In digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) systems, projection data are acquired from a limited number of angles. Consequently, the reconstructed images contain severe blurring artifacts that might heavily degrade the DBT image quality and cause difficulties in detecting lesions. In this study, we propose a two-phase learning approach for artifact compensation in a coarse-to-fine manner to mitigate blurring artifacts effectively along all viewing directions of the DBT image volume (i.e., along the axial, coronal, and sagittal planes) to improve the detection performance of lesions. The proposed method employs a convolutional neural network model comprising two submodels/phases, with Phase 1 performing three-dimensional (3D) deblurring and Phase 2 performing additional 2D deblurring. To investigate the effects of loss functions on the proposed model’s deblurring performance, we evaluated several loss functions, such as the pixel-based loss function, adversarial-based loss function, and perception-based loss function. Compared with the DBT image, the mean squared error of the image and the root mean squared errors of the gradient of the image decreased by 82.8% and 44.9%, respectively, and the contrast-to-noise ratio increased by 183.4% in the in-focus plane. We verified that the proposed method sequentially restored the missing frequency components as the DBT images were processed through the Phase 1 and Phase 2 steps. These results indicate that the proposed method performs effective 3D deblurring, significantly reducing the blurring artifacts in the in-focus plane and other planes of the DBT image, thus improving the detection performance of lesions.

The prior-image-based linearization method exhibited better correction performance than conventional methods. Because the proposed method did not require time-consuming iterative reconstruction processes to obtain the optimal correction function, it can expedite the correction procedure and incorporate more high-order terms in the linearization correction function in comparison to the conventional methods.

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Named Entity Recognition and Classification (NERC) is a task for recognition and classification of named entities such as a person's name, location, and organization. There have been various studies carried out on Korean NERC, but they have some problems, for example lacking some features as compared with English NERC. In this paper, we propose a method that uses word embedding as features for Korean NERC. We generate a word vector using a Continuous-Bag-of-Word (CBOW) model from POS-tagged corpus, and a word cluster symbol using a K-means algorithm from a word vector. We use the word vector and word cluster symbol as word embedding features in Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). From the result of the experiment, performance improved 1.17%, 0.61% and 1.19% respectively for TV domain, Sports domain and IT domain over the baseline system. Showing better performance than other NERC systems, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

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