Early diagnosis of Alzheimers disease and its prodromal stage, also known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), is critical since some patients with progressive MCI will develop the disease. We propose a multi-stream deep convolutional neural network fed with patch-based imaging data to classify stable MCI and progressive MCI. First, we compare MRI images of Alzheimers disease with cognitively normal subjects to identify distinct anatomical landmarks using a multivariate statistical test. These landmarks are then used to extract patches that are fed into the proposed multi-stream convolutional neural network to classify MRI images. Next, we train the architecture in a separate scenario using samples from Alzheimers disease images, which are anatomically similar to the progressive MCI ones and cognitively normal images to compensate for the lack of progressive MCI training data. Finally, we transfer the trained model weights to the proposed architecture in order to fine-tune the model using progressive MCI and stable MCI data. Experimental results on the ADNI-1 dataset indicate that our method outperforms existing methods for MCI classification, with an F1-score of 85.96%.

Monitoring the spread of disease-carrying mosquitoes is a first and necessary step to control severe diseases such as dengue, chikungunya, Zika or yellow fever. Previous citizen science projects have been able to obtain large image datasets with linked geo-tracking information. As the number of international collaborators grows, the manual annotation by expert entomologists of the large amount of data gathered by these users becomes too time demanding and unscalable, posing a strong need for automated classification of mosquito species from images. We introduce the application of two Deep Convolutional Neural Networks in a comparative study to automate this classification task. We use the transfer learning principle to train two state-of-the-art architectures on the data provided by the Mosquito Alert project, obtaining testing accuracy of 94%. In addition, we applied explainable models based on the Grad-CAM algorithm to visualise the most discriminant regions of the classified images, which coincide with the white band stripes located at the legs, abdomen, and thorax of mosquitoes of the Aedes albopictus species. The model allows us to further analyse the classification errors. Visual Grad-CAM models show that they are linked to poor acquisition conditions and strong image occlusions.

Oyster fungi Pleurotus djamor generate actin potential like spikes of electrical potential. The trains of spikes might manifest propagation of growing mycelium in a substrate, transportation of nutrients and metabolites and communication processes in the mycelium network. The spiking activity of the mycelium networks is highly variable compared to neural activity and therefore can not be analysed by standard tools from neuroscience. We propose original techniques for detecting and classifying the spiking activity of fungi. Using these techniques, we analyse the information-theoretic complexity of the fungal electrical activity. The results can pave ways for future research on sensorial fusion and decision making of fungi.