Deep learning has demonstrated significant promise in medical image analysis; however, standard CNNs frequently encounter challenges in detecting subtle and intricate features vital for accurate diagnosis. To address this limitation, we systematically integrated attention mechanisms into five commonly used CNN backbones: VGG16, ResNet18, InceptionV3, DenseNet121, and EfficientNetB5. Each network was modified using either a Squeeze-and-Excitation block or a hybrid Convolutional Block Attention Module, allowing for more effective recalibration of channel and spatial features. We evaluated these attention-augmented models on two distinct datasets: (1) a Products of Conception histopathological dataset containing four tissue categories, and (2) a brain tumor MRI dataset that includes multiple tumor subtypes. Across both datasets, networks enhanced with attention mechanisms consistently outperformed their baseline counterparts on all measured evaluation criteria. Importantly, EfficientNetB5 with hybrid attention achieved superior overall results, with notable enhancements in both accuracy and generalizability. In addition to improved classification outcomes, the inclusion of attention mechanisms also advanced feature localization, thereby increasing robustness across a range of imaging modalities. Our study established a comprehensive framework for incorporating attention modules into diverse CNN architectures and delineated their impact on medical image classification. These results provide important insights for the development of interpretable and clinically robust deep learning-driven diagnostic systems.

Accurate classification of brain tumors in medical imaging is crucial to ensure reliable diagnoses and effective treatment planning. This study introduces a novel double ensemble framework that synergistically combines pre-trained Deep Learning (DL) models for feature extraction with optimized Machine Learning (ML) classifiers for robust classification. The framework incorporates comprehensive preprocessing and data augmentation of brain Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs), followed by deep feature extraction based on transfer learning using pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) networks. The novelty of our approach lies in its dual-level ensemble strategy: we employ a feature-level ensemble, which integrates deep features from the top-performing ViT models, and a classifier-level ensemble, which aggregates predictions from various hyperparameter-optimized ML classifiers. Experiments on two public MRI brain tumor datasets from Kaggle demonstrate that this approach significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods, underscoring the importance of feature and classifier fusion. The proposed methodology also highlights the critical roles that hyperparameter optimization and advanced preprocessing techniques can play in improving the diagnostic accuracy and reliability of medical image analysis, advancing the integration of DL and ML in this vital, clinically relevant task.

A major challenge in deep learning (DL) model training is data scarcity. Data scarcity is commonly found in specific domains, such as clinical or low-resource languages, that are not vastly explored in AI research. In this paper, we investigate the generation capability of large language models such as Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) and Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformers (BART) for Clinical Health-Aware Reasoning across Dimensions (CHARDAT) dataset by applying the ChatGPT augmentation technique. We employed ChatGPT to rephrase each instance of the training set into conceptually similar but semantically different samples and augmented them to the dataset. This study aims to investigate the utilization of large language models, ChatGPT in particular, for data augmentation to overcome the limited availability in the clinical domain. In addition to the ChatGPT augmentation, we applied other augmentation techniques, such as easy data augmentation (EDA) and an easier data augmentation (AEDA), to clinical data. ChatGPT comprehended the contextual significance of sentences within the dataset and successfully modified English terms but not clinical terms. The original CHARDAT datasets represent 52 health conditions across three clinical dimensions, i.e., Treatments, Risk Factors, and Preventions. We compared the outputs for different augmentation techniques and evaluated their relative performance. Additionally, we examined how these techniques perform with different pre-trained language models, assessing their sensitivity in various contexts. Despite the relatively small size of the CHARDAT dataset, our results demonstrated that augmentation methods like ChatGPT augmentation surpassed the efficiency of the previously employed back-translation augmentation. Specifically, our findings revealed that the BART model resulted in superior performance, achieving a rouge score of 52.35 for ROUGE-1, 41.59 for ROUGE-2, and 50.71 for ROUGE-L.

Many devices have been used to detect human action, including wearable devices, cameras, lidars, and radars. However, some people, such as the elderly and young children, may not know how to use wearable devices effectively. Cameras have the disadvantage of invading privacy, and lidar is rather expensive. In contrast, radar, which is widely used commercially, is easily accessible and relatively cheap. However, due to the limitations of radio waves, radar data are sparse and not easy to use for human activity recognition. In this study, we present a novel human activity recognition model that consists of a pre-trained model and graph neural networks (GNNs). First, we overcome the sparsity of the radar data. To achieve that, we use a model pre-trained with the 3D coordinates of radar data and Kinect data that represents the ground truth. With this pre-trained model, we extract reliable features as 3D human joint coordinate estimates from sparse radar data. Then, a GNN model is used to extract additional information in the spatio-temporal domain from these joint coordinate estimates. Our approach was evaluated using the MMActivity dataset, which includes five different human activities. Our system achieved an accuracy of 96%. The experimental result demonstrates that our algorithm is more effective than five other baseline models.

The World Health Organization and Korea National Health Insurance assert that the number of alopecia patients is increasing every year, and approximately 70 percent of adults suffer from scalp problems. Although alopecia is a genetic problem, it is difficult to diagnose at an early stage. Although deep-learning-based approaches have been effective for medical image analyses, it is challenging to generate deep learning models for alopecia detection and analysis because creating an alopecia image dataset is challenging. In this paper, we present an approach for generating a model specialized for alopecia analysis that achieves high accuracy by applying data preprocessing, data augmentation, and an ensemble of deep learning models that have been effective for medical image analyses. We use an alopecia image dataset containing 526 good, 13,156 mild, 3742 moderate, and 825 severe alopecia images. The dataset was further augmented by applying normalization, geometry-based augmentation (rotate, vertical flip, horizontal flip, crop, and affine transformation), and PCA augmentation. We compare the performance of a single deep learning model using ResNet, ResNeXt, DenseNet, XceptionNet, and ensembles of these models. The best result was achieved when DenseNet, XceptionNet, and ResNet were combined to achieve an accuracy of 95.75 and an F1 score of 87.05.

Transformer-based approaches have shown good results in image captioning tasks. However, current approaches have a limitation in generating text from global features of an entire image. Therefore, we propose novel methods for generating better image captioning as follows: (1) The Global-Local Visual Extractor (GLVE) to capture both global features and local features. (2) The Cross Encoder-Decoder Transformer (CEDT) for injecting multiple-level encoder features into the decoding process. GLVE extracts not only global visual features that can be obtained from an entire image, such as size of organ or bone structure, but also local visual features that can be generated from a local region, such as lesion area. Given an image, CEDT can create a detailed description of the overall features by injecting both low-level and high-level encoder outputs into the decoder. Each method contributes to performance improvement and generates a description such as organ size and bone structure. The proposed model was evaluated on the IU X-ray dataset and achieved better performance than the transformer-based baseline results, by 5.6% in BLEU score, by 0.56% in METEOR, and by 1.98% in ROUGE-L.