Md Kawsar Ahmed

Md. Iqbal Hossain, Mohammad Zunaed, Md. Kawsar Ahmed et al.

Objective: Computer-aided disease diagnosis and prognosis based on medical images is a rapidly emerging field. Many Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures have been developed by researchers for disease classification and localization from chest X-ray images. It is known that different thoracic disease lesions are more likely to occur in specific anatomical regions compared to others. This article aims to incorporate this disease and region-dependent prior probability distribution within a deep learning framework. Methods: We present the ThoraX-PriorNet, a novel attention-based CNN model for thoracic disease classification. We first estimate a disease-dependent spatial probability, i.e., an anatomical prior, that indicates the probability of occurrence of a disease in a specific region in a chest X-ray image. Next, we develop a novel attention-based classification model that combines information from the estimated anatomical prior and automatically extracted chest region of interest (ROI) masks to provide attention to the feature maps generated from a deep convolution network. Unlike previous works that utilize various self-attention mechanisms, the proposed method leverages the extracted chest ROI masks along with the probabilistic anatomical prior information, which selects the region of interest for different diseases to provide attention. Results: The proposed method shows superior performance in disease classification on the NIH ChestX-ray14 dataset compared to existing state-of-the-art methods while reaching an area under the ROC curve (%AUC) of 84.67. Regarding disease localization, the anatomy prior attention method shows competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, achieving an accuracy of 0.80, 0.63, 0.49, 0.33, 0.28, 0.21, and 0.04 with an Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold of 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, and 0.7, respectively.

Md Sohag Mia, Abdullah Al Bary Voban, Abu Bakor Hayat Arnob et al.

Efficient and accurate detection of small objects in manufacturing settings, such as defects and cracks, is crucial for ensuring product quality and safety. To address this issue, we proposed a comprehensive strategy by synergizing Faster R-CNN with cutting-edge methods. By combining Faster R-CNN with Feature Pyramid Network, we enable the model to efficiently handle multi-scale features intrinsic to manufacturing environments. Additionally, Deformable Net is used that contorts and conforms to the geometric variations of defects, bringing precision in detecting even the minuscule and complex features. Then, we incorporated an attention mechanism called Convolutional Block Attention Module in each block of our base ResNet50 network to selectively emphasize informative features and suppress less useful ones. After that we incorporated RoI Align, replacing RoI Pooling for finer region-of-interest alignment and finally the integration of Focal Loss effectively handles class imbalance, crucial for rare defect occurrences. The rigorous evaluation of our model on both the NEU-DET and Pascal VOC datasets underscores its robust performance and generalization capabilities. On the NEU-DET dataset, our model exhibited a profound understanding of steel defects, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy in identifying various defects. Simultaneously, when evaluated on the Pascal VOC dataset, our model showcases its ability to detect objects across a wide spectrum of categories within complex and small scenes.