Sturge-Weber syndrome (SWS) is a vascular malformation disease, and it may cause blindness if the patient's condition is severe. Clinical results show that SWS can be divided into two types based on the characteristics of scleral blood vessels. Therefore, how to accurately segment scleral blood vessels has become a significant problem in computer-aided diagnosis. In this research, we propose to continuously upsample the bottom layer's feature maps to preserve image details, and design a novel Claw UNet based on UNet for scleral blood vessel segmentation. Specifically, the residual structure is used to increase the number of network layers in the feature extraction stage to learn deeper features. In the decoding stage, by fusing the features of the encoding, upsampling, and decoding parts, Claw UNet can achieve effective segmentation in the fine-grained regions of scleral blood vessels. To effectively extract small blood vessels, we use the attention mechanism to calculate the attention coefficient of each position in images. Claw UNet outperforms other UNet-based networks on scleral blood vessel image dataset.
Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) in plants are crucial for understanding biological processes. Although high-throughput techniques produced valuable information to identify PPIs in plants, they are usually expensive, inefficient, and extremely time-consuming. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop novel computational methods to predict PPIs in plants. In this article, we proposed a novel approach to predict PPIs in plants only using the information of protein sequences. Specifically, plants’ protein sequences are first converted as position-specific scoring matrix (PSSM); then, the fast Walsh–Hadamard transform (FWHT) algorithm is used to extract feature vectors from PSSM to obtain evolutionary information of plant proteins. Lastly, the rotation forest (RF) classifier is trained for prediction and produced a series of evaluation results. In this work, we named this approach FWHT-RF because FWHT and RF are used for feature extraction and classification, respectively. When applying FWHT-RF on three plants’ PPI datasets Maize, Rice, and Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis), the average accuracies of FWHT-RF using 5-fold cross validation were achieved as high as 95.20%, 94.42%, and 83.85%, respectively. To further evaluate the predictive power of FWHT-RF, we compared it with the state-of-art support vector machine (SVM) and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier in different aspects. The experimental results demonstrated that FWHT-RF can be a useful supplementary method to predict potential PPIs in plants.
An intelligent encoding/decoding scheme for barcodes is studied that can realize transformation among different barcodes under external stimuli. The proposed scheme is compatible with the European Article Number (EAN)‐13 encoding/decoding system. First, the transformation mechanism among different barcodes is analyzed. Two different transformation strategies, the bar transformation and the background color transformation, are discussed. To demonstrate the possible applications, a temperature‐sensitive barcode tag (TSBT) and pH‐indicative barcode tag (PSBT) are developed by embedding the corresponding thermochromic and pH‐sensitive materials into the traditional EAN‐13 barcodes. Except for the conventional identification function, these tags can be used as environmental sensors to sense temperature and pH values. The maximum recognition rates of the TSBT and PSBT are 100% and 98%, respectively. The technology is universal and versatile because different kinds of sensitive tags can be constructed easily. This sensitive barcode technology can be expected to provide an efficient, accurate, and low‐cost solution to real‐time detection.
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