Protein structure prediction (PSP) problems are a major biocomputing challenge, owing to its scientific intrinsic that assists researchers to understand the relationship between amino acid sequences and protein structures, and to study the function of proteins. Although computational resources increased substantially over the last decade, a complete solution to PSP problems by computational methods has not yet been obtained. Using only one energy function is insufficient to characterize proteins because of their complexity. Diverse protein energy functions and evolutionary computation algorithms have been extensively studied to assist in the prediction of protein structures in different ways. Such algorithms are able to provide a better protein with less computational resources requirement than deep learning methods. For the first time, this study proposes a many-objective PSP (MaOPSP) problem with four types of objectives to alleviate the impact of imprecise energy functions for predicting protein structures. A many-objective evolutionary algorithm (MaOEA) is utilized to solve MaOPSP. The proposed method is compared with existing methods by examining 34 proteins. An analysis of the objectives demonstrates that our generated conformations are more reasonable than those generated by single/multiobjective optimization methods. Experimental results indicate that solving a PSP problem as an MaOPSP problem with four objectives yields better PSPs, in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. The source code of the proposed method can be found at https://toyamaailab.github.io/sourcedata.html .

This letter proposes to integrate dendritic learnable network architecture with Vision Transformer to improve the accuracy of image recognition. In this study, based on the theory of dendritic neurons in neuroscience, we design a network that is more practical for engineering to classify visual features. Based on this, we propose a dendritic learning-incorporated vision Transformer (DVT), which out-performs other state-of-the-art methods on three image recognition benchmarks.

Dear Editor, This letter presents a novel segmentation approach that leverages dendritic neurons to tackle the challenges of medical imaging segmentation. In this study, we enhance the segmentation accuracy based on a SegNet variant including an encoder-decoder structure, an upsampling index, and a deep supervision method. Furthermore, we introduce a dendritic neuron-based convolutional block to enable nonlinear feature mapping, thereby further improving the effectiveness of our approach. The proposed method is evaluated on medical imaging segmentation datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that it is superior to state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance.