%. LiLNet can aid in clinical diagnosis, especially in regions with a shortage of radiologists.

This retrospective study aimed to develop and validate deep-learning-based models for grading clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) patients. A cohort enrolling 706 patients (n = 706) with pathologically verified ccRCC was used in this study. A temporal split was applied to verify our models: the first 83.9% of the cases (years 2010–2017) for development and the last 16.1% (year 2018–2019) for validation (development cohort: n = 592; validation cohort: n = 114). Here, we demonstrated a deep learning(DL) framework initialized by a self-supervised pre-training method, developed with the addition of mixed loss strategy and sample reweighting to identify patients with high grade for ccRCC. Four types of DL networks were developed separately and further combined with different weights for better prediction. The single DL model achieved up to an area under curve (AUC) of 0.864 in the validation cohort, while the ensembled model yielded the best predictive performance with an AUC of 0.882. These findings confirms that our DL approach performs either favorably or comparably in terms of grade assessment of ccRCC with biopsies whilst enjoying the non-invasive and labor-saving property.

Energy problem is one of the most important challenges in the application of sensor networks. With the development of wireless charging technology and intelligent mobile charger (MC), the energy problem can be solved by wireless charging strategy. In the practical application of Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs), the energy consumption rate of nodes is dynamically changed due to many uncertainties such as the death and different transmission tasks of sensor nodes. However, existing works focus on on-demand schemes, which not fully consider real-time global charging scheduling. In this paper, a novel Dynamic Charging Scheme (DCS) in WRSN based on Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning (ACRL) algorithm is proposed. In the ACRL, we introduce Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to capture the relationships of charging actions in time sequence. Using the Actor network with one GRU layer, we can pick up an optimal or near-optimal sensor node from candidates as the next charging target more quickly and speed up the training of the model. Meanwhile, we take the tour length and the number of dead nodes as the reward signal. Actor and Critic networks are updated by the error criterion function of R and V. Compared with current on-demand charging scheduling algorithms, extensive simulations show that the proposed ACRL algorithm surpasses heuristic algorithms such as the Greedy, DP, NJNP and TSCA in the average lifetime and tour length, especially against the size and complexity increasing of WRSNs.

Background: Clear cell Renal Cell Carcinoma (ccRCC) is the most common malignant tumor in the urinary system and the predominant subtype of malignant renal tumors with high mortality. Biopsy is the main examination to determine ccRCC grade, but it can lead to unavoidable complications and sampling bias. Therefore, non-invasive technology (e.g., CT examination) for ccRCC grading is attracting more and more attention. However, noise labels on CT images containing multiple grades but only one label make prediction difficult. However, noise labels exist in CT images, which contain multiple grades but only one label, making prediction difficult.Aim: We proposed a Transformer-based deep learning algorithm with CT images to improve the diagnostic accuracy of grading prediction and to improve the diagnostic accuracy of ccRCC grading.Methods: We integrate different training models to improve robustness and predict Fuhrman nuclear grade. Then, we conducted experiments on a collected ccRCC dataset containing 759 patients and used average classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and AreaUnderCurve as indicators to evaluate the quality of research. In the comparative experiments, we further performed various current deep learning algorithms to show the advantages of the proposed method. We collected patients with pathologically proven ccRCC diagnosed from April 2010 to December 2018 as the training and internal test dataset, containing 759 patients. We propose a transformer-based network architecture that efficiently employs convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and self-attention mechanisms to extract a persuasive feature automatically. And then, a nonlinear classifier is applied to classify. We integrate different training models to improve the accuracy and robustness of the model. The average classification accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under curve are used as indicators to evaluate the quality of a model.Results: The mean accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and Area Under Curve achieved by CNN were 82.3%, 89.4%, 83.2%, and 85.7%, respectively. In contrast, the proposed Transformer-based model obtains a mean accuracy of 87.1% with a sensitivity of 91.3%, a specificity of 85.3%, and an Area Under Curve (AUC) of 90.3%. The integrated model acquires a better performance (86.5% ACC and an AUC of 91.2%).Conclusion: A transformer-based network performs better than traditional deep learning algorithms in terms of the accuracy of ccRCC prediction. Meanwhile, the transformer has a certain advantage in dealing with noise labels existing in CT images of ccRCC. This method is promising to be applied to other medical tasks (e.g., the grade of neurogliomas and meningiomas).