Dementia is a neurodegenerative disease that leads to the development of cognitive deficits, such as aphasia, apraxia, and agnosia. It is currently considered one of the most significant major medical problems worldwide, primarily affecting the elderly. This condition gradually impairs the patient’s cognition, eventually leading to the inability to perform everyday tasks without assistance. Since dementia is an incurable disease, early detection plays an important role in delaying its progression. Because of this, tools and methods have been developed to help accurately diagnose patients in their early stages. State-of-the-art methods have shown that the use of syntactic-type linguistic features provides a sensitive and noninvasive tool for detecting dementia in its early stages. However, these methods lack relevant semantic information. In this work, we propose a novel methodology, based on the semantic features approach, by using sentence embeddings computed by Siamese BERT networks (SBERT), along with support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), random forest, and an artificial neural network (ANN) as classifiers. Our methodology extracted 17 features that provide demographic, lexical, syntactic, and semantic information from 550 oral production samples of elderly controls and people with Alzheimer’s disease, provided by the DementiaBank Pitt Corpus database. To quantify the relevance of the extracted features for the dementia classification task, we calculated the mutual information score, which demonstrates a dependence between our features and the MMSE score. The experimental classification performance metrics, such as the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score (77, 80, 80, and 80%, respectively), validate that our methodology performs better than syntax-based methods and the BERT approach when only the linguistic features are used.

Food waste is a global concern and is the focus of this research. Currently, no method in the state of the art classifies multiple fruits and vegetables and their level of ripening. The objective of the study is to design and develop an intelligent system based on deep learning techniques to classify between types of fruits and vegetables, and also to evaluate the level of ripeness of some of them. The system consists of two models using the MobileNet V2 architecture. One algorithm is for the classification of 32 classes of fruits and vegetables, and another is for the determination of the ripeness of 6 classes of them. The overall intelligent system is the union of the two models, predicting first the class of fruit or vegetable and then its ripeness. The fruits and vegetables classification model achieved 97.86% accuracy, 98% precision, 98% recall, and 98% F1-score, while the ripeness assessment model achieved 100% accuracy, 98% precision, 99% recall, and 99% F1-score. According to the results, the proposed system is able to classify between types of fruits and vegetables and evaluate their ripeness. To achieve the best performance indicators, it is necessary to obtain the appropriate hyperparameters for the artificial intelligence models, in addition to having an extensive database with well-defined classes.

Retina images are the only non-invasive way of accessing the cardiovascular system, offering us a means of observing patterns such as microaneurysms, hemorrhages and the vasculature structure which can be used to diagnose a variety of diseases. The main goal of this paper is to automate retinal blood vessel segmentation with a good tradeoff between blood vessel classification and training time in the presence of high unbalanced classes. In this work, a novel methodology is proposed using two convolutional neural networks (CNN’s), chained to each other. The second CNN has been designed with residual network blocks, which joined to the information flow from the first, give us metrics like recall and F1-Score, which are, in most cases, superior to state of the art in vessel segmentation task. We tested this work on two public datasets for blood vessel segmentation in retinal images showing that this work outperforms many of other contributions by other authors.

Segmenting vessels in brain images is a critical step for many medical interventions and diagnoses of illnesses. Recent advances in artificial intelligence provide better models, achieving a human-like level of expertise in many tasks. In this paper, we present a new approach to segment Time-of-Flight Magnetic Resonance Angiography (TOF-MRA) images, relying on fewer training samples than state-of-the-art methods. We propose a conditional generative adversarial network with an adapted generator based on a concatenated U-Net with a residual U-Net architecture (UUr-cGAN) to carry out blood vessel segmentation in TOF-MRA images, relying on data augmentation to diminish the drawback of having few volumes at disposal for training the model, while preventing overfitting by using regularization techniques. The proposed model achieves 89.52% precision and 87.23% in Dice score on average from the cross-validated experiment for brain blood vessel segmentation tasks, which is similar to other state-of-the-art methods while using considerably fewer training samples. UUr-cGAN extracts important features from small datasets while preventing overfitting compared to other CNN-based methods and still achieve a relatively good performance in image segmentation tasks such as brain blood vessels from TOF-MRA.

In this research a fully sensorized cooperative robot system for manipulation of needles is presented. The setup consists of a DLR/KUKA Light Weight Robot III especially designed for safe human/robot interaction, a FD-CT robot-driven angiographic C-arm system, and a navigation camera. Also, new control strategies for robot manipulation in the clinical environment are introduced. A method for fast calibration of the involved components and the preliminary accuracy tests of the whole possible errors chain are presented. Calibration of the robot with the navigation system has a residual error of 0.81 mm (rms) with a standard deviation of ±0.41 mm. The accuracy of the robotic system while targeting fixed points at different positions within the workspace is of 1.2 mm (rms) with a standard deviation of ±0.4 mm. After calibration, and due to close loop control, the absolute positioning accuracy was reduced to the navigation camera accuracy which is of 0.35 mm (rms). The implemented control allows the robot to compensate for small patient movements.

Accurate quality detection of fruits and vegetables is crucial for optimizing harvest timing, minimizing post-harvest losses, and reducing waste. This research aims to integrate remote-sensing and deep learning (DL) technologies to develop and evaluate object detection models employing a novel DL approach for precision agriculture through automated quality detection in fruits and vegetables. To achieve this, twelve state-of-the-art object detection models from the MMDetection framework were trained by utilizing a custom-created and annotated dataset that comprises 1535 images and 39 classes of fruits and vegetables categorized into unripe, ripe, and overripe qualities. To evaluate the performance of each model, metrics like loss, mean Average Precision (mAP), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, area under the curve (AUC), and confusion matrix were employed. The results determined that the Detection Transformer with Improved Denoising Anchor Boxes (DINO) and Dynamic Denoising Query (DDQ) models outperformed the others, achieving a mAP of 0.65 and a loss of 1.8 and 1.9, respectively. These metrics demonstrate their ability to distinguish the quality of fruits and vegetables accurately. These findings highlight the potential of DL models for real-world agricultural applications, as they facilitate timely quality assessment and contribute to the development of intelligent solutions.