Medical-image-based diagnosis is a tedious task‚ and small lesions in various medical images can be overlooked by medical experts due to the limited attention span of the human visual system, which can adversely affect medical treatment. However, this problem can be resolved by exploring similar cases in the previous medical database through an efficient content-based medical image retrieval (CBMIR) system. In the past few years, heterogeneous medical imaging databases have been growing rapidly with the advent of different types of medical imaging modalities. Recently, a medical doctor usually refers to various types of imaging modalities all together such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), X-ray, and ultrasound, etc of various organs in order for the diagnosis and treatment of specific disease. Accurate classification and retrieval of multimodal medical imaging data is the key challenge for the CBMIR system. Most previous attempts use handcrafted features for medical image classification and retrieval, which show low performance for a massive collection of multimodal databases. Although there are a few previous studies on the use of deep features for classification, the number of classes is very small. To solve this problem, we propose the classification-based retrieval system of the multimodal medical images from various types of imaging modalities by using the technique of artificial intelligence, named as an enhanced residual network (ResNet). Experimental results with 12 databases including 50 classes demonstrate that the accuracy and F1.score by our method are respectively 81.51% and 82.42% which are higher than those by the previous method of CBMIR (the accuracy of 69.71% and F1.score of 69.63%).

Various techniques using artificial intelligence (AI) have resulted in a significant contribution to field of medical image and video-based diagnoses, such as radiology, pathology, and endoscopy, including the classification of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases. Most previous studies on the classification of GI diseases use only spatial features, which demonstrate low performance in the classification of multiple GI diseases. Although there are a few previous studies using temporal features based on a three-dimensional convolutional neural network, only a specific part of the GI tract was involved with the limited number of classes. To overcome these problems, we propose a comprehensive AI-based framework for the classification of multiple GI diseases by using endoscopic videos, which can simultaneously extract both spatial and temporal features to achieve better classification performance. Two different residual networks and a long short-term memory model are integrated in a cascaded mode to extract spatial and temporal features, respectively. Experiments were conducted on a combined dataset consisting of one of the largest endoscopic videos with 52,471 frames. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed classification framework for multi-GI diseases. The experimental results of the proposed model (97.057% area under the curve) demonstrate superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods and indicate its potential for clinical applications.

Biometrics using finger-veins is a recognition method based on the shape of veins in fingers, and it has the advantage of difficulty to be forged. However, a shade is inevitably produced due to the bones and fingernails, and a change in illumination occurs when acquiring the images of finger-veins. Previous studies have conducted finger-vein recognition using a single-type texture image or finger-vein segmented image (shape image). A texture image provides numerous features, but it is vulnerable to the changes in illumination during recognition and contains noises in regions other than the finger-vein region. A shape image is less affected by noises; however, the recognition accuracy is significantly reduced due to fewer features available and mis-segmented regions caused by shades. In this study, therefore, rough finger-vein regions in an image are detected to reduce the effect of mis-segmented regions, to complement the drawbacks of shape image-based finger-vein recognition. Furthermore, score-level fusion is performed for two output scores of deep convolutional neural network extracted from the texture and shape images, which can reduce the sensitivity to noise, while diverse features provided in the texture image are used efficiently. Two open databases, the Shandong University homologous multi-modal traits finger-vein database and Hong Kong Polytech University finger image database, are used for experiments, and the proposed method shows better recognition performance than the state-of-the-art method.

Automatic chest anatomy segmentation plays a key role in computer-aided disease diagnosis, such as for cardiomegaly, pleural effusion, emphysema, and pneumothorax. Among these diseases, cardiomegaly is considered a perilous disease, involving a high risk of sudden cardiac death. It can be diagnosed early by an expert medical practitioner using a chest X-Ray (CXR) analysis. The cardiothoracic ratio (CTR) and transverse cardiac diameter (TCD) are the clinical criteria used to estimate the heart size for diagnosing cardiomegaly. Manual estimation of CTR and other diseases is a time-consuming process and requires significant work by the medical expert. Cardiomegaly and related diseases can be automatically estimated by accurate anatomical semantic segmentation of CXRs using artificial intelligence. Automatic segmentation of the lungs and heart from the CXRs is considered an intensive task owing to inferior quality images and intensity variations using nonideal imaging conditions. Although there are a few deep learning-based techniques for chest anatomy segmentation, most of them only consider single class lung segmentation with deep complex architectures that require a lot of trainable parameters. To address these issues, this study presents two multiclass residual mesh-based CXR segmentation networks, X-RayNet-1 and X-RayNet-2, which are specifically designed to provide fine segmentation performance with a few trainable parameters compared to conventional deep learning schemes. The proposed methods utilize semantic segmentation to support the diagnostic procedure of related diseases. To evaluate X-RayNet-1 and X-RayNet-2, experiments were performed with a publicly available Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT) dataset for multiclass segmentation of the lungs, heart, and clavicle bones; two other publicly available datasets, Montgomery County (MC) and Shenzhen X-Ray sets (SC), were evaluated for lung segmentation. The experimental results showed that X-RayNet-1 achieved fine performance for all datasets and X-RayNet-2 achieved competitive performance with a 75% parameter reduction.

Morphological attributes of human blastocyst components and their characteristics are highly correlated with the success rate of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Blastocyst component analysis aims to choose the most viable embryos to improve the success rate of IVF. The embryologist evaluates blastocyst viability by manual microscopic assessment of its components, such as zona pellucida (ZP), trophectoderm (TE), blastocoel (BL), and inner cell mass (ICM). With the success of deep learning in the medical diagnosis domain, semantic segmentation has the potential to detect crucial components of human blastocysts for computerized analysis. In this study, a sprint semantic segmentation network (SSS-Net) is proposed to accurately detect blastocyst components for embryological analysis. The proposed method is based on a fully convolutional semantic segmentation scheme that provides the pixel-wise classification of important blastocyst components that help to automatically check the morphologies of these elements. The proposed SSS-Net uses the sprint convolutional block (SCB), which uses asymmetric kernel convolutions in combination with depth-wise separable convolutions to reduce the overall cost of the network. SSS-Net is a shallow architecture with dense feature aggregation, which helps in better segmentation. The proposed SSS-Net consumes a smaller number of trainable parameters (4.04 million) compared to state-of-the-art methods. The SSS-Net was evaluated using a publicly available human blastocyst image dataset for component segmentation. The experimental results confirm that our proposal provides promising segmentation performance with a Jaccard Index of 82.88%, 77.40%, 88.39%, 84.94%, and 96.03% for ZP, TE, BL, ICM, and background, with residual connectivity, respectively. It is also provides a Jaccard Index of 84.51%, 78.15%, 88.68%, 84.50%, and 95.82% for ZP, TE, BL, ICM, and background, with dense connectivity, respectively. The proposed SSS-Net is providing a mean Jaccard Index (Mean JI) of 85.93% and 86.34% with residual and dense connectivity, respectively; this shows effective segmentation of blastocyst components for embryological analysis.

Owing to the rapid advancements in smartphone technology, there is an emerging need for a technology that can detect banknotes and coins to assist visually impaired people using the cameras embedded in smartphones. Previous studies have mostly used handcrafted feature-based methods, such as scale-invariant feature transform or speeded-up robust features, which cannot produce robust detection results for banknotes or coins captured in various backgrounds and environments. With the recent advancement in deep learning technology, some studies have been conducted on banknote and coin detection using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). However, these studies also showed degraded performance depending on the changes in background and environment. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes a three-stage detection technology for new banknotes and coins by applying faster region-based CNN, geometric constraints, and the residual network (ResNet). In the experiment performed using the open database of Jordanian dinar (JOD) and 6,400 images of eight types of Korean won banknotes and coins obtained using our smartphones, the proposed method exhibited a better detection performance than the state-of-the-art methods based on handcrafted features and deep features.