Brain cancer is one of the most dominant causes of cancer death; the best way to diagnose and treat brain tumors is to screen early. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)is commonly used for brain tumor diagnosis; however, it is challenging problem to achieve higher accuracy and performance , which is a vital problem in most of the previous presented automated medical diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Two-Track U-Net(HTTU-Net) architecture for brain tumor segmentation. This architecture leverages the use of Leaky Relu activation and batch normalization. It includes two tracks; each one has a different number of layers and utilizes a different kernel size. Then, we merge these two tracks to generate the final segmentation. We use the focal loss, and generalized Dice (GDL), loss functions to address the problem of class imbalance. The proposed segmentation method was evaluated on the BraTS'2018 datasets and obtained a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.865 for the whole tumor region, 0.808 for the core region and 0.745 for the enhancement region and a median Dice similarity coefficient of 0.883, 0.895, and 0.815 for the whole tumor, core and enhancing region, respectively. The proposed HTTU-Net architecture is sufficient for the segmentation of brain tumors and achieves highly accurate results. Other quantitative and qualitative evaluation are discussed along the paper it confirms that our results are very comparable expert human-level performance, and could help experts to decrease the time of diagnostic. INDEX TERMS Brain Tumor Segmentation, deep neural networks, U-net, fully convolutional network, BraTS'2018 challenge.

Automated identification of plant diseases is very important for crop protection. Most automated approaches aim to build classification models based on leaf or fruit images. These approaches usually require the collection and annotation of many images, which is difficult and costly process especially in the case of new or rare diseases. Therefore, in this study, we developed and evaluated several methods for identifying plant diseases with little data. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are used due to their superior ability to transfer learning. Three CNN architectures (ResNet18, ResNet34, and ResNet50) were used to build two baseline models, a Triplet network and a deep adversarial Metric Learning (DAML) approach. These approaches were trained from a large source domain dataset and then tuned to identify new diseases from few images, ranging from 5 to 50 images per disease. The proposed approaches were also evaluated in the case of identifying the disease and plant species together or only if the disease was identified, regardless of the affected plant. The evaluation results demonstrated that a baseline model trained with a large set of source field images can be adapted to classify new diseases from a small number of images. It can also take advantage of the availability of a larger number of images. In addition, by comparing it with metric learning methods, we found that baseline model has better transferability when the source domain images differ from the target domain images significantly or are captured in different conditions. It achieved an accuracy of 99% when the shift from source domain to target domain was small and 81% when that shift was large and outperformed all other competitive approaches.

Abstract. In this paper, we present a liver segmentation approach. In which, the relation between neighboring slices in CT images is utilized to estimate shape and statistical information of the liver. This information is then integrated with the graph cuts algorithm to segment the liver in each CT slice. This approach does not require prior models construction, and it uses single phase CT images; even so, it is talented to deal with complex shape and intensity variations. Moreover, it eliminates the burdens associated with model construction like data collection, manual segmentation, registration, and landmark correspondence. In contrast, it requires a low user interaction to determine the liver landmarks on a single CT slice only. The proposed approach has been evaluated on 10 CT images with several liver abnormalities, including tumors and cysts, and it achieved high average scores of 81.7 using MICCAI-2007 Grand Challenge scoring system. Compared to contemporary approaches, our approach requires significantly less interaction and processing time.