Kidney–ureter–bladder (KUB) imaging is used as a frontline investigation for patients with suspected renal stones. In this study, we designed a computer-aided diagnostic system for KUB imaging to assist clinicians in accurately diagnosing urinary tract stones. The image dataset used for training and testing the model comprised 485 images provided by Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital. The proposed system was divided into two subsystems, 1 and 2. Subsystem 1 used Inception-ResNetV2 to train a deep learning model on preprocessed KUB images to verify the improvement in diagnostic accuracy with image preprocessing. Subsystem 2 trained an image segmentation model using the ResNet hybrid, U-net, to accurately identify the contours of renal stones. The performance was evaluated using a confusion matrix for the classification model. We conclude that the model can assist clinicians in accurately diagnosing renal stones via KUB imaging. Therefore, the proposed system can assist doctors in diagnosis, reduce patients’ waiting time for CT scans, and minimize the radiation dose absorbed by the body.

In recent years, deep learning technology for clinical diagnosis has progressed considerably, and the value of medical imaging continues to increase. In the past, clinicians evaluated medical images according to their individual expertise. In contrast, the application of artificial intelligence technology for automatic analysis and diagnostic assistance to support clinicians in evaluating medical information more efficiently has become an important trend. In this study, we propose a machine learning architecture designed to segment images of retinal blood vessels based on an improved U-Net neural network model. The proposed model incorporates a residual module to extract features more effectively, and includes a full-scale skip connection to combine low level details with high-level features at different scales. The results of an experimental evaluation show that the model was able to segment images of retinal vessels accurately. The proposed method also outperformed several existing models on the benchmark datasets DRIVE and ROSE, including U-Net, ResUNet, U-Net3+, ResUNet++, and CaraNet.

Kidney–ureter–bladder (KUB) imaging is a radiological examination with a low cost, low radiation, and convenience. Although emergency room clinicians can arrange KUB images easily as a first-line examination for patients with suspicious urolithiasis, interpreting the KUB images correctly is difficult for inexperienced clinicians. Obtaining a formal radiology report immediately after a KUB imaging examination can also be challenging. Recently, artificial-intelligence-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have been developed to help clinicians who are not experts make correct diagnoses for further treatment more effectively. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a CAD system for KUB imaging based on a deep learning model designed to help first-line emergency room clinicians diagnose urolithiasis accurately. A total of 355 KUB images were retrospectively collected from 104 patients who were diagnosed with urolithiasis at Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital. Then, we trained a deep learning model with a ResNet architecture to classify KUB images in terms of the presence or absence of kidney stones with this dataset of pre-processed images. Finally, we tuned the parameters and tested the model experimentally. The results show that the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-measure of the model were 0.977, 0.953, 1, and 0.976 on the validation set and 0.982, 0.964, 1, and 0.982 on the testing set, respectively. Moreover, the results demonstrate that the proposed model performed well compared to the existing CNN-based methods and was able to detect urolithiasis in KUB images successfully. We expect the proposed approach to help emergency room clinicians make accurate diagnoses and reduce unnecessary radiation exposure from computed tomography (CT) scans, along with the associated medical costs.

Image identification, machine learning and deep learning technologies have been applied in various fields. However, the application of image identification currently focuses on object detection and identification in order to determine a single momentary picture. This paper not only proposes multiple feature dependency detection to identify key parts of pets (mouth and tail) but also combines the meaning of the pet’s bark (growl and cry) to identify the pet’s mood and state. Therefore, it is necessary to consider changes of pet hair and ages. To this end, we add an automatic optimization identification module subsystem to respond to changes of pet hair and ages in real time. After successfully identifying images of featured parts each time, our system captures images of the identified featured parts and stores them as effective samples for subsequent training and improving the identification ability of the system. When the identification result is transmitted to the owner each time, the owner can get the current mood and state of the pet in real time. According to the experimental results, our system can use a faster R-CNN model to improve 27.47%, 68.17% and 26.23% accuracy of traditional image identification in the mood of happy, angry and sad respectively.

Anomaly detection is an important research topic in the field of artificial intelligence and visual scene understanding. The most significant challenge in real-world anomaly detection problems is the high imbalance of available data (i.e., non-anomalous versus anomalous data). This limits the use of supervised learning methods. Furthermore, the abnormal—and even normal—datasets in the airport field are relatively insufficient, causing them to be difficult to use to train deep neural networks when conducting experiments. Because generative adversarial networks (GANs) are able to effectively learn the latent vector space of all images, the present study adopted a GAN variant with autoencoders to create a hybrid model for detecting anomalies and hazards in the airport environment. The proposed method, which integrates the Wasserstein-GAN (WGAN) and Skip-GANomaly models to distinguish between normal and abnormal images, is called the Improved Wasserstein Skip-Connection GAN (IWGAN). In the experimental stage, we evaluated different hyper-parameters—including the activation function, learning rate, decay rate, training times of discriminator, and method of label smoothing—to identify the optimal combination. The proposed model’s performance was compared with that of existing models, such as U-Net, GAN, WGAN, GANomaly, and Skip-GANomaly. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed model yields exceptional performance.