Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive disease that causes problems of cognitive and memory functions decline. Patients with AD usually lose their ability to manage their daily life. Exploring the progression of the brain from normal controls (NC) to AD is an essential part of human research. Although connection changes have been found in the progression, the connection mechanism that drives these changes remains incompletely understood. The purpose of this study is to explore the connection changes in brain networks in the process from NC to AD, and uncovers the underlying connection mechanism that shapes the topologies of AD brain networks. In particular, we propose a mutual information brain network model (MINM) from the perspective of graph theory to achieve our aim. MINM concerns the question of estimating the connection probability between two cortical regions with the consideration of both the mutual information of their observed network topologies and their Euclidean distance in anatomical space. In addition, MINM considers establishing and deleting connections, simultaneously, during the networks modeling from the stage of NC to AD. Experiments show that MINM is sufficient to capture an impressive range of topological properties of real brain networks such as characteristic path length, network efficiency, and transitivity, and it also provides an excellent fit to the real brain networks in degree distribution compared to experiential models. Thus, we anticipate that MINM may explain the connection mechanism for the formation of the brain network organization in AD patients.

Accurate malignancy level classification of lung nodules can reduce lung cancer mortality rate effectively. In this study, we present a fast and efficient CAD system to improve the performance of nodules malignancy level classification. Firstly, to reduce false positives (FPs), we propose a novel vessel segmentation method which measures vessel likelihood by tubular-like structures discriminating from multiple views. The method can recognize irregular vascular structures robustly and sensitively, and achieve fast vessel segmentation. In addition, a mathematical description for 3D pulmonary entities using neighbor centroids clustering is provided as a fundamental condition for spatial feature extraction. To optimize features extraction, we formulate a gray values cumulative function and a patches selection function based on the mathematical description, to generate axial spatial outline and spatial density distribution samples of the entities, respectively. Then, we use Edge Orientation Histogram (EOH) to extract edge features from the spatial outline and propose a multi-scale path LBP (MSPLBP) to extract the texture feature of the density distribution samples. Finally, the fused EOH and MSPLBP are classified into 6 malignancy levels by three state-of-the-art classifiers. The experimental results show that the vessel segmentation method achieves an average F1_Score of 78.14% and AUC value under PR curves of 0.8149. Moreover, our system reaches an average accuracy of 95.88% and consumes average 176.26 seconds for evaluating a CT set on malignancy level classification. These results indicate that the system can segment vessels exactly, and classify the malignancy level of nodules efficiently. Our system is the potential to be a powerful tool for early diagnosis of lung cancer.

BACKGROUND: Pulmonary nodule detection can significantly influence the early diagnosis of lung cancer while is confused by false positives. OBJECTIVE: In this study, we focus on the false positive reduction and present a method for accurate and rapid detection of pulmonary nodule from suspective regions with 3D texture and edge feature. METHODS: This work mainly consists of four modules. Firstly, small pulmonary nodule candidates are preprocessed by a reconstruction approach for enhancing 3D image feature. Secondly, a texture feature descriptor is proposed, named cross-scale local binary patterns (CS-LBP), to extract spatial texture information. Thirdly, we design a 3D edge feature descriptor named orthogonal edge orientation histogram (ORT-EOH) to obtain spatial edge information. Finally, hierarchical support vector machines (H-SVMs) is used to classify suspective regions as either nodules or non-nodules with joint CS-LBP and ORT-EOH feature vector. RESULTS: For the solitary solid nodule, ground-glass opacity, juxta-vascular nodule and juxta-pleural nodule, average sensitivity, average specificity and average accuracy of our method are 95.69%, 96.95% and 96.04%, respectively. The elapsed time in training and testing stage are 321.76 s and 5.69 s. CONCLUSIONS: Our proposed method has the best performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods and is shown the improved precision of pulmonary nodule detection with computationaly low cost.

Alzheimer’s disease is a primary age-related neurodegenerative disorder that can result in impaired cognitive and memory functions. Although connections between changes in brain networks of Alzheimer’s disease patients have been established, the mechanisms that drive these alterations remain incompletely understood. This study, which was conducted in 2018 at Northeastern University in China, included data from 97 participants of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset covering genetics, imaging, and clinical data. All participants were divided into two groups: normal control (n = 52; 20 males and 32 females; mean age 73.90 ± 4.72 years) and Alzheimer’s disease (n = 45, 23 males and 22 females; mean age 74.85 ± 5.66). To uncover the wiring mechanisms that shaped changes in the topology of human brain networks of Alzheimer’s disease patients, we proposed a local naïve Bayes brain network model based on graph theory. Our results showed that the proposed model provided an excellent fit to observe networks in all properties examined, including clustering coefficient, modularity, characteristic path length, network efficiency, betweenness, and degree distribution compared with empirical methods. This proposed model simulated the wiring changes in human brain networks between controls and Alzheimer’s disease patients. Our results demonstrate its utility in understanding relationships between brain tissue structure and cognitive or behavioral functions. The ADNI was performed in accordance with the Good Clinical Practice guidelines, US 21CFR Part 50–Protection of Human Subjects, and Part 56–Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)/Research Good Clinical Practice guidelines Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)/Research Ethics Boards (REBs).

Providing accurate information about bus travel times can help passengers plan their itinerary and reduce waiting time. However, due to various uncertainty factors and the sparsity of single-route data, traditional travel time predictions cannot accurately describe the credibility of the prediction results, which is not conducive to passengers waiting based on the predicted results. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a bus travel time prediction intervals model based on shared road segments, multiple routes’ driving style similarity, and the bootstrap method. The model first divides the predicted route into segments, dividing adjacent stations shared by multiple routes into one section. Then, the hierarchical clustering algorithm is used to group all drivers in multiple bus routes in this section according to their driving styles. Finally, the bootstrap method is used to construct a bus travel time prediction interval for different categories of drivers. The travel time data sets of Shenyang 239, 134, and New Area Line 1 were selected for experimental verification. The experimental results indicate that the quality of the prediction interval constructed using a data set fused with multiple routes is better than that constructed using a single-route data set. In the two cases studied, the MPIW of the three time periods decreased by 101.04 s, 151.72 s, 33.87 s, and 126.58 s, 127.47 s, 17.06 s, respectively.

In the Body Sensor Networks (BSNs), a comprehensive and intuitive conclusion can be obtained by analyzing the physiological state in the mode of multi-heterogeneous source fusion. However, if a node in the sensing layer fails, the input-oriented analysis system is no longer reliable. In this paper, we propose a homogenous sensor weight calculation method for a single sensing node in the BSNs. Under the premise of valid sensing, a set of sequences will be randomly selected as a referee to make the rules of weight allocation. Weak competitiveness means that sensors have a high degree of antagonism, which indicates that the measuring results have errors or there may be abnormal sensors in the sensing module. Meanwhile, we introduce the trend factor of human body state to strengthen the connection between adjacent data in time series, so as to further improve the reliability of trust weight. The proposed algorithm is helpful for sensing nodes in BSNs to obtain more reliable original physiological data and ensure the accuracy of subsequent feature analysis and system decision. Specifically, it can (1) improve the robustness of sensing in BSNs applications, (2) suppress the interference of abnormal signals, (3) solve data conflict, and (4) be universal to the sensors in BSNs devices. The ECG simulations verify the validity of the algorithm in all extreme cases of valid sensing, and the PPG experiments show that the proposed algorithm is applicable to different types of biosensors. Finally, the evaluation and comparison with other four known data-level fusion methods show that the proposed algorithm has better fusion performance.