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Automatic skin lesion segmentation in dermoscopic images is a challenging task due to the low contrast between lesion and the surrounding skin, the irregular and fuzzy lesion borders, the existence of various artifacts, and various imaging acquisition conditions. In this paper, we present a fully automatic method for skin lesion segmentation by leveraging 19-layer deep convolutional neural networks that is trained end-to-end and does not rely on prior knowledge of the data. We propose a set of strategies to ensure effective and efficient learning with limited training data. Furthermore, we design a novel loss function based on Jaccard distance to eliminate the need of sample re-weighting, a typical procedure when using cross entropy as the loss function for image segmentation due to the strong imbalance between the number of foreground and background pixels. We evaluated the effectiveness, efficiency, as well as the generalization capability of the proposed framework on two publicly available databases. One is from ISBI 2016 skin lesion analysis towards melanoma detection challenge, and the other is the PH2 database. Experimental results showed that the proposed method outperformed other state-of-the-art algorithms on these two databases. Our method is general enough and only needs minimum pre- and post-processing, which allows its adoption in a variety of medical image segmentation tasks.

Using 116.1 fb(-1) of data collected by the BABAR detector, we present an analysis of xi(c)(0) production in B decays and from the cc continuum, with the xi(c)(0) decaying into omega- K+ and xi- pi+ final states. We measure the ratio of branching fractions B(xi(c)(0) --> omega- K+)/B(xi(c)(0) --> xi- pi+) spectrum is measured on and 40 MeV below the upsilon(4S) resonance. From these spectra the branching fraction product B(B --> xi(c)(0)X) x B(xi(c)(0) --> xi- pi+) is measured to be (2.11 +/- 0.19 +/- 0.25) x 10(-4), and the cross-section product sigma(e+ e- --> xi(c)(0)X) x B(xi(c)(0) --> xi- pi+) from the continuum is measured to be (388 +/- 39 +/- 41) fb at a center-of-mass energy of 10.58 GeV.

We report measurements of the inclusive electron momentum spectra in decays of charged and neutral B mesons, and of the ratio of semileptonic branching fractions BB ! Xe and BB 0 ! Xe. These were performed on a sample of 231 10 6 B B events recorded with the BABAR detector at the 4S resonance. Events are selected by fully reconstructing a hadronic decay of one B meson and identifying an electron among the decay products of the recoiling B meson. We obtain BB ! Xe=BB 0 ! Xe 1:074 0:041 stat 0:026 syst .

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