Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common retinal disease that leads to blindness. For diagnosis purposes, DR image grading aims to provide automatic DR grade classification, which is not addressed in conventional research methods of binary DR image classification. Small objects in the eye images, like lesions and microaneurysms, are essential to DR grading in medical imaging, but they could easily be influenced by other objects. To address these challenges, we propose a new deep learning architecture, called BiRA-Net, which combines the attention model for feature extraction and bilinear model for fine-grained classification. Furthermore, in considering the distance between different grades of different DR categories, we propose a new loss function, called grading loss, which leads to improved training convergence of the proposed approach. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.

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Enhancers are short deoxyribonucleic acid fragments that assume an important part in the genetic process of gene expression. Due to their possibly distant location relative to the gene that is acted upon, the identification of enhancers is difficult. There are many published works focused on identifying enhancers based on their sequence information, however, the resulting performance still requires improvements. Using deep learning methods, this study proposes a model ensemble of classifiers for predicting enhancers based on deep recurrent neural networks. The input features of deep ensemble networks were generated from six types of dinucleotide physicochemical properties, which had outperformed the other features. In summary, our model which used this ensemble approach could identify enhancers with achieved sensitivity of 75.5%, specificity of 76%, accuracy of 75.5%, and MCC of 0.51. For classifying enhancers into strong or weak sequences, our model reached sensitivity of 83.15%, specificity of 45.61%, accuracy of 68.49%, and MCC of 0.312. Compared to the benchmark result, our results had higher performance in term of most measurement metrics. The results showed that deep model ensembles hold the potential for improving on the best results achieved to date using shallow machine learning methods.

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Anticancer peptides (ACPs) are the types of peptides that have been demonstrated to have anticancer activities. Using ACPs to prevent cancer could be a viable alternative to conventional cancer treatments because they are safer and display higher selectivity. Due to ACP identification being highly lab-limited, expensive and lengthy, a computational method is proposed to predict ACPs from sequence information in this study. The process includes the input of the peptide sequences, feature extraction in terms of ordinal encoding with positional information and handcrafted features, and finally feature selection. The whole model comprises of two modules, including deep learning and machine learning algorithms. The deep learning module contained two channels: bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN). Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) was used in the machine learning module. Finally, this study voted the three models’ classification results for the three paths resulting in the model ensemble layer. This study provides insights into ACP prediction utilizing a novel method and presented a promising performance. It used a benchmark dataset for further exploration and improvement compared with previous studies. Our final model has an accuracy of 0.7895, sensitivity of 0.8153 and specificity of 0.7676, and it was increased by at least 2% compared with the state-of-the-art studies in all metrics. Hence, this paper presents a novel method that can potentially predict ACPs more effectively and efficiently. The work and source codes are made available to the community of researchers and developers at https://github.com/khanhlee/acp-ope/.