We developed a CAD system using a CNN algorithm for the fully automated detection of prostate cancer using MRI, which has the potential to provide reproducible interpretation and a greater level of standardisation and consistency.

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We propose a new constrained optimization approach to hyperspectral (HS) image restoration. Most existing methods restore a desirable HS image by solving some optimization problems, consisting of a regularization term(s) and a data-fidelity term(s). The methods have to handle a regularization term(s) and a data-fidelity term(s) simultaneously in one objective function; therefore, we need to carefully control the hyperparameter(s) that balances these terms. However, the setting of such hyperparameters is often a troublesome task because their suitable values depend strongly on the regularization terms adopted and the noise intensities on a given observation. Our proposed method is formulated as a convex optimization problem, utilizing a novel hybrid regularization technique named Hybrid Spatio-Spectral Total Variation (HSSTV) and incorporating data-fidelity as hard constraints. HSSTV has a strong noise and artifact removal ability while avoiding oversmoothing and spectral distortion, without combining other regularizations such as low-rank modeling-based ones. In addition, the constraint-type data-fidelity enables us to translate the hyperparameters that balance between regularization and data-fidelity to the upper bounds of the degree of data-fidelity that can be set in a much easier manner. We also develop an efficient algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to efficiently solve the optimization problem. We illustrate the advantages of the proposed method over various HS image restoration methods through comprehensive experiments, including state-of-the-art ones.

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Background Recent increased use of medical images induces further burden of their interpretation for physicians. A plain X-ray is a low-cost examination that has low-dose radiation exposure and high availability, although diagnosing urolithiasis using this method is not always easy. Since the advent of a convolutional neural network via deep learning in the 2000s, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) has had a great impact on automatic image analysis in the urological field. The objective of our study was to develop a CAD system with deep learning architecture to detect urinary tract stones on a plain X-ray and to evaluate the model’s accuracy. Methods We collected plain X-ray images of 1017 patients with a radio-opaque upper urinary tract stone. X-ray images (n = 827 and 190) were used as the training and test data, respectively. We used a 17-layer Residual Network as a convolutional neural network architecture for patch-wise training. The training data were repeatedly used until the best model accuracy was achieved within 300 runs. The F score, which is a harmonic mean of the sensitivity and positive predictive value (PPV) and represents the balance of the accuracy, was measured to evaluate the model’s accuracy. Results Using deep learning, we developed a CAD model that needed 110 ms to provide an answer for each X-ray image. The best F score was 0.752, and the sensitivity and PPV were 0.872 and 0.662, respectively. When limited to a proximal ureter stone, the sensitivity and PPV were 0.925 and 0.876, respectively, and they were the lowest at mid-ureter. Conclusion CAD of a plain X-ray may be a promising method to detect radio-opaque urinary tract stones with satisfactory sensitivity although the PPV could still be improved. The CAD model detects urinary tract stones quickly and automatically and has the potential to become a helpful screening modality especially for primary care physicians for diagnosing urolithiasis. Further study using a higher volume of data would improve the diagnostic performance of CAD models to detect urinary tract stones on a plain X-ray.

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In this article, we propose an object tracking method using a neural network which represents the shape of an object based on the object's color information. We previously proposed a specific form of multiple-layered neural network which has a suitable structure to represent an object's shape. This network (shape representation network) originally has been developed to deal with black and white images but it is extended for color images in this article. SRN is capable of representing objects of various kinds of shape and color with the arbitrary degree of blurring. Its learning capability enables automatic model construction for various shapes including their color information. To perform object tracking with the color information, we introduced Mahalanobis distance in the color space and improved the tracking performance. Some experiments were performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed method using real image sequences.