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.

Abstract: Deep learning has provided promising results in various applications; however, algorithms tend to be overconfident in their predictions, even though they may be entirely wrong. Particularly for critical applications, the model should provide answers only when it is very sure of them. This article presents a Bayesian version of two different state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods to perform multi-class segmentation of foods and estimate the uncertainty about the given predictions. The proposed methods were evaluated on three public pixel-annotated food datasets. As a result, we can conclude that Bayesian methods improve the performance achieved by the baseline architectures and, in addition, provide information to improve decision-making. Furthermore, based on the extracted uncertainty map, we proposed three measures to rank the images according to the degree of noisy annotations they contained. Note that the top 135 images ranked by one of these measures include more than half of the worst-labeled food images.

Abstract: Vascular tortuosity of supra-aortic vessels is widely considered one of the main reasons for failure and delays in endovascular treatment of large vessel occlusion in patients with acute ischemic stroke. Characterization of tortuosity is a challenging task due to the lack of objective, robust and effective analysis tools. We present a fully automatic method for arterial segmentation, vessel labelling and tortuosity feature extraction applied to the supra-aortic region. A sample of 566 computed tomography angiography scans from acute ischemic stroke patients (aged 74.8 ± 12.9, 51.0% females) were used for training, validation and testing of a segmentation module based on a U-Net architecture (162 cases) and a vessel labelling module powered by a graph U-Net (566 cases). Successively, 30 cases were processed for testing of a tortuosity feature extraction module. Measurements obtained through automatic processing were compared to manual annotations from two observers for a thorough validation of the method. The proposed feature extraction method presented similar performance to the inter-rater variability observed in the measurement of 33 geometrical and morphological features of the arterial anatomy in the supra-aortic region. This system will contribute to the development of more complex models to advance the treatment of stroke by adding immediate automation, objectivity, repeatability and robustness to the vascular tortuosity characterization of patients.