Skin lesion segmentation is one of the pivotal stages in the diagnosis of melanoma. Many methods have been proposed but, to date, this is still a challenging task. Variations in size and color, the fuzzy boundary and the low contrast between lesion and normal skin are the adverse factors for deficient or excessive delineation of lesions, or even inaccurate lesion location detection. In this paper, to counter these problems, we introduce a deep learning method based on U-Net architecture, which performs three tasks, namely lesion segmentation, boundary distance map regression and contour detection. The two auxiliary tasks provide an awareness of boundary and shape to the main encoder, which improves the object localization and pixel-wise classification in the transition region from lesion tissues to healthy tissues. Moreover, concerning the large variation in size, the Selective Kernel modules, which are placed in the skip connections, transfer the multi-receptive field features from the encoder to the decoder. Our methods are evaluated on three publicly available datasets: ISBI2016, ISBI 2017 and PH2. The extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in the task of skin lesion segmentation.

Besides facial or gesture-based emotion recognition, Electroencephalogram (EEG) data have been drawing attention thanks to their capability in countering the effect of deceptive external expressions of humans, like faces or speeches. Emotion recognition based on EEG signals heavily relies on the features and their delineation, which requires the selection of feature categories converted from the raw signals and types of expressions that could display the intrinsic properties of an individual signal or a group of them. Moreover, the correlation or interaction among channels and frequency bands also contain crucial information for emotional state prediction, and it is commonly disregarded in conventional approaches. Therefore, in our method, the correlation between 32 channels and frequency bands were put into use to enhance the emotion prediction performance. The extracted features chosen from the time domain were arranged into feature-homogeneous matrices, with their positions following the corresponding electrodes placed on the scalp. Based on this 3D representation of EEG signals, the model must have the ability to learn the local and global patterns that describe the short and long-range relations of EEG channels, along with the embedded features. To deal with this problem, we proposed the 2D CNN with different kernel-size of convolutional layers assembled into a convolution block, combining features that were distributed in small and large regions. Ten-fold cross validation was conducted on the DEAP dataset to prove the effectiveness of our approach. We achieved the average accuracies of 98.27% and 98.36% for arousal and valence binary classification, respectively.

Due to the increase of lung cancer globally, and particularly in Korea, survival analysis for this type of cancer has gained prominence in recent years. For this task, mathematical and traditional machine learning approaches are commonly used by medical doctors. While the deep learning approach has had proven success in computer vision tasks, natural language processing and other AI techniques are also adopted for this task. Due to the privacy issues and management process, data in medicine are difficult to collect, which leads to a paucity of samples. The small number of samples makes it difficult to use deep learning and renders this approach unusable. In this investigation, we propose a network architecture that combines a variational autoencoder (VAE) with the typical DNN architecture to solve the survival analysis task. With a training size of n = 4107, MVAESA achieves a C-index of 0.722 while CoxCC, CoxPH, and CoxTime achieved scores of 0.713, 0.703, and 0.710, respectively. With a small training size of n = 379, MVAESA achieves a C-index of 0.707, compared with 0.689, 0.688 and 0.690 for CoxCC, CoxPH, and CoxTime, respectively. The results show that the combination of a VAE with a target task makes the network more stable and that the network could be trained using a small-sized sample.

One essential step in radiotherapy treatment planning is the organ at risk of segmentation in Computed Tomography (CT). Many recent studies have focused on several organs such as the lung, heart, esophagus, trachea, liver, aorta, kidney, and prostate. However, among the above organs, the esophagus is one of the most difficult organs to segment because of its small size, ambiguous boundary, and very low contrast in CT images. To address these challenges, we propose a fully automated framework for the esophagus segmentation from CT images. The proposed method is based on the processing of slice images from the original three-dimensional (3D) image so that our method does not require large computational resources. We employ the spatial attention mechanism with the atrous spatial pyramid pooling module to locate the esophagus effectively, which enhances the segmentation performance. To optimize our model, we use group normalization because the computation is independent of batch sizes, and its performance is stable. We also used the simultaneous truth and performance level estimation (STAPLE) algorithm to reach robust results for segmentation. Firstly, our model was trained by k-fold cross-validation. And then, the candidate labels generated by each fold were combined by using the STAPLE algorithm. And as a result, Dice and Hausdorff Distance scores have an improvement when applying this algorithm to our segmentation results. Our method was evaluated on SegTHOR and StructSeg 2019 datasets, and the experiment shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in esophagus segmentation. Our approach shows a promising result in esophagus segmentation, which is still challenging in medical analyses.

This article introduces a framework for predicting the survival of brain tumor patients by analyzing magnetic resonance images. The prediction of brain tumor survival is challenging due to the limited size of available datasets. To overcome the issue of overfitting, we propose a self-supervised learning method that involves identifying image patches from the same or different images. By recognizing intra-and inter-image differences, the network can learn the relationships between local spatial windows in the same image and across different images. In addition to analyzing local information, we also incorporate a global structure awareness network to capture global information from the entire image. Our proposed method shows a strong correlation between local spatial relationships and survivor class prediction in FLAIR MRI brain images. We evaluate our method using the BraTS 2020 validation dataset and observe that our method outperforms others in accuracy and SpearmanR correlation metrics.