The application of deep learning algorithms for medical diagnosis in the real world faces challenges with transparency and interpretability. The labeling of large-scale samples leads to costly investment in developing deep learning algorithms. The application of human prior knowledge is an effective way to solve these problems. Previously, we developed a deep learning system for glaucoma diagnosis based on a large number of samples that had high sensitivity and specificity. However, it is a black box and the specific analytic methods cannot be elucidated. Here, we establish a hierarchical deep learning system based on a small number of samples that comprehensively simulates the diagnostic thinking of human experts. This system can extract the anatomical characteristics of the fundus images, including the optic disc, optic cup, and appearance of the retinal nerve fiber layer to realize automatic diagnosis of glaucoma. In addition, this system is transparent and interpretable, and the intermediate process of prediction can be visualized. Applying this system to three validation datasets of fundus images, we demonstrate performance comparable to that of human experts in diagnosing glaucoma. Moreover, it markedly improves the diagnostic accuracy of ophthalmologists. This system may expedite the screening and diagnosis of glaucoma, resulting in improved clinical outcomes.

Glaucoma is a serious eye disease that can cause permanent blindness and is difficult to diagnose early. Optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) play a pivotal role in the screening of glaucoma. Therefore, accurate segmentation of OD and OC from fundus images is a key task in the automatic screening of glaucoma. In this paper, we designed a U-shaped convolutional neural network with multi-scale input and multi-kernel modules (MSMKU) for OD and OC segmentation. Such a design gives MSMKU a rich receptive field and is able to effectively represent multi-scale features. In addition, we designed a mixed maximum loss minimization learning strategy (MMLM) for training the proposed MSMKU. This training strategy can adaptively sort the samples by the loss function and re-weight the samples through data enhancement, thereby synchronously improving the prediction performance of all samples. Experiments show that the proposed method has obtained a state-of-the-art breakthrough result for OD and OC segmentation on the RIM-ONE-V3 and DRISHTI-GS datasets. At the same time, the proposed method achieved satisfactory glaucoma screening performance on the RIM-ONE-V3 and DRISHTI-GS datasets. On datasets with an imbalanced distribution between typical and rare sample images, the proposed method obtained a higher accuracy than existing deep learning methods.

The detection of small objects within intricate backgrounds poses a significant challenge in the domain of aerial image object detection. In this manuscript, a spatial context-aware selection network (SCASNet) is proposed, which innovatively integrates a state space model with the YOLO architecture to address this challenge. A spatial selection block and a context-aware block are designed to form a spatial context-aware selection module, which can overcome the limitations of the original state space model in sequence modeling, such as insufficient receptive fields and weak local dependency modeling. Then, a channel prior multidimensional attention enhancement module is proposed to focus on key information and optimize the extraction of spatial relationships. It leverages multi-scale strip convolutions to map spatial relationships and dynamically allocates weights across channel and spatial dimensions. Finally, a content-focused attention module is designed in the detection heads to fuse fine-grained features from the lower layers of the backbone network with semantic features from the neck layers, which enhances the richness of feature representation. Extensive experiments conducted on publicly available datasets, VisDrone, AI-TOD and SSDD, demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed SCASNet compared with existing aerial image object detection models.

Glaucoma is a chronic eye disease that can cause permanent visual loss and is difficult to detect early. Retinal nerve fiber layer defect (RNFLD) is clinical evidence for the diagnosis of glaucoma. Classical deep learning based methods can be used to segment RNFLD from fundus images. However, the segmentation results of these methods do not have the specific geometry of RNFLD, and the segmentation errors of fundus images with special styles are large. In this paper, we present a novel conditional adversarial shuffle U-shaped network (CASU-Net) to segment RNFLD, which consists of a generator and a discriminator. For the generator, a mixed loss is designed, which consists of an adaptive weighted segmentation loss and an adversarial loss. This adaptive weighted segmentation loss can balance the segmentation accuracy of the target and background region, and assign more attention to the hard samples, thus ensuring the consistent improvement of the segmentation accuracy of all fundus images. The adversarial loss not only helps to improve the pixel-wise segmentation accuracy but also makes the geometry of the RNFLD segmentation closer to the ground truth. In addition, in the generator, a shuffle module was designed to fully mine the information of all channels to improve the feature extraction capability of the model. The proposed CASU-Net is verified on a RNFLD dataset from Beijing Tongren Hospital. The experiments show that the CASU-Net achieves state-of-the-art results on this dataset.

The great success of deep learning poses an urgent challenge to establish the theoretical basis for its working mechanism. Recently, research on the convergence of deep neural networks (DNNs) has made great progress. However, the existing studies are based on the assumption that the samples are independent, which is too strong to be applied to many real-world scenarios. In this brief, we establish a fast learning rate for the empirical risk minimization (ERM) on DNN regression with dependent samples, and the dependence is expressed in terms of geometrically strongly mixing sequence. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first convergence result of DNN methods based on mixing sequences. This result is a natural generalization of the independent sample case.