Abstract: Major advances have recently been made in merging language and vision representations. Most tasks considered so far have confined themselves to the processing of objects and lexicalised relations amongst objects (content words). We know, however, that humans (even pre-school children) can abstract over raw multimodal data to perform certain types of higher level reasoning, expressed in natural language by function words. A case in point is given by their ability to learn quantifiers, i.e. expressions like few, some and all. From formal semantics and cognitive linguistics, we know that quantifiers are relations over sets which, as a simplification, we can see as proportions. For instance, in most fish are red, most encodes the proportion of fish which are red fish. In this paper, we study how well current neural network strategies model such relations. We propose a task where, given an image and a query expressed by an object–property pair, the system must return a quantifier expressing which proportions of the queried object have the queried property. Our contributions are twofold. First, we show that the best performance on this task involves coupling state-of-the-art attention mechanisms with a network architecture mirroring the logical structure assigned to quantifiers by classic linguistic formalisation. Second, we introduce a new balanced dataset of image scenarios associated with quantification queries, which we hope will foster further research in this area.

Abstract: The most common tool for population-wide COVID-19 identification is the Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction test that detects the presence of the virus in the throat (or sputum) in swab samples. This test has a sensitivity between 59% and 71%. However, this test does not provide precise information regarding the extension of the pulmonary infection. Moreover, it has been proven that through the reading of a computed tomography (CT) scan, a clinician can provide a more complete perspective of the severity of the disease. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive system for fully-automated COVID-19 detection and lesion segmentation from CT scans, powered by deep learning strategies to support decision-making process for the diagnosis of COVID-19.

Abstract: Multi-modal medical image fusion plays an important role in clinical diagnosis and works as an assistance model for clinicians. In this paper, a computed tomography-magnetic resonance (CT-MR) image fusion model is proposed using an optimized bio-inspired spiking feedforward neural network in different decomposition domains. First, source images are decomposed into base (low-frequency) and detail (high-frequency) layer components. Low-frequency subbands are fused using texture energy measures to capture the local energy, contrast, and small edges in the fused image. High-frequency coefficients are fused using firing maps obtained by pixel-activated neural model with the optimized parameters using three different optimization techniques such as differential evolution, cuckoo search, and gray wolf optimization, individually. In the optimization model, a fitness function is computed based on the edge index of resultant fused images, which helps to extract and preserve sharp edges available in the source CT and MR images. To validate the fusion performance, a detailed comparative analysis is presented among the proposed and state-of-the-art methods in terms of quantitative and qualitative measures along with computational complexity. Experimental results show that the proposed method produces a significantly better visual quality of fused images meanwhile outperforms the existing methods.