Computer-aided diagnosis software for vulvovaginal candidiasis detection from Pap smear images.

Vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC) is a common gynecologic infection and it occurs when there is overgrowth of the yeast called Candida. VVC diagnosis is usually done by observing a Pap smear sample under a microscope and searching for the conidium and mycelium components of Candida. This manual method is time consuming, subjective and tedious. Any diagnosis tools that detect VVC, semi- or full-automatically, can be very helpful to pathologists. This article presents a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) software to improve human diagnosis of VVC from Pap smear samples. The proposed software is designed based on phenotypic and morphology features of the Candida in Pap smear sample images. This software provide a user-friendly interface which consists of a set of image processing tools and analytical results that helps to detect Candida and determine severity of illness. The software was evaluated on 200 Pap smear sample images and obtained specificity of 91.04% and sensitivity of 92.48% to detect VVC. As a result, the use of the proposed software reduces diagnostic time and can be employed as a second objective opinion for pathologists.

Exact localization of breakpoints of Retinal pigment epithelium in Optical Coherence Tomography of Optic Nerve Head.

Automatic segmentation of retinal boundaries in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) acquired around Optic Nerve Head (ONH) is of high importance, due to anatomical structure of this area. Exclusion of this area from calculations is a prevalent method but for cases like calculation of disc margins, it is not applicable. The pro-posed method is designed for exact localization of Retinal pigment epithelium break points in ONH centered OCTs. The method is based on incorporation of ridgelet transform for determination of the ONH region and consequent identification of the end points. Incorrect localization in presence of shadow of retinal vessels has also been considered to obtain the high accuracy. Considering the mean value of disk diameter (145.07±38.96), the rational error of the algorithm is 0.07.

The role of different sampling methods in improving biological activity prediction using deep belief network.

Thousands of molecules and descriptors are available for a medicinal chemist thanks to the technological advancements in different branches of chemistry. This fact as well as the correlation between them has raised new problems in quantitative structure activity relationship studies. Proper parameter initialization in statistical modeling has merged as another challenge in recent years. Random selection of parameters leads to poor performance of deep neural network (DNN). In this research, deep belief network (DBN) was applied to initialize DNNs. DBN is composed of some stacks of restricted Boltzmann machine, an energy-based method that requires computing log likelihood gradient for all samples. Three different sampling approaches were suggested to solve this gradient. In this respect, the impact of DBN was applied based on the different sampling approaches mentioned above to initialize the DNN architecture in predicting biological activity of all fifteen Kaggle targets that contain more than 70k molecules. The same as other fields of processing research, the outputs of these models demonstrated significant superiority to that of DNN with random parameters. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Obtaining Thickness Maps of Corneal Layers Using the Optimal Algorithm for Intracorneal Layer Segmentation.

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is one of the most informative methodologies in ophthalmology and provides cross sectional images from anterior and posterior segments of the eye. Corneal diseases can be diagnosed by these images and corneal thickness maps can also assist in the treatment and diagnosis. The need for automatic segmentation of cross sectional images is inevitable since manual segmentation is time consuming and imprecise. In this paper, segmentation methods such as Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), Graph Cut, and Level Set are used for automatic segmentation of three clinically important corneal layer boundaries on OCT images. Using the segmentation of the boundaries in three-dimensional corneal data, we obtained thickness maps of the layers which are created by these borders. Mean and standard deviation of the thickness values for normal subjects in epithelial, stromal, and whole cornea are calculated in central, superior, inferior, nasal, and temporal zones (centered on the center of pupil). To evaluate our approach, the automatic boundary results are compared with the boundaries segmented manually by two corneal specialists. The quantitative results show that GMM method segments the desired boundaries with the best accuracy.

Ensemble Supervised Classification Method Using the Regions of Interest and Grey Level Co-Occurrence Matrices Features for Mammograms Data.

BACKGROUND: Breast cancer is one of the most encountered cancers in women. Detection and classification of the cancer into malignant or benign is one of the challenging fields of the pathology. OBJECTIVES: Our aim was to classify the mammogram data into normal and abnormal by ensemble classification method. PATIENTS AND METHODS: In this method, we first extract texture features from cancerous and normal breasts, using the Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrices (GLCM) method. To obtain better results, we select a region of breast with high probability of cancer occurrence before feature extraction. After features extraction, we use the maximum difference method to select the features that have predominant difference between normal and abnormal data sets. Six selected features served as the classifying tool for classification purpose by the proposed ensemble supervised algorithm. For classification, the data were first classified by three supervised classifiers, and then by simple voting policy, we finalized the classification process. RESULTS: After classification with the ensemble supervised algorithm, the performance of the proposed method was evaluated by perfect test method, which gave the sensitivity and specificity of 96.66% and 97.50%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we proposed a new computer aided diagnostic tool for the detection and classification of breast cancer. The obtained results showed that the proposed method is more reliable in diagnostic to assist the radiologists in the detection of abnormal data and to improve the diagnostic accuracy.