To better understand early brain development in health and disorder, it is critical to accurately segment infant brain magnetic resonance (MR) images into white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Deep learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance; h owever, one of the major limitations is that the learning-based methods may suffer from the multi-site issue, that is, the models trained on a dataset from one site may not be applicable to the datasets acquired from other sites with different imaging protocols/scanners. To promote methodological development in the community, the iSeg-2019 challenge ( http://iseg2019.web.unc.edu ) provides a set of 6-month infant subjects from multiple sites with different protocols/scanners for the participating methods. T raining/validation subjects are from UNC (MAP) and testing subjects are from UNC/UMN (BCP), Stanford University, and Emory University. By the time of writing, there are 30 automatic segmentation methods participated in the iSeg-2019. In this article, 8 top-ranked methods were reviewed by detailing their pipelines/implementations, presenting experimental results, and evaluating performance across different sites in terms of whole brain, regions of interest, and gyral landmark curves. We further pointed out their limitations and possible directions for addressing the multi-site issue. We find that multi-site consistency is still an open issue. We hope that the multi-site dataset in the iSeg-2019 and this review article will attract more researchers to address the challenging and critical multi-site issue in practice.

As one of the most critical characteristics in advanced stage of non-exudative Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD), Geographic Atrophy (GA) is one of the significant causes of sustained visual acuity loss. Automatic localization of retinal regions affected by GA is a fundamental step for clinical diagnosis. In this paper, we present a novel weakly supervised model for GA segmentation in Spectral-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography (SD-OCT) images. A novel Multi-Scale Class Activation Map (MS-CAM) is proposed to highlight the discriminatory significance regions in localization and detail descriptions. To extract available multi-scale features, we design a Scaling and UpSampling (SUS) module to balance the information content between features of different scales. To capture more discriminative features, an Attentional Fully Connected (AFC) module is proposed by introducing the attention mechanism into the fully connected operations to enhance the significant informative features and suppress less useful ones. Based on the location cues, the final GA region prediction is obtained by the projection segmentation of MS-CAM. The experimental results on two independent datasets demonstrate that the proposed weakly supervised model outperforms the conventional GA segmentation methods and can produce similar or superior accuracy comparing with fully supervised approaches. The source code has been released and is available on GitHub: https://github.com/ jizexuan/Multi-Scale-Class-Activation-Map-Tensorflow.

Non-invasive whole-brain scans aid the diagnosis of neuropsychiatric disorder diseases such as autism, dementia, and brain cancer. The assessable analysis for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is rationally challenging due to the limitations of publicly available datasets. For diagnostic or prognostic tools, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) exposed affirmation to the biomarkers in neuroimaging research because of fMRI pickup inherent connectivity between the brain and regions. There are profound studies in ASD with introducing machine learning or deep learning methods that have manifested advanced steps for ASD predictions based on fMRI data. However, utmost antecedent models have an inadequacy in their capacity to manipulate performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. To overcome these problems, we proposed an avant-garde DarkASDNet, which has the competence to extract features from a lower level to a higher level and bring out promising results. In this work, we considered 3D fMRI data to predict binary classification between ASD and typical control (TC). Firstly, we pre-processed the 3D fMRI data by adopting proper slice time correction and normalization. Then, we introduced a novel DarkASDNet which surpassed the benchmark accuracy for the classification of ASD. Our model's outcomes unveil that our proposed method established state-of-the-art accuracy of 94.70% to classify ASD vs. TC in ABIDE-I, NYU dataset. Finally, we contemplated our model by performing evaluation metrics including precision, recall, F1-score, ROC curve, and AUC score, and legitimize by distinguishing with recent literature descriptions to vindicate our outcomes. The proposed DarkASDNet architecture provides a novel benchmark approach for ASD classification using fMRI processed data.

In this paper, we consider the predefined-time synchronization problem of stochastic memristor-based bidirectional associative memory neural networks (MBAMNNs). Firstly, considering the influence of stochastic disturbance, we propose two new predefined-time theorems. Secondly, combined with the predefined-time theorem proposed in this paper, we design a feedback controller to realize the predefined-time synchronization of MBAMNNs. Then, the sufficient conditions for the predefined-time synchronization of MBAMNNs are obtained based on Ito’s formula and Lyapunov theorem. Finally, the effectiveness of the theorems are verified by numerical simulations.