In recent years, segmentation details and computing efficiency have become more important in medical image segmentation for clinical applications. In deep learning, UNet based on a convolutional neural network is one of the most commonly used models. UNet 3+ was designed as a modified UNet by adopting the architecture of full-scale skip connections. However, full-scale feature fusion can result in excessively redundant computations. This study aimed to reduce the network parameters of UNet 3+ while further improving the feature extraction capability. First, to eliminate redundancy and improve computational efficiency, we prune the full-scale skip connections of UNet 3+. In addition, we use the attention module called Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to capture more essential features and thus improve the feature expression capabilities. The performance of the proposed model was validated by three different types of datasets: skin cancer segmentation, breast cancer segmentation, and lung segmentation. The parameters are reduced by about 36% and 18% compared to UNet and UNet 3+, respectively. The results show that the proposed method not only outperformed the comparison models in a variety of evaluation metrics but also achieved more accurate segmentation results. The proposed models have lower network parameters that enhance feature extraction and improve segmentation performance efficiently. Furthermore, the models have great potential for application in medical imaging computer-aided diagnosis.

Long COVID is a condition distinguished by long-term sequelae that occur or persist after the convalescence period of COVID-19. During the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 experienced long COVID, which attracted the attention of researchers. This study aims to assess the pattern of long COVID research literature, analyze the research topics, and provide insights on long COVID. In this study, we extracted 784 publications from Scopus in the field of long COVID. According to bibliometric analysis, it is found that: developed countries in Europe and America were in leading positions in terms of paper productivity and citations. The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and the Journal of Clinical Medicine were leading journals in the perspective of publications count, and Nature Medicine had the highest number of citations. Author Greenhalgh T has the highest number of papers and citations. The main research topics were: pathophysiology, symptoms, treatment, and epidemiology. The causes of long COVID may be related to organ injury, inflammation, maladaptation of the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) pathway, and mental factors. The symptoms are varied, including physical and psychological symptoms. Treatment options vary from person to person. Most patients developed at least one long-term symptom. Finally, we presented some possible research opportunities.

Purpose: To develop a tool for automated subtype classification and segmentation of intracranial hemorrhages (ICH) on CT scans of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Furthermore, outcome prediction for patients can effectively facilitate patient management.Methods: This study presents a cascade framework for two‐stage segmentation and multi‐label classification. The hematoma region of interest (ROI) is localized, and then the ROI is cropped and resized to the original pixel size before being input into the model again to obtain the segmentation results. In multilabel classification, the mask obtained from automatic segmentation is superimposed onto the corresponding ROI and CT slices, respectively, to constitute the input image. Subsequently, the ROI image is employed as the local network input to obtain local features. Third, the CT image is utilized to construct a feature extraction network to obtain global features. Ultimately, the local and global features are fused dimensions in the pooling layer, and calculated to generate the final retrieval results. For the prediction of 14‐day in‐hospital mortality, automatically extracted hematoma subtype and volume features were integrated to enhance the widely used CRASH model.Results: The proposed segmentation method achieves the best estimates on the Dice similarity coefficient and Jaccard Similarity Index. The proposed multilabel classification method achieved an average accuracy of 95.91%. For mortality prediction, the best model achieved an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.91 by 5‐fold cross‐validation.Conclusions: The proposed method enhances the precision of hematoma segmentation and subtype classification. In clinical settings, the method can streamline the evaluation of ICH for radiologists, and the automatically extracted features are anticipated to facilitate prognosis assessment.

Research on artificial intelligence for brain injury is currently a prominent area of scientific research. A significant amount of related literature has been accumulated in this field. This study aims to identify hotspots and clarify research resources by conducting literature metrology visualization analysis, providing valuable ideas and references for related fields. The research object of this paper consists of 3000 articles cited in the core database of Web of Science from 1998 to 2023. These articles are visualized and analyzed using VOSviewer and CiteSpace. The bibliometric analysis reveals a continuous increase in the number of articles published on this topic, particularly since 2016, indicating significant growth. The United States stands out as the leading country in artificial intelligence for brain injury, followed by China, which tends to catch up. The core research institutions are primarily universities in developed countries, but there is a lack of cooperation and communication between research groups. With the development of computer technology, the research in this field has shown strong wave characteristics, experiencing the early stage of applied research based on expert systems, the middle stage of prediction research based on machine learning, and the current phase of diversified research focused on deep learning. Artificial intelligence has innovative development prospects in brain injury, providing a new orientation for the treatment and auxiliary diagnosis in this field.