The use of intraoral ultrasound imaging has received great attention recently due to the benefits of being a portable and low-cost imaging solution for initial and continuing care that is noninvasive and free of ionizing radiation. Alveolar bone is an important structure in the periodontal apparatus to support the tooth. Accurate assessment of alveolar bone level is essential for periodontal diagnosis. However, interpretation of alveolar bone structure in ultrasound images is a challenge for clinicians. This work is aimed at automatically segmenting alveolar bone and locating the alveolar crest via a machine learning (ML) approach for intraoral ultrasound images. Three convolutional neural network–based ML methods were trained, validated, and tested with 700, 200, and 200 images, respectively. To improve the robustness of the ML algorithms, a data augmentation approach was introduced, where 2100 additional images were synthesized through vertical and horizontal shifting as well as horizontal flipping during the training process. Quantitative evaluations of 200 images, as compared with an expert clinician, showed that the best ML approach yielded an average Dice score of 85.3%, sensitivity of 88.5%, and specificity of 99.8%, and identified the alveolar crest with a mean difference of 0.20 mm and excellent reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient ≥0.98) in less than a second. This work demonstrated the potential use of ML to assist general dentists and specialists in the visualization of alveolar bone in ultrasound images.
Accurately assessing the air quality index (AQI) values and levels has become an attractive research topic during the last decades. It is a crucial aspect when studying the possible adverse health effects associated with current air quality conditions. This paper aims to utilize machine learning and an appropriate selection of attributes for the air quality estimation problem using various features, including sensor data (humidity, temperature), timestamp features, location features, and public weather data. We evaluated the performance of different learning models and features to study the problem using the data set “MNR-HCM II”. The experimental results show that adopting TLPW features with Stacking generalization yields higher overall performance than other techniques and features in RMSE, accuracy, and F1-score.
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