Clinical imaging (e.g., magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography) is a crucial adjunct for clinicians, aiding in the diagnosis of diseases and planning of appropriate interventions. This is especially true in malignant conditions such as hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), where image segmentation (such as accurate delineation of liver and tumor) is the preliminary step taken by the clinicians to optimize diagnosis, staging, and treatment planning and intervention (e.g., transplantation, surgical resection, radiotherapy, PVE, embolization, etc). Thus, segmentation methods could potentially impact the diagnosis and treatment outcomes. This paper comprehensively reviews the literature (during the year 2012–2021) for relevant segmentation methods and proposes a broad categorization based on their clinical utility (i.e., surgical and radiological interventions) in HCC. The categorization is based on the parameters such as precision, accuracy, and automation.
Segmentation of abdominal Computed Tomography (CT) scan is essential for analyzing, diagnosing, and treating visceral organ diseases (e.g., hepatocellular carcinoma). This paper proposes a novel neural network (Res-PAC-UNet) that employs a fixed-width residual UNet backbone and Pyramid Atrous Convolutions, providing a low disk utilization method for precise liver CT segmentation. The proposed network is trained on medical segmentation decathlon dataset using a modified surface loss function. Additionally, we evaluate its quantitative and qualitative performance; the Res16-PAC-UNet achieves a Dice coefficient of 0.950 ± 0.019 with less than half a million parameters. Alternatively, the Res32-PAC-UNet obtains a Dice coefficient of 0.958 ± 0.015 with an acceptable parameter count of approximately 1.2 million.
Computational drug repurposing is an efficient method to utilize existing knowledge for understanding and predicting their effect on neurological diseases. The ability of a molecule to cross the blood-brain barrier is a primary criteria for effective therapy. Thus, accurate predictions by employing Machine learning models can effectively identify the drug candidates that could be repurposed for neurological conditions. This study comprehensively analyzes the performance of the well-known machine learning models on two different datasets to overcome dataset-related biases. We found that random forest and extratrees (i.e., tree-based ensembled models) have the highest accuracy with mol2vec fingerprint for BBB permeability prediction, attaining AUC_ROC of 0.9453 and 0.9601 on BBB and B3DB dataset, respectively. Additionally, we have analyzed the impact of the data balancing technique (i.e., SMOTE) to improve the specificity of the models. Finally, we have explored the impact of different fingerprint combinations on accuracy. By employing SMOTE and fingerprint combination, SVC attains the highest AUC_ROC of 0.9511 on BBB dataset. Finally, we used the best-performing models of the B3DB dataset to evaluate the BBB permeability for drugs intended to be used for repurposing. Model validation for repurposing predicted the non-passage for most antihypertensive drugs and passage for CYP17A1 cancer drugs.INDEX TERMS Blood brain barrier, drug permeability, drug repurposing, empirical study, machine learning.
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