Danni Chen

Nianzu Yang, Kaipeng Zeng, Haotian Lu et al.

Neuronal morphology is essential for studying brain functioning and understanding neurodegenerative disorders. As acquiring real-world morphology data is expensive, computational approaches for morphology generation have been studied. Traditional methods heavily rely on expert-set rules and parameter tuning, making it difficult to generalize across different types of morphologies. Recently, MorphVAE was introduced as the sole learning-based method, but its generated morphologies lack plausibility, i.e., they do not appear realistic enough and most of the generated samples are topologically invalid. To fill this gap, this paper proposes MorphGrower, which mimicks the neuron natural growth mechanism for generation. Specifically, MorphGrower generates morphologies layer by layer, with each subsequent layer conditioned on the previously generated structure. During each layer generation, MorphGrower utilizes a pair of sibling branches as the basic generation block and generates branch pairs synchronously. This approach ensures topological validity and allows for fine-grained generation, thereby enhancing the realism of the final generated morphologies. Results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that MorphGrower outperforms MorphVAE by a notable margin. Importantly, the electrophysiological response simulation demonstrates the plausibility of our generated samples from a neuroscience perspective. Our code is available at https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/MorphGrower.

Yiting Wei, Bingo Wing-Kuen Ling, Danni Chen et al.

Recently, the wearable and non-invasive blood glucose estimation approach has been proposed. However, due to the unreliability of the acquisition device, the presence of the noise and the variations of the acquisition environments, the obtained features and the reference blood glucose values are highly unreliable. To address this issue, this paper proposes a polynomial fitting approach to smooth the obtained features or the reference blood glucose values. First, the blood glucose values are estimated based on the individual optimization approaches. Second, the absolute difference values between the estimated blood glucose values and the actual blood glucose values based on each optimization approach are computed. Third, these absolute difference values for each optimization approach are sorted in the ascending order. Fourth, for each sorted blood glucose value, the optimization method corresponding to the minimum absolute difference value is selected. Fifth, the accumulate probability of each selected optimization method is computed. If the accumulate probability of any selected optimization method at a point is greater than a threshold value, then the accumulate probabilities of these three selected optimization methods at that point are reset to zero. A range of the sorted blood glucose values are defined as that with the corresponding boundaries points being the previous reset point and this reset point. Hence, after performing the above procedures for all the sorted reference blood glucose values in the validation set, the regions of the sorted reference blood glucose values and the corresponding optimization methods in these regions are determined. The computer numerical simulation results show that our proposed method yields the mean absolute relative deviation (MARD) at 0.0930 and the percentage of the test data falling in the zone A of the Clarke error grid at 94.1176%.

Xianghua Ye, Dazhou Guo, Chen-kan Tseng et al.

Background: The current clinical workflow for esophageal gross tumor volume (GTV) contouring relies on manual delineation of high labor-costs and interuser variability. Purpose: To validate the clinical applicability of a deep learning (DL) multi-modality esophageal GTV contouring model, developed at 1 institution whereas tested at multiple ones. Methods and Materials: We collected 606 esophageal cancer patients from four institutions. 252 institution-1 patients had a treatment planning-CT (pCT) and a pair of diagnostic FDG-PETCT; 354 patients from other 3 institutions had only pCT. A two-streamed DL model for GTV segmentation was developed using pCT and PETCT scans of a 148 patient institution-1 subset. This built model had the flexibility of segmenting GTVs via only pCT or pCT+PETCT combined. For independent evaluation, the rest 104 institution-1 patients behaved as unseen internal testing, and 354 institutions 2-4 patients were used for external testing. We evaluated manual revision degrees by human experts to assess the contour-editing effort. The performance of the deep model was compared against 4 radiation oncologists in a multiuser study with 20 random external patients. Contouring accuracy and time were recorded for the pre-and post-DL assisted delineation process. Results: Our model achieved high segmentation accuracy in internal testing (mean Dice score: 0.81 using pCT and 0.83 using pCT+PET) and generalized well to external evaluation (mean DSC: 0.80). Expert assessment showed that the predicted contours of 88% patients need only minor or no revision. In multi-user evaluation, with the assistance of a deep model, inter-observer variation and required contouring time were reduced by 37.6% and 48.0%, respectively. Conclusions: Deep learning predicted GTV contours were in close agreement with the ground truth and could be adopted clinically with mostly minor or no changes.