In this paper, a multiscale convolutional network (MSCN) and graph-partitioning-based method is proposed for accurate segmentation of cervical cytoplasm and nuclei. Specifically, deep learning via the MSCN is explored to extract scale invariant features, and then, segment regions centered at each pixel. The coarse segmentation is refined by an automated graph partitioning method based on the pretrained feature. The texture, shape, and contextual information of the target objects are learned to localize the appearance of distinctive boundary, which is also explored to generate markers to split the touching nuclei. For further refinement of the segmentation, a coarse-to-fine nucleus segmentation framework is developed. The computational complexity of the segmentation is reduced by using superpixel instead of raw pixels. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed cervical nucleus cell segmentation delivers promising results and outperforms existing methods.

Accurate segmentation of cervical cells in Pap smear images is an important step in automatic pre-cancer identification in the uterine cervix. One of the major segmentation challenges is overlapping of cytoplasm, which has not been well-addressed in previous studies. To tackle the overlapping issue, this paper proposes a learning-based method with robust shape priors to segment individual cell in Pap smear images to support automatic monitoring of changes in cells, which is a vital prerequisite of early detection of cervical cancer. We define this splitting problem as a discrete labeling task for multiple cells with a suitable cost function. The labeling results are then fed into our dynamic multi-template deformation model for further boundary refinement. Multi-scale deep convolutional networks are adopted to learn the diverse cell appearance features. We also incorporated high-level shape information to guide segmentation where cell boundary might be weak or lost due to cell overlapping. An evaluation carried out using two different datasets demonstrates the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of segmentation accuracy.

Accurate and reliable traffic flow forecasting is of importance for urban planning and mitigation of traffic congestion, and it is also the basis for the deployment of intelligent traffic management systems. However, constructing a reasonable and robust forecasting model is a challenging task due to the uncertainties and nonlinear characteristics of traffic flow. Aiming at the nonlinear relationship affecting traffic flow forecasting effect, a PSO-ELM model based on particle swarm optimization is proposed for short-term traffic flow forecasting, which takes the advantages of particle swarm optimization to search global optimal solution and extreme learning machine to fast deal with the nonlinear relationship. The proposed model improves the accuracy of traffic flow forecasting. The traffic flow data from highways A1, A2, A4, A8 connecting to Amsterdam's ring road are employed for the case study. The RMSEs of PSO-ELM model are respectively 252.61, 173.75, 200.24, 146.05, while the MAPEs of PSO-ELM model are respectively 11.86%, 10.10%, 10.74%, 11.60%. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposal is significantly better than the performance of state-of-the-art models. INDEX TERMS Short-term traffic flow forecasting, extreme learning machine, particle swarm optimization, time-series model.

Quantitative analysis of bacterial morphotypes in the microscope images plays a vital role in diagnosis of bacterial vaginosis (BV) based on the Nugent score criterion. However, there are two main challenges for this task: 1) It is quite difficult to identify the bacterial regions due to various appearance, faint boundaries, heterogeneous shapes, low contrast with the background, and small bacteria sizes with regards to the image. 2) There are numerous bacteria overlapping each other, which hinder us to conduct accurate analysis on individual bacterium. To overcome these challenges, we propose an automatic method in this paper to diagnose BV by quantitative analysis of bacterial morphotypes, which consists of a three-step approach, i.e., bacteria regions segmentation, overlapping bacteria splitting, and bacterial morphotypes classification. Specifically, we first segment the bacteria regions via saliency cut, which simultaneously evaluates the global contrast and spatial weighted coherence. And then Markov random field model is applied for high-quality unsupervised segmentation of small object. We then decompose overlapping bacteria clumps into markers, and associate a pixel with markers to identify evidence for eventual individual bacterium splitting. Next, we extract morphotype features from each bacterium to learn the descriptors and to characterize the types of bacteria using an Adaptive Boosting machine learning framework. Finally, BV diagnosis is implemented based on the Nugent score criterion. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves high accuracy and efficiency in computation for BV diagnosis.

This paper presents a spatial-temporal deep learning network, termed ST-TrafficNet, for traffic flow forecasting. Recent deep learning methods highly relate accurate predetermined graph structure for the complex spatial dependencies of traffic flow, and ineffectively harvest high dimensional temporal features of the traffic flow. In this paper, a novel multi-diffusion convolution block constructed by an attentive diffusion convolution and bidirectional diffusion convolution is proposed, which is capable to extract precise potential spatial dependencies. Moreover, a stacked Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) block is adopted to capture high-dimensional temporal features. By integrating the two blocks, the ST-TrafficNet can learn the spatial-temporal dependencies of intricate traffic data accurately. The performance of the ST-TrafficNet has been evaluated on two real-world benchmark datasets by comparing it with three commonly-used methods and seven state-of-the-art ones. The Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of the proposed method outperform not only the commonly-used methods, but also the state-of-the-art ones in 15 min, 30 min, and 60 min time-steps.