BLCov: A novel collaborative-competitive broad learning system for COVID-19 detection from radiology images

Employing broad learning and non-invasive risk factor to improve the early diagnosis of metabolic syndrome

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) as a multifactorial disease is highly prevalent in countries and individuals. Monitoring the conventional risk factors (CRFs) would be a cost-effective strategy to target the increasing prevalence of MetS and the potential of noninvasive CRF for precisely detection of MetS in the early stage remains to be explored. From large-scale multicenter MetS clinical dataset, we discover 15 non-invasive CRFs which have strong relevance with MetS and first propose a broad learning-based approach named Genetic Programming Collaborative-competitive Broad Learning System (GP-CCBLS) with noninvasive CRF for early detection of MetS. The proposed GP-CCBLS model can significantly boost the detection performance and achieve the accuracy of 80.54%. This study supports the potential clinical validity of noninvasive CRF to complement general diagnostic criteria for early detecting the MetS and also illustrates possible strength of broad learning in disease diagnosis comparing with other machine learning approaches.

CDRNet: Cascaded dense residual network for grayscale and pseudocolor medical image fusion

OBJECTIVE

Multimodal medical fusion images have been widely used in clinical medicine, computer-aided diagnosis and other fields. However, the existing multimodal medical image fusion algorithms generally have shortcomings such as complex calculations, blurred details and poor adaptability. To solve this problem, we propose a cascaded dense residual network and use it for grayscale and pseudocolor medical image fusion.

METHODS

The cascaded dense residual network uses a multiscale dense network and a residual network as the basic network architecture, and a multilevel converged network is obtained through cascade. The cascaded dense residual network contains 3 networks, the first-level network inputs two images with different modalities to obtain a fused Image 1, the second-level network uses fused Image 1 as the input image to obtain fused Image 2 and the third-level network uses fused Image 2 as the input image to obtain fused Image 3. The multimodal medical image is trained through each level of the network, and the output fusion image is enhanced step-by-step.

RESULTS

As the number of networks increases, the fusion image becomes increasingly clearer. Through numerous fusion experiments, the fused images of the proposed algorithm have higher edge strength, richer details, and better performance in the objective indicators than the reference algorithms.

CONCLUSION

Compared with the reference algorithms, the proposed algorithm has better original information, higher edge strength, richer details and an improvement of the four objective SF, AG, MZ and EN indicator metrics.

Broad learning for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease using FDG-PET of the brain

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease, and the development of AD is irreversible. However, preventive measures in the presymptomatic stage of AD can effectively slow down deterioration. Fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) can detect the metabolism of glucose in patients' brains, which can help to identify changes related to AD before brain damage occurs. Machine learning is useful for early diagnosis of patients with AD using FDG-PET, but it requires a sufficiently large dataset, and it is easy for overfitting to occur in small datasets. Previous studies using machine learning for early diagnosis with FDG-PET have either involved the extraction of elaborately handcrafted features or validation on a small dataset, and few studies have explored the refined classification of early mild cognitive impairment (EMCI) and late mild cognitive impairment (LMCI). This article presents a broad network-based model for early diagnosis of AD (BLADNet) through PET imaging of the brain; this method employs a novel broad neural network to enhance the features of FDG-PET extracted via 2D CNN. BLADNet can search for information over a broad space through the addition of new BLS blocks without retraining of the whole network, thus improving the accuracy of AD classification. Experiments conducted on a dataset containing 2,298 FDG-PET images of 1,045 subjects from the ADNI database demonstrate that our methods are superior to those used in previous studies on early diagnosis of AD with FDG-PET. In particular, our methods achieved state-of-the-art results in EMCI and LMCI classification with FDG-PET.