Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems can help radiologists in numerous medical tasks including classification and staging of the various diseases. The 3D tomosynthesis imaging technique adds value to the CAD systems in diagnosis and classification of the breast lesions. Several convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures have been proposed to classify the lesion shapes to the respective classes using a similar imaging method. However, not only is the black box nature of these CNN models questionable in the healthcare domain, but so is the morphological-based cancer classification, concerning the clinicians. As a result, this study proposes both a mathematically and visually explainable deep-learning-driven multiclass shape-based classification framework for the tomosynthesis breast lesion images. In this study, authors exploit eight pretrained CNN architectures for the classification task on the previously extracted regions of interests images containing the lesions. Additionally, the study also unleashes the black box nature of the deep learning models using two well-known perceptive explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) algorithms including Grad-CAM and LIME. Moreover, two mathematical-structure-based interpretability techniques, i.e., t-SNE and UMAP, are employed to investigate the pretrained models’ behavior towards multiclass feature clustering. The experimental results of the classification task validate the applicability of the proposed framework by yielding the mean area under the curve of 98.2%. The explanability study validates the applicability of all employed methods, mainly emphasizing the pros and cons of both Grad-CAM and LIME methods that can provide useful insights towards explainable CAD systems.

Today’s buildings are responsible for about 40% of total energy consumption and 30–40% of carbon emissions, which are key concerns for the sustainable development of any society. The excessive usage of grid energy raises sustainability issues in the face of global changes, such as climate change, population, economic growths, etc. Traditionally, the power systems that deliver this commodity are fuel operated and lead towards high carbon emissions and global warming. To overcome these issues, the recent concept of the nearly zero energy building (nZEB) has attracted numerous researchers and industry for the construction and management of the new generation buildings. In this regard, this paper proposes various demand side management (DSM) programs using the genetic algorithm (GA), teaching learning-based optimization (TLBO), the enhanced differential evolution (EDE) algorithm and the proposed enhanced differential teaching learning algorithm (EDTLA) to manage energy and comfort, while taking the human preferences into consideration. Power consumption patterns of shiftable home appliances are modified in response to the real-time price signal in order to get monetary benefits. To further improve the cost and user discomfort objectives along with reduced carbon emission, renewable energy sources (RESs) are also integrated into the microgrid (MG). The proposed model is implemented in a smart residential complex of multiple homes under a real-time pricing environment. We figure out two feasible regions: one for electricity cost and the other for user discomfort. The proposed model aims to deal with the stochastic nature of RESs while introducing the battery storage system (BSS). The main objectives of this paper include: (1) integration of RESs; (2) minimization of the electricity bill (cost) and discomfort; and (3) minimizing the peak to average ratio (PAR) and carbon emission. Additionally, we also analyze the tradeoff between two conflicting objectives, like electricity cost and user discomfort. Simulation results validate both the implemented and proposed techniques.

The non-destructive testing methods offer great benefit in detecting and classifying the weld defects. Among these, infrared (IR) thermography stands out in the inspection, characterization, and analysis of the defects from the camera image sequences, particularly with the recent advent of deep learning. However, in IR, the defect classification becomes a cumbersome task because of the exposure to the inconsistent and unbalanced heat source, which requires additional supervision. In light of this, authors present a fully automated system capable of detecting defective welds according to the electrical resistance properties in the inline mode. The welding process is captured by an IR camera that generates a video sequence. A set of features extracted by such video feeds supervised machine learning and deep learning algorithms in order to build an industrial diagnostic framework for weld defect detection. The experimental study validates the aptitude of a customized convolutional neural network architecture to classify the malfunctioning weld joints with mean accuracy of 99% and median f1 score of 73% across five-fold cross validation on our locally acquired real world dataset. The outcome encourages the integration of thermographic-based quality control frameworks in all applications where fast and accurate recognition and safety assurance are crucial industrial requirements across the production line.

The recent advancements in the surging field of Deep Learning (DL) have revolutionized every sphere of life, and the healthcare domain is no exception. The enormous success of DL models, particularly with image data, has led to the development of image-guided Robot Assisted Surgery (RAS) systems. By and large, the number of studies concerning image-driven computer assisted surgical systems using DL has increased exponentially. Additionally, the contemporary availability of surgical datasets has also boosted the DL applications in RAS. Inspired by the latest trends and contributions in surgery, this literature survey presents a summarized analysis of recent innovations of DL in image-guided RAS systems. After a thorough review, a sum of 184 articles are selected and grouped into four categories, based on the literature and the relevancy of the task in the articles, comprising 1) Surgical Tools, 2) Surgical Processes, 3) Surgical Surveillance, and 4) Surgical Performance. The survey also discusses publicly available surgical datasets and highlights the basics of the DL models. Furthermore, the legal, ethical, and technological challenges together with the intuitive predictions and recommendations related to the autonomous RAS systems are also presented. The study reveals that Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is most widely adopted architecture, whereas, JIGSAWS is most employed dataset in RAS. The study suggests fusing kinematic data along with image data, which produces better accuracy and precision, particularly in gesture and trajectory segmentation tasks. Additionally, CNN and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks have shown remarkable performance, however, authors recommend employing these gigantic architectures only when simpler models have failed to produce satisfactory results. The simpler models, despite their limitations, are time and cost effective and yield considerable outcomes even on the smaller datasets.

The accurate segmentation and identification of vertebrae presents the foundations for spine analysis including fractures, malfunctions and other visual insights. The large-scale vertebrae segmentation challenge (VerSe), organized as a competition at the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), is aimed at vertebrae segmentation and labeling. In this paper, we propose a framework that addresses the tasks of vertebrae segmentation and identification by exploiting both deep learning and classical machine learning methodologies. The proposed solution comprises two phases: a binary fully automated segmentation of the whole spine, which exploits a 3D convolutional neural network, and a semi-automated procedure that allows locating vertebrae centroids using traditional machine learning algorithms. Unlike other approaches, the proposed method comes with the added advantage of no requirement for single vertebrae-level annotations to be trained. A dataset of 214 CT scans has been extracted from VerSe’20 challenge data, for training, validating and testing the proposed approach. In addition, to evaluate the robustness of the segmentation and labeling algorithms, 12 CT scans from subjects affected by severe, moderate and mild scoliosis have been collected from a local medical clinic. On the designated test set from Verse’20 data, the binary spine segmentation stage allowed to obtain a binary Dice coefficient of 89.17%, whilst the vertebrae identification one reached an average multi-class Dice coefficient of 90.09%. In order to ensure the reproducibility of the algorithms hereby developed, the code has been made publicly available.

In this work, we evaluate performance of home energy management system(HEM) by using three meta-heuristic optimization techniques: Harmony search algorithm (HSA), Bacterial foraging optimization (BFO) and Enhanced deferential evolution(EDE). We categorize appliances into three groups on the basis of their energy consumption pattern. Real time pricing (RTP) scheme is used for electricity bill calculation. Our objectives are to minimize electricity cost, energy consumption, reduction in peak to average ratio while maximizing user comfort. However, there exists a trade-off between different objectives. Our simulation results show that there exist a trade-off between user comfort and cost. Results also show that in terms of cost HSA perform better among other techniques.