Neural networks contribution in face mask detection to reduce the spread of COVID-19

In front of COVID-19 propagation, we can protect our self by taking precautionary measures such as wearing face masks. It may be mandatory in particular public place although some persons ignore this rule. Several research in face mask detection area have emerged and most of studies are based on deep learning. In this paper, we present a method to detect whether person wear a mask or not to prevent the propagation of virus. The approach is based on combination of Pulse Couple Neural Network and Fully Connected Neural Network and the processing is divided in three steps: geometrical, feature extraction and decision. The geometrical module selects the Region of Interest for given image and the feature extraction module composed by Pulse Couple Neural Network extracts all pertinent information which will be used by the last module for decision. This decision module makes directly a decision in case of non-complex classification without neural network training overwise the Fully Connected Neural Network continues the treatment. The input image may be captured from video surveillance sequence, the system triggers a signal alarm once a person doesn't wear face mask. Our proposed approach was tested with different datasets like Kaggle, AIZOO, Moxa3K, Real-World Masked Face Dataset, Medical Masks Dataset, Face Mask Dataset and the accuracy varies from 83.2% to 100% with minimum computation time.

Reconstructing gene regulatory networks of biological function using differential equations of multilayer perceptrons

BACKGROUND

Building biological networks with a certain function is a challenge in systems biology. For the functionality of small (less than ten nodes) biological networks, most methods are implemented by exhausting all possible network topological spaces. This exhaustive approach is difficult to scale to large-scale biological networks. And regulatory relationships are complex and often nonlinear or non-monotonic, which makes inference using linear models challenging.

RESULTS

In this paper, we propose a multi-layer perceptron-based differential equation method, which operates by training a fully connected neural network (NN) to simulate the transcription rate of genes in traditional differential equations. We verify whether the regulatory network constructed by the NN method can continue to achieve the expected biological function by verifying the degree of overlap between the regulatory network discovered by NN and the regulatory network constructed by the Hill function. And we validate our approach by adapting to noise signals, regulator knockout, and constructing large-scale gene regulatory networks using link-knockout techniques. We apply a real dataset (the mesoderm inducer Xenopus Brachyury expression) to construct the core topology of the gene regulatory network and find that Xbra is only strongly expressed at moderate levels of activin signaling.

CONCLUSION

We have demonstrated from the results that this method has the ability to identify the underlying network topology and functional mechanisms, and can also be applied to larger and more complex gene network topologies.

A neural network based framework for effective laparoscopic video quality assessment

Video quality assessment is a challenging problem having a critical significance in the context of medical imaging. For instance, in laparoscopic surgery, the acquired video data suffers from different kinds of distortion that not only hinder surgery performance but also affect the execution of subsequent tasks in surgical navigation and robotic surgeries. For this reason, we propose in this paper neural network-based approaches for distortion classification as well as quality prediction. More precisely, a Residual Network (ResNet) based approach is firstly developed for simultaneous ranking and classification task. Then, this architecture is extended to make it appropriate for the quality prediction task by using an additional Fully Connected Neural Network (FCNN). To train the overall architecture (ResNet and FCNN models), transfer learning and end-to-end learning approaches are investigated. Experimental results, carried out on a new laparoscopic video quality database, have shown the efficiency of the proposed methods compared to recent conventional and deep learning based approaches.

Classifying the tracing difficulty of 3D neuron image blocks based on deep learning

Quickly and accurately tracing neuronal morphologies in large-scale volumetric microscopy data is a very challenging task. Most automatic algorithms for tracing multi-neuron in a whole brain are designed under the Ultra-Tracer framework, which begins the tracing of a neuron from its soma and traces all signals via a block-by-block strategy. Some neuron image blocks are easy for tracing and their automatic reconstructions are very accurate, and some others are difficult and their automatic reconstructions are inaccurate or incomplete. The former are called low Tracing Difficulty Blocks (low-TDBs), while the latter are called high Tracing Difficulty Blocks (high-TDBs). We design a model named 3D-SSM to classify the tracing difficulty of 3D neuron image blocks, which is based on 3D Residual neural Network (3D-ResNet), Fully Connected Neural Network (FCNN) and Long Short-Term Memory network (LSTM). 3D-SSM contains three modules: Structure Feature Extraction (SFE), Sequence Information Extraction (SIE) and Model Fusion (MF). SFE utilizes a 3D-ResNet and a FCNN to extract two kinds of features in 3D image blocks and their corresponding automatic reconstruction blocks. SIE uses two LSTMs to learn sequence information hidden in 3D image blocks. MF adopts a concatenation operation and a FCNN to combine outputs from SIE. 3D-SSM can be used as a stop condition of an automatic tracing algorithm in the Ultra-Tracer framework. With its help, neuronal signals in low-TDBs can be traced by the automatic algorithm and in high-TDBs may be reconstructed by annotators. 12732 training samples and 5342 test samples are constructed on neuron images of a whole mouse brain. The 3D-SSM achieves classification accuracy rates 87.04% on the training set and 84.07% on the test set. Furthermore, the trained 3D-SSM is tested on samples from another whole mouse brain and its accuracy rate is 83.21%.