BACKGROUND: To say data is revolutionising the medical sector would be a vast understatement. The amount of medical data available today is unprecedented and has the potential to enable to date unseen forms of healthcare. To process this huge amount of data, an equally huge amount of computing power is required, which cannot be provided by regular desktop computers. These

The segmentation of hepatic vessels is crucial for liver surgical planning. It is also a challenging task because of its small diameter. Hepatic vessels are often captured in images of low contrast and resolution. Our research uses filter enhancement to improve their contrast, which helps with their detection and final segmentation. We have designed a specific fusion of the Ranking Orientation Responses of Path Operators (RORPO) enhancement filter with a raw image, and we have compared it with the fusion of different enhancement filters based on Hessian eigenvectors. Additionally, we have evaluated the 3D U-Net and 3D V-Net neural networks as segmentation architectures, and have selected 3D V-Net as a better segmentation architecture in combination with the vessel enhancement technique. Furthermore, to tackle the pixel imbalance between the liver (background) and vessels (foreground), we have examined several variants of the Dice Loss functions, and have selected the Weighted Dice Loss for its performance. We have used public 3D Image Reconstruction for Comparison of Algorithm Database (3D-IRCADb) dataset, in which we have manually improved upon the annotations of vessels, since the dataset has poor-quality annotations for certain patients. The experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a mean dice score of 76.2%, which outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques.

In this paper, an ultra compact surface Plasmon (SP) sensor based on 'ring resonator coupled metal-insulator-metal (MIM) waveguide' is theoretically studied and numerically simulated by finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. Ring and waveguide is filled by material to be sensed and implanted in a silver medium whose frequency dependent relative permittivity is characterized by Drude model. Any change in refractive index of material to be sensed leads to variation in resonance condition. Refractive index of the medium can be sensed by detecting resonant wavelength of the ring resonator. Due to the confinement of material to be sensed and optical energy to same area, light-matter interaction increases, and hence, an ultra high value of sensitivity(S= 1235 nm per refractive index unit) is obtained. Sensitivity can be further increased with increasing radius of resonator but at the cost of increased propagation losses and size of the device. Device offers an ultra large value of sensitivity that opens its opportunity to be used in biological and biochemical sensors.