Echocardiography is one the most commonly used imaging modalities for the diagnosis of congenital heart disease. Echocardiographic image analysis is crucial to obtaining accurate cardiac anatomy information. Semantic segmentation models can be used to precisely delimit the borders of the left ventricle, and allow an accurate and automatic identification of the region of interest, which can be extremely useful for cardiologists. In the field of computer vision, convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures remain dominant. Existing CNN approaches have proved highly efficient for the segmentation of various medical images over the past decade. However, these solutions usually struggle to capture long-range dependencies, especially when it comes to images with objects of different scales and complex structures. In this study, we present an efficient method for semantic segmentation of echocardiographic images that overcomes these challenges by leveraging the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer architecture. The proposed solution extracts long-range dependencies and efficiently processes objects at different scales, improving performance in a variety of tasks. We introduce Shifted Windows Transformer models (Swin Transformers), which encode both the content of anatomical structures and the relationship between them. Our solution combines the Swin Transformer and U-Net architectures, producing a U-shaped variant. The validation of the proposed method is performed with the EchoNet-Dynamic dataset used to train our model. The results show an accuracy of 0.97, a Dice coefficient of 0.87, and an Intersection over union (IoU) of 0.78. Swin Transformer models are promising for semantically segmenting echocardiographic images and may help assist cardiologists in automatically analyzing and measuring complex echocardiographic images.

Deep learning has recently made significant progress in semantic segmentation. However, the current methods face critical challenges. The segmentation process often lacks sufficient contextual information and attention mechanisms, low-level features lack semantic richness, and high-level features suffer from poor resolution. These limitations reduce the model\'s ability to accurately understand and process scene details, particularly in complex scenarios, leading to segmentation outputs that may have inaccuracies in boundary delineation, misclassification of regions, and poor handling of small or overlapping objects. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Semantic Segmentation Network Based on Adaptive Attention and Deep Fusion with the Multi-Scale Dilated Convolutional Pyramid (SDAMNet). Specifically, the Dilated Convolutional Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (DCASPP) module is developed to enhance contextual information in semantic segmentation. Additionally, a Semantic Channel Space Details Module (SCSDM) is devised to improve the extraction of significant features through multi-scale feature fusion and adaptive feature selection, enhancing the model\'s perceptual capability for key regions and optimizing semantic understanding and segmentation performance. Furthermore, a Semantic Features Fusion Module (SFFM) is constructed to address the semantic deficiency in low-level features and the low resolution in high-level features. The effectiveness of SDAMNet is demonstrated on two datasets, revealing significant improvements in Mean Intersection over Union (MIOU) by 2.89% and 2.13%, respectively, compared to the Deeplabv3+ network.

Most real-time semantic segmentation networks use shallow architectures to achieve fast inference speeds. This approach, however, limits a network\'s receptive field. Concurrently, feature information extraction is restricted to a single scale, which reduces the network\'s ability to generalize and maintain robustness. Furthermore, loss of image spatial details negatively impacts segmentation accuracy. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Multiscale Context Pyramid Pooling and Spatial Detail Enhancement Network (BMSeNet). First, to address the limitation of singular semantic feature scales, a Multiscale Context Pyramid Pooling Module (MSCPPM) is introduced. By leveraging various pooling operations, this module efficiently enlarges the receptive field and better aggregates multiscale contextual information. Moreover, a Spatial Detail Enhancement Module (SDEM) is designed, to effectively compensate for lost spatial detail information and significantly enhance the perception of spatial details. Finally, a Bilateral Attention Fusion Module (BAFM) is proposed. This module leverages pixel positional correlations to guide the network in assigning appropriate weights to the features extracted from the two branches, effectively merging the feature information of both branches. Extensive experiments were conducted on the Cityscapes and CamVid datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed BMSeNet achieves a good balance between inference speed and segmentation accuracy, outperforming some state-of-the-art real-time semantic segmentation methods.

Railway transportation has been integrated into people\'s lives. According to the \"Notice on the release of the General Technical Specification of High-speed Railway Power Supply Safety Testing (6C System) System\" issued by the National Railway Administration of China in 2012, it is required to install pantograph and slide monitoring devices in high-speed railway stations, station throats and the inlet and exit lines of high-speed railway sections, and it is required to detect the damage of the slider with high precision. It can be seen that the good condition of the pantograph slider is very important for the normal operation of the railway system. As a part of providing power for high-speed rail and subway, the pantograph must be paid attention to in railway transportation to ensure its integrity. The wear of the pantograph is mainly due to the contact power supply between the slide block and the long wire during high-speed operation, which inevitably produces scratches, resulting in depressions on the upper surface of the pantograph slide block. During long-term use, because the depression is too deep, there is a risk of fracture. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor the slider regularly and replace the slider with serious wear. At present, most of the traditional methods use automation technology or simple computer vision technology for detection, which is inefficient. Therefore, this paper introduces computer vision and deep learning technology into pantograph slide wear detection. Specifically, this paper mainly studies the wear detection of the pantograph slider based on deep learning and the main purpose is to improve the detection accuracy and improve the effect of segmentation. From a methodological perspective, this paper employs a linear array camera to enhance the quality of the data sets. Additionally, it integrates an attention mechanism to improve segmentation performance. Furthermore, this study introduces a novel image stitching method to address issues related to incomplete images, thereby providing a comprehensive solution.

OBJECTIVE: To develop an automatic segmentation model for solid renal tumors on contrast-enhanced CTs and to visualize segmentation with associated confidence to promote clinical applicability.
METHODS: The training dataset included solid renal tumor patients from two tertiary centers undergoing surgical resection and receiving CT in the corticomedullary or nephrogenic contrast media (CM) phase. Manual tumor segmentation was performed on all axial CT slices serving as reference standard for automatic segmentations. Independent testing was performed on the publicly available KiTS 2019 dataset. Ensembles of neural networks (ENN, DeepLabV3) were used for automatic renal tumor segmentation, and their performance was quantified with DICE score. ENN average foreground entropy measured segmentation confidence (binary: successful segmentation with DICE score > 0.8 versus inadequate segmentation ≤ 0.8).
RESULTS: N = 639/n = 210 patients were included in the training and independent test dataset. Datasets were comparable regarding age and sex (p > 0.05), while renal tumors in the training dataset were larger and more frequently benign (p < 0.01). In the internal test dataset, the ENN model yielded a median DICE score = 0.84 (IQR: 0.62-0.97, corticomedullary) and 0.86 (IQR: 0.77-0.96, nephrogenic CM phase), and the segmentation confidence an AUC = 0.89 (sensitivity = 0.86; specificity = 0.77). In the independent test dataset, the ENN model achieved a median DICE score = 0.84 (IQR: 0.71-0.97, corticomedullary CM phase); and segmentation confidence an accuracy = 0.84 (sensitivity = 0.86 and specificity = 0.81). ENN segmentations were visualized with color-coded voxelwise tumor probabilities and thresholds superimposed on clinical CT images.
CONCLUSIONS: ENN-based renal tumor segmentation robustly performs in external test data and might aid in renal tumor classification and treatment planning.
CONCLUSIONS: Ensembles of neural networks (ENN) models could automatically segment renal tumors on routine CTs, enabling and standardizing downstream image analyses and treatment planning. Providing confidence measures and segmentation overlays on images can lower the threshold for clinical ENN implementation.
CONCLUSIONS: Ensembles of neural networks (ENN) segmentation is visualized by color-coded voxelwise tumor probabilities and thresholds. ENN provided a high segmentation accuracy in internal testing and in an independent external test dataset. ENN models provide measures of segmentation confidence which can robustly discriminate between successful and inadequate segmentations.

Echocardiography is a key tool for the diagnosis of cardiac diseases, and accurate left ventricular (LV) segmentation in echocardiographic videos is crucial for the assessment of cardiac function. However, since semantic segmentation of video needs to take into account the temporal correlation between frames, this makes the task very challenging. This article introduces an innovative method that incorporates a modified mixed attention mechanism into the SegFormer architecture, enabling it to effectively grasp the temporal correlation present in video data. The proposed method processes each time series by encoding the image input into the encoder to obtain the current time feature map. This map, along with the historical time feature map, is then fed into a time-sensitive mixed attention mechanism type of convolution block attention module (TCBAM). Its output can serve as the historical time feature map for the subsequent sequence, and a combination of the current time feature map and historical time feature map for the current sequence. The processed feature map is then input into the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and subsequent networks to generate the final segmented image. Through extensive experiments conducted on two different datasets: Hamad Medical Corporation, Tampere University, and Qatar University (HMC-QU), Cardiac Acquisitions for Multi-structure Ultrasound Segmentation (CAMUS) and Sunnybrook Cardiac Data (SCD), achieving a Dice coefficient of 97.92 % on the SCD dataset and an F1 score of 0.9263 on the CAMUS dataset, outperforming all other models. This research provides a promising solution to the temporal modeling challenge in video semantic segmentation tasks using transformer-based models and points out a promising direction for future research in this field.

BACKGROUND: Fluorescence microscopy (FM) is an important and widely adopted biological imaging technique. Segmentation is often the first step in quantitative analysis of FM images. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become the state-of-the-art tools for image segmentation. However, their performance on natural images may collapse under certain image corruptions or adversarial attacks. This poses real risks to their deployment in real-world applications. Although the robustness of DNN models in segmenting natural images has been studied extensively, their robustness in segmenting FM images remains poorly understood RESULTS: To address this deficiency, we have developed an assay that benchmarks robustness of DNN segmentation models using datasets of realistic synthetic 2D FM images with precisely controlled corruptions or adversarial attacks. Using this assay, we have benchmarked robustness of ten representative models such as DeepLab and Vision Transformer. We find that models with good robustness on natural images may perform poorly on FM images. We also find new robustness properties of DNN models and new connections between their corruption robustness and adversarial robustness. To further assess the robustness of the selected models, we have also benchmarked them on real microscopy images of different modalities without using simulated degradation. The results are consistent with those obtained on the realistic synthetic images, confirming the fidelity and reliability of our image synthesis method as well as the effectiveness of our assay.
CONCLUSIONS: Based on comprehensive benchmarking experiments, we have found distinct robustness properties of deep neural networks in semantic segmentation of FM images. Based on the findings, we have made specific recommendations on selection and design of robust models for FM image segmentation.

Autonomous Vehicles (AV\'s) have achieved more popularity in vehicular technology in recent years. For the development of secure and safe driving, these AV\'s help to reduce the uncertainties such as crashes, heavy traffic, pedestrian behaviours, random objects, lane detection, different types of roads and their surrounding environments. In AV\'s, Lane Detection is one of the most important aspects which helps in lane holding guidance and lane departure warning. From Literature, it is observed that existing deep learning models perform better on well maintained roads and in favourable weather conditions. However, performance in extreme weather conditions and curvy roads need focus. The proposed work focuses on presenting an accurate lane detection approach on poor roads, particularly those with curves, broken lanes, or no lane markings and extreme weather conditions. Lane Detection with Convolutional Attention Mechanism (LD-CAM) model is proposed to achieve this outcome. The proposed method comprises an encoder, an enhanced convolution block attention module (E-CBAM), and a decoder. The encoder unit extracts the input image features, while the E-CBAM focuses on quality of feature maps in input images extracted from the encoder, and the decoder provides output without loss of any information in the original image. The work is carried out using the distinct data from three datasets called Tusimple for different weather condition images, Curve Lanes for different curve lanes images and Cracks and Potholes for damaged road images. The proposed model trained using these datasets showcased an improved performance attaining an Accuracy of 97.90%, Precision of 98.92%, F1-Score of 97.90%, IoU of 98.50% and Dice Co-efficient as 98.80% on both structured and defective roads in extreme weather conditions.

Typically, deep learning models for image segmentation tasks are trained using large datasets of images annotated at the pixel level, which can be expensive and highly time-consuming. A way to reduce the amount of annotated images required for training is to adopt a semi-supervised approach. In this regard, generative deep learning models, concretely Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have been adapted to semi-supervised training of segmentation tasks. This work proposes MaskGDM, a deep learning architecture combining some ideas from EditGAN, a GAN that jointly models images and their segmentations, together with a generative diffusion model. With careful integration, we find that using a generative diffusion model can improve EditGAN performance results in multiple segmentation datasets, both multi-class and with binary labels. According to the quantitative results obtained, the proposed model improves multi-class image segmentation when compared to the EditGAN and DatasetGAN models, respectively, by [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. Moreover, using the ISIC dataset, our proposal improves the results from other models by up to [Formula: see text] for the binary image segmentation approach.

Skin surface imaging has been used to examine skin lesions with a microscope for over a century and is commonly known as epiluminescence microscopy, dermatoscopy, or dermoscopy. Skin surface microscopy has been recommended to reduce the necessity of biopsy. This imaging technique could improve the clinical diagnostic performance of pigmented skin lesions. Different imaging techniques are employed in dermatology to find diseases. Segmentation and classification are the two main steps in the examination. The classification performance is influenced by the algorithm employed in the segmentation procedure. The most difficult aspect of segmentation is getting rid of the unwanted artifacts. Many deep-learning models are being created to segment skin lesions. In this paper, an analysis of common artifacts is proposed to investigate the segmentation performance of deep learning models with skin surface microscopic images. The most prevalent artifacts in skin images are hair and dark corners. These artifacts can be observed in the majority of dermoscopy images captured through various imaging techniques. While hair detection and removal methods are common, the introduction of dark corner detection and removal represents a novel approach to skin lesion segmentation. A comprehensive analysis of this segmentation performance is assessed using the surface density of artifacts. Assessment of the PH2, ISIC 2017, and ISIC 2018 datasets demonstrates significant enhancements, as reflected by Dice coefficients rising to 93.49 (86.81), 85.86 (79.91), and 75.38 (51.28) respectively, upon artifact removal. These results underscore the pivotal significance of artifact removal techniques in amplifying the efficacy of deep-learning models for skin lesion segmentation.