The intermittent nature associated with photovoltaic (PV) generation is a challenging problem for the optimal planning and efficient management in smart grids. A reliable forecasting model of solar irradiance can play an essential role in allowing high PV penetrations without degrading the grid performance. For this purpose, most related works either use individual forecasting models or ensemble approaches (e.g., weighted average), ignoring the interaction between the values to be aggregated and thus may worsen the forecasting reliability. Differently, we propose a reliable solar irradiance forecasting method based on long short-term memory (LSTM) models and an aggregation function based on Choquet integral. This novel combination has the following features: 1) LSTM models can achieve accurate predictions because they model the temporal changes in solar irradiance, thanks to their recurrent architecture and memory units, and 2) the Choquet integral can model the interaction between the inputs to be aggregated through a fuzzy measure. This aggregation technique can determine the largest consistency among the conflicting forecasting results, taking advantage of each individual model. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we compare it with several forecasting methods using six realistic datasets collected from different sites in Finland in which solar irradiance is intermittent. The comparison reveals the high reliability of the proposed forecasting model with different sites and solar profiles.

Breast density estimation with visual evaluation is still challenging due to low contrast and significant fluctuations in the mammograms’ fatty tissue background. The primary key to breast density classification is to detect the dense tissues in the mammographic images correctly. Many methods have been proposed for breast density estimation; nevertheless, most of them are not fully automated. Besides, they have been badly affected by low signal-to-noise ratio and variability of density in appearance and texture. This study intends to develop a fully automated and digitalized breast tissue segmentation and classification using advanced deep learning techniques. The conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGAN) network is applied to segment the dense tissues in mammograms. To have a complete system for breast density classification, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to classify mammograms based on the standardization of Breast Imaging-Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS). The classification network is fed by the segmented masks of dense tissues generated by the cGAN network. For screening mammography, 410 images of 115 patients from the INbreast dataset were used. The proposed framework can segment the dense regions with an accuracy, Dice coefficient, Jaccard index of 98%, 88%, and 78%, respectively. Furthermore, we obtained precision, sensitivity, and specificity of 97.85%, 97.85%, and 99.28%, respectively, for breast density classification. This study’s findings are promising and show that the proposed deep learning-based techniques can produce a clinically useful computer-aided tool for breast density analysis by digital mammography.

Nowadays, breast cancer is one of the most common cancers diagnosed in women. Mammography is the standard screening imaging technique for the early detection of breast cancer. However, thermal infrared images (thermographies) can be used to reveal lesions in dense breasts. In these images, the temperature of the regions that contain tumors is warmer than the normal tissue. To detect that difference in temperature between normal and cancerous regions, a dynamic thermography procedure uses thermal infrared cameras to generate infrared images at fixed time steps, obtaining a sequence of infrared images. In this paper, we propose a novel method to model the changes on temperatures in normal and abnormal breasts using a representation learning technique called learning-to-rank and texture analysis methods. The proposed method generates a compact representation for the infrared images of each sequence, which is then exploited to differentiate between normal and cancerous cases. Our method produced competitive (AUC = 0.989) results when compared to other studies in the literature.

Skin lesion segmentation in dermoscopic images is still a challenge due to the low contrast and fuzzy boundaries of lesions. Moreover, lesions have high similarity with the healthy regions in terms of appearance. In this paper, we propose an accurate skin lesion segmentation model based on a modified conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). We introduce a new block in the encoder of cGAN called factorized channel attention (FCA), which exploits both channel attention mechanism and residual 1-D kernel factorized convolution. The channel attention mechanism increases the discriminability between the lesion and non-lesion features by taking feature channel interdependencies into account. The 1-D factorized kernel block provides extra convolutions layers with a minimum number of parameters to reduce the computations of the higher-order convolutions. Besides, we use a multi-scale input strategy to encourage the development of filters which are scale-variant (i.e., constructing a scale-invariant representation). The proposed model is assessed on three skin challenge datasets: ISBI2016, ISBI2017, and ISIC2018. It yields competitive results when compared to several state-of-the-art methods in terms of Dice coefficient and intersection over union (IoU) score. The codes of the proposed model are publicly available at https://github.com/vivek231/Skin-Project .