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Deep learning techniques offer improvements in computer-aided diagnosis systems. However, acquiring image domain annotations is challenging due to the knowledge and commitment required of expert pathologists. Pathologists often identify regions in whole slide images with diagnostic relevance rather than examining the entire slide, with a positive correlation between the time spent on these critical image regions and diagnostic accuracy. In this paper, a heatmap is generated to represent pathologists' viewing patterns during diagnosis and used to guide a deep learning architecture during training. The proposed system outperforms traditional approaches based on color and texture image characteristics, integrating pathologists' domain expertise to enhance region of interest detection without needing individual case annotations. Evaluating our best model, a U-Net model with a pre-trained ResNet-18 encoder, on a skin biopsy whole slide image dataset for melanoma diagnosis, shows its potential in detecting regions of interest, surpassing conventional methods with an increase of 20%, 11%, 22%, and 12% in precision, recall, F1-score, and Intersection over Union, respectively. In a clinical evaluation, three dermatopathologists agreed on the model's effectiveness in replicating pathologists' diagnostic viewing behavior and accurately identifying critical regions. Finally, our study demonstrates that incorporating heatmaps as supplementary signals can enhance the performance of computer-aided diagnosis systems. Without the availability of eye tracking data, identifying precise focus areas is challenging, but our approach shows promise in assisting pathologists in improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency, streamlining annotation processes, and aiding the training of new pathologists.
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PURPOSE: Saliency maps (SM) allow clinicians to better understand the opaque decision-making process in artificial intelligence (AI) models by visualising the important features responsible for predictions. This ultimately improves interpretability and confidence. In this work, we review the use case for SMs, exploring their impact on clinicians' understanding and trust in AI models. We use the following ophthalmic conditions as examples: (1) glaucoma, (2) myopia, (3) age-related macular degeneration, and (4) diabetic retinopathy. METHOD: A multi-field search on MEDLINE, Embase, and Web of Science was conducted using specific keywords. Only studies on the use of SMs in glaucoma, myopia, AMD, or DR were considered for inclusion. RESULTS: Findings reveal that SMs are often used to validate AI models and advocate for their adoption, potentially leading to biased claims. Overlooking the technical limitations of SMs, and the conductance of superficial assessments of their quality and relevance, was discerned. Uncertainties persist regarding the role of saliency maps in building trust in AI. It is crucial to enhance understanding of SMs' technical constraints and improve evaluation of their quality, impact, and suitability for specific tasks. Establishing a standardised framework for selecting and assessing SMs, as well as exploring their relationship with other reliability sources (e.g. safety and generalisability), is essential for enhancing clinicians' trust in AI. CONCLUSION: We conclude that SMs are not beneficial for interpretability and trust-building purposes in their current forms. Instead, SMs may confer benefits to model debugging, model performance enhancement, and hypothesis testing (e.g. novel biomarkers).
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Aiming to automatically monitor and improve stereoscopic image and video processing systems, stereoscopic image quality assessment approaches are becoming more and more important as 3D technology gains popularity. We propose a full-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment method that incorporate monocular and binocular features based on binocular competition and binocular integration. To start, we create a three-channel RGB fused view by fusing Gabor filter bank responses and disparity maps. Then, using the monocular view and the RGB fusion view, respectively, we extract monocular and binocular features. To alter the local features in the binocular features, we simultaneously estimate the saliency of the RGB fusion image. Finally, the monocular and binocular quality scores are calculated based on the monocular and binocular features, and the quality scores of the stereo image prediction are obtained by fusion. Performance testing in the LIVE 3D IQA database Phase I and Phase II. The results of the proposed method are compared with newer methods. The experimental results show good consistency and robustness.
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Deep learning architectures like ResNet and Inception have produced accurate predictions for classifying benign and malignant tumors in the healthcare domain. This enables healthcare institutions to make data-driven decisions and potentially enable early detection of malignancy by employing computer-vision-based deep learning algorithms. These CNN algorithms, in addition to requiring huge amounts of data, can identify higher- and lower-level features that are significant while classifying tumors into benign or malignant. However, the existing literature is limited in terms of the explainability of the resultant classification, and identifying the exact features that are of importance, which is essential in the decision-making process for healthcare practitioners. Thus, the motivation of this work is to implement a custom classifier on the ovarian tumor dataset, which exhibits high classification performance and subsequently interpret the classification results qualitatively, using various Explainable AI methods, to identify which pixels or regions of interest are given highest importance by the model for classification. The dataset comprises CT scanned images of ovarian tumors taken from to the axial, saggital and coronal planes. State-of-the-art architectures, including a modified ResNet50 derived from the standard pre-trained ResNet50, are implemented in the paper. When compared to the existing state-of-the-art techniques, the proposed modified ResNet50 exhibited a classification accuracy of 97.5 % on the test dataset without increasing the the complexity of the architecture. The results then were carried for interpretation using several explainable AI techniques. The results show that the shape and localized nature of the tumors play important roles for qualitatively determining the ability of the tumor to metastasize and thereafter to be classified as benign or malignant.
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BACKGROUND: Retinal prostheses offer hope for individuals with degenerative retinal diseases by stimulating the remaining retinal cells to partially restore their vision. This review delves into the current advancements in retinal prosthesis technology, with a special emphasis on the pivotal role that image processing and machine learning techniques play in this evolution. METHODS: We provide a comprehensive analysis of the existing implantable devices and optogenetic strategies, delineating their advantages, limitations, and challenges in addressing complex visual tasks. The review extends to various image processing algorithms and deep learning architectures that have been implemented to enhance the functionality of retinal prosthetic devices. We also illustrate the testing results by demonstrating the clinical trials or using Simulated Prosthetic Vision (SPV) through phosphene simulations, which is a critical aspect of simulating visual perception for retinal prosthesis users. RESULTS: Our review highlights the significant progress in retinal prosthesis technology, particularly its capacity to augment visual perception among the visually impaired. It discusses the integration between image processing and deep learning, illustrating their impact on individual interactions and navigations within the environment through applying clinical trials and also illustrating the limitations of some techniques to be used with current devices, as some approaches only use simulation even on sighted-normal individuals or rely on qualitative analysis, where some consider realistic perception models and others do not. CONCLUSION: This interdisciplinary field holds promise for the future of retinal prostheses, with the potential to significantly enhance the quality of life for individuals with retinal prostheses. Future research directions should pivot towards optimizing phosphene simulations for SPV approaches, considering the distorted and confusing nature of phosphene perception, thereby enriching the visual perception provided by these prosthetic devices. This endeavor will not only improve navigational independence but also facilitate a more immersive interaction with the environment.
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Mental illness has grown to become a prevalent and global health concern that affects individuals across various demographics. Timely detection and accurate diagnosis of mental disorders are crucial for effective treatment and support as late diagnosis could result in suicidal, harmful behaviors and ultimately death. To this end, the present study introduces a novel pipeline for the analysis of facial expressions, leveraging both the AffectNet and 2013 Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) datasets. Consequently, this research goes beyond traditional diagnostic methods by contributing a system capable of generating a comprehensive mental disorder dataset and concurrently predicting mental disorders based on facial emotional cues. Particularly, we introduce a hybrid architecture for mental disorder detection leveraging the state-of-the-art object detection algorithm, YOLOv8 to detect and classify visual cues associated with specific mental disorders. To achieve accurate predictions, an integrated learning architecture based on the fusion of Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) and Visual Transformer (ViT) models is developed to form an ensemble classifier that predicts the presence of mental illness (e.g., depression, anxiety, and other mental disorder). The overall accuracy is improved to about 81% using the proposed ensemble technique. To ensure transparency and interpretability, we integrate techniques such as Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) and saliency maps to highlight the regions in the input image that significantly contribute to the model's predictions thus providing healthcare professionals with a clear understanding of the features influencing the system's decisions thereby enhancing trust and more informed diagnostic process.
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OBJECTIVE: Pneumothorax is an acute thoracic disease caused by abnormal air collection between the lungs and chest wall. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning (DL), has been increasingly employed for automating the diagnostic process of pneumothorax. To address the opaqueness often associated with DL models, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods have been introduced to outline regions related to pneumothorax. However, these explanations sometimes diverge from actual lesion areas, highlighting the need for further improvement. METHOD: We propose a template-guided approach to incorporate the clinical knowledge of pneumothorax into model explanations generated by XAI methods, thereby enhancing the quality of the explanations. Utilizing one lesion delineation created by radiologists, our approach first generates a template that represents potential areas of pneumothorax occurrence. This template is then superimposed on model explanations to filter out extraneous explanations that fall outside the template's boundaries. To validate its efficacy, we carried out a comparative analysis of three XAI methods (Saliency Map, Grad-CAM, and Integrated Gradients) with and without our template guidance when explaining two DL models (VGG-19 and ResNet-50) in two real-world datasets (SIIM-ACR and ChestX-Det). RESULTS: The proposed approach consistently improved baseline XAI methods across twelve benchmark scenarios built on three XAI methods, two DL models, and two datasets. The average incremental percentages, calculated by the performance improvements over the baseline performance, were 97.8% in Intersection over Union (IoU) and 94.1% in Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) when comparing model explanations and ground-truth lesion areas. We further visualized baseline and template-guided model explanations on radiographs to showcase the performance of our approach. CONCLUSIONS: In the context of pneumothorax diagnoses, we proposed a template-guided approach for improving model explanations. Our approach not only aligns model explanations more closely with clinical insights but also exhibits extensibility to other thoracic diseases. We anticipate that our template guidance will forge a novel approach to elucidating AI models by integrating clinical domain expertise.
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Inteligência Artificial , Aprendizado Profundo , Pneumotórax , Humanos , Pneumotórax/diagnóstico por imagem , Algoritmos , Tomografia Computadorizada por Raios X/métodos , Informática Médica/métodosRESUMO
Parkinson's Disease (PD), a neurodegenerative disorder, significantly impacts the quality of life for millions of people worldwide. PD primarily impacts dopaminergic neurons in the brain's substantia nigra, resulting in dopamine deficiency and gait impairments such as bradykinesia and rigidity. Currently, several well-established tools, such as the Movement Disorder Society-Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) and Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) Scale, are used for evaluating gait dysfunction in PD. While insightful, these methods are subjective, time-consuming, and often ineffective in early-stage diagnosis. Other methods using specialized sensors and equipment to measure movement disorders are cumbersome and expensive, limiting their accessibility. This study introduces a hierarchical approach to evaluating gait dysfunction in PD through videos. The novel 2-Stream Spatial-Temporal Neural Network (2S-STNN) leverages the spatial-temporal features from the skeleton and silhouette streams for PD classification. This approach achieves an accuracy rate of 89% and outperforms other state-of-the-art models. The study also employs saliency values to highlight critical body regions that significantly influence model decisions and are severely affected by the disease. For a more detailed analysis, the study investigates 21 specific gait attributes for a more nuanced quantification of gait disorders. Parameters such as walking pace, step length, and neck forward angle are found to be strongly correlated with PD gait severity categories. This approach offers a comprehensive and convenient solution for PD management in clinical settings, enabling patients to receive a more precise evaluation and monitoring of their gait impairments.
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Saliency maps are popularly used to "explain" decisions made by modern machine learning models, including deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). While the resulting heatmaps purportedly indicate important image features, their "trustworthiness," i.e., utility and robustness, has not been evaluated for musculoskeletal imaging. The purpose of this study was to systematically evaluate the trustworthiness of saliency maps used in disease diagnosis on upper extremity X-ray images. The underlying DCNNs were trained using the Stanford MURA dataset. We studied four trustworthiness criteria-(1) localization accuracy of abnormalities, (2) repeatability, (3) reproducibility, and (4) sensitivity to underlying DCNN weights-across six different gradient-based saliency methods (Grad-CAM (GCAM), gradient explanation (GRAD), integrated gradients (IG), Smoothgrad (SG), smooth IG (SIG), and XRAI). Ground-truth was defined by the consensus of three fellowship-trained musculoskeletal radiologists who each placed bounding boxes around abnormalities on a holdout saliency test set. Compared to radiologists, all saliency methods showed inferior localization (AUPRCs: 0.438 (SG)-0.590 (XRAI); average radiologist AUPRC: 0.816), repeatability (IoUs: 0.427 (SG)-0.551 (IG); average radiologist IOU: 0.613), and reproducibility (IoUs: 0.250 (SG)-0.502 (XRAI); average radiologist IOU: 0.613) on abnormalities such as fractures, orthopedic hardware insertions, and arthritis. Five methods (GCAM, GRAD, IG, SG, XRAI) passed the sensitivity test. Ultimately, no saliency method met all four trustworthiness criteria; therefore, we recommend caution and rigorous evaluation of saliency maps prior to their clinical use.
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In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have shown promising performance in medical image analysis, including breast lesion classification in 2D ultrasound (US) images. Despite the outstanding performance of DCNN solutions, explaining their decisions remains an open investigation. Yet, the explainability of DCNN models has become essential for healthcare systems to accept and trust the models. This paper presents a novel framework for explaining DCNN classification decisions of lesions in ultrasound images using the saliency maps linking the DCNN decisions to known cancer characteristics in the medical domain. The proposed framework consists of three main phases. First, DCNN models for classification in ultrasound images are built. Next, selected methods for visualization are applied to obtain saliency maps on the input images of the DCNN models. In the final phase, the visualization outputs and domain-known cancer characteristics are mapped. The paper then demonstrates the use of the framework for breast lesion classification from ultrasound images. We first follow the transfer learning approach and build two DCNN models. We then analyze the visualization outputs of the trained DCNN models using the EGrad-CAM and Ablation-CAM methods. We map the DCNN model decisions of benign and malignant lesions through the visualization outputs to the characteristics such as echogenicity, calcification, shape, and margin. A retrospective dataset of 1298 US images collected from different hospitals is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the framework. The test results show that these characteristics contribute differently to the benign and malignant lesions' decisions. Our study provides the foundation for other researchers to explain the DCNN classification decisions of other cancer types.
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Finding the most interesting areas of an image is the aim of saliency detection. Conventional methods based on low-level features rely on biological cues like texture and color. These methods, however, have trouble with processing complicated or low-contrast images. In this paper, we introduce a deep neural network-based saliency detection method. First, using semantic segmentation, we construct a pixel-level model that gives each pixel a saliency value depending on its semantic category. Next, we create a region feature model by combining both hand-crafted and deep features, which extracts and fuses the local and global information of each superpixel region. Third, we combine the results from the previous two steps, along with the over-segmented superpixel images and the original images, to construct a multi-level feature model. We feed the model into a deep convolutional network, which generates the final saliency map by learning to integrate the macro and micro information based on the pixels and superpixels. We assess our method on five benchmark datasets and contrast it against 14 state-of-the-art saliency detection algorithms. According to the experimental results, our method performs better than the other methods in terms of F-measure, precision, recall, and runtime. Additionally, we analyze the limitations of our method and propose potential future developments.
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Although the value of adding AI as a surrogate second reader in various scenarios has been investigated, it is unknown whether implementing an AI tool within double reading practice would capture additional subtle cancers missed by both radiologists who independently assessed the mammograms. This paper assesses the effectiveness of two state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in detecting retrospectively-identified missed cancers within a screening program employing double reading practices. The study also explores the agreement between AI and radiologists in locating the lesions, considering various levels of concordance among the radiologists in locating the lesions. The Globally-aware Multiple Instance Classifier (GMIC) and Global-Local Activation Maps (GLAM) models were fine-tuned for our dataset. We evaluated the sensitivity of both models on missed cancers retrospectively identified by a panel of three radiologists who reviewed prior examinations of 729 cancer cases detected in a screening program with double reading practice. Two of these experts annotated the lesions, and based on their concordance levels, cases were categorized as 'almost perfect,' 'substantial,' 'moderate,' and 'poor.' We employed Similarity or Histogram Intersection (SIM) and Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD) metrics to compare saliency maps of malignant cases from the AI model with annotations from radiologists in each category. In total, 24.82% of cancers were labeled as "missed." The performance of GMIC and GLAM on the missed cancer cases was 82.98% and 79.79%, respectively, while for the true screen-detected cancers, the performances were 89.54% and 87.25%, respectively (p-values for the difference in sensitivity < 0.05). As anticipated, SIM and KLD from saliency maps were best in 'almost perfect,' followed by 'substantial,' 'moderate,' and 'poor.' Both GMIC and GLAM (p-values < 0.05) exhibited greater sensitivity at higher concordance. Even in a screening program with independent double reading, adding AI could potentially identify missed cancers. However, the challenging-to-locate lesions for radiologists impose a similar challenge for AI.
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Inteligência Artificial , Neoplasias da Mama , Detecção Precoce de Câncer , Mamografia , Humanos , Mamografia/métodos , Feminino , Neoplasias da Mama/diagnóstico por imagem , Neoplasias da Mama/diagnóstico , Estudos Retrospectivos , Detecção Precoce de Câncer/métodos , Pessoa de Meia-Idade , Idoso , Interpretação de Imagem Radiográfica Assistida por Computador/métodos , Sensibilidade e EspecificidadeRESUMO
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience pervasive difficulties in processing social information from faces. However, the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying social trait judgments of faces in ASD remain largely unclear. Here, we comprehensively addressed this question by employing functional neuroimaging and parametrically generated faces that vary in facial trustworthiness and dominance. Behaviorally, participants with ASD exhibited reduced specificity but increased inter-rater variability in social trait judgments. Neurally, participants with ASD showed hypo-activation across broad face-processing areas. Multivariate analysis based on trial-by-trial face responses could discriminate participant groups in the majority of the face-processing areas. Encoding social traits in ASD engaged vastly different face-processing areas compared to controls, and encoding different social traits engaged different brain areas. Interestingly, the idiosyncratic brain areas encoding social traits in ASD were still flexible and context-dependent, similar to neurotypicals. Additionally, participants with ASD also showed an altered encoding of facial saliency features in the eyes and mouth. Together, our results provide a comprehensive understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying social trait judgments in ASD.
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Transtorno do Espectro Autista , Encéfalo , Reconhecimento Facial , Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética , Percepção Social , Humanos , Transtorno do Espectro Autista/fisiopatologia , Transtorno do Espectro Autista/diagnóstico por imagem , Transtorno do Espectro Autista/psicologia , Masculino , Feminino , Adulto , Adulto Jovem , Reconhecimento Facial/fisiologia , Encéfalo/fisiopatologia , Encéfalo/diagnóstico por imagem , Julgamento/fisiologia , Mapeamento Encefálico , AdolescenteRESUMO
Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has been increasingly investigated to enhance the transparency of black-box artificial intelligence models, promoting better user understanding and trust. Developing an XAI that is faithful to models and plausible to users is both a necessity and a challenge. This work examines whether embedding human attention knowledge into saliency-based XAI methods for computer vision models could enhance their plausibility and faithfulness. Two novel XAI methods for object detection models, namely FullGrad-CAM and FullGrad-CAM++, were first developed to generate object-specific explanations by extending the current gradient-based XAI methods for image classification models. Using human attention as the objective plausibility measure, these methods achieve higher explanation plausibility. Interestingly, all current XAI methods when applied to object detection models generally produce saliency maps that are less faithful to the model than human attention maps from the same object detection task. Accordingly, human attention-guided XAI (HAG-XAI) was proposed to learn from human attention how to best combine explanatory information from the models to enhance explanation plausibility by using trainable activation functions and smoothing kernels to maximize the similarity between XAI saliency map and human attention map. The proposed XAI methods were evaluated on widely used BDD-100K, MS-COCO, and ImageNet datasets and compared with typical gradient-based and perturbation-based XAI methods. Results suggest that HAG-XAI enhanced explanation plausibility and user trust at the expense of faithfulness for image classification models, and it enhanced plausibility, faithfulness, and user trust simultaneously and outperformed existing state-of-the-art XAI methods for object detection models.
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Inteligência Artificial , Atenção , Humanos , Atenção/fisiologia , Redes Neurais de ComputaçãoRESUMO
We present a novel methodology for integrating high resolution longitudinal data with the dynamic prediction capabilities of survival models. The aim is two-fold: to improve the predictive power while maintaining the interpretability of the models. To go beyond the black box paradigm of artificial neural networks, we propose a parsimonious and robust semi-parametric approach (i.e., a landmarking competing risks model) that combines routinely collected low-resolution data with predictive features extracted from a convolutional neural network, that was trained on high resolution time-dependent information. We then use saliency maps to analyze and explain the extra predictive power of this model. To illustrate our methodology, we focus on healthcare-associated infections in patients admitted to an intensive care unit.
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Unidades de Terapia Intensiva , Redes Neurais de Computação , Humanos , Unidades de Terapia Intensiva/organização & administração , Infecção HospitalarRESUMO
Prior research has yet to fully elucidate the impact of varying relative saliency between target and distractor on attentional capture and suppression, along with their underlying neural mechanisms, especially when social (e.g. face) and perceptual (e.g. color) information interchangeably serve as singleton targets or distractors, competing for attention in a search array. Here, we employed an additional singleton paradigm to investigate the effects of relative saliency on attentional capture (as assessed by N2pc) and suppression (as assessed by PD) of color or face singleton distractors in a visual search task by recording event-related potentials. We found that face singleton distractors with higher relative saliency induced stronger attentional processing. Furthermore, enhancing the physical salience of colors using a bold color ring could enhance attentional processing toward color singleton distractors. Reducing the physical salience of facial stimuli by blurring weakened attentional processing toward face singleton distractors; however, blurring enhanced attentional processing toward color singleton distractors because of the change in relative saliency. In conclusion, the attentional processes of singleton distractors are affected by their relative saliency to singleton targets, with higher relative saliency of singleton distractors resulting in stronger attentional capture and suppression; faces, however, exhibit some specificity in attentional capture and suppression due to high social saliency.
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Atenção , Percepção de Cores , Eletroencefalografia , Potenciais Evocados , Humanos , Atenção/fisiologia , Feminino , Masculino , Adulto Jovem , Potenciais Evocados/fisiologia , Adulto , Percepção de Cores/fisiologia , Estimulação Luminosa/métodos , Reconhecimento Facial/fisiologia , Reconhecimento Visual de Modelos/fisiologia , Encéfalo/fisiologiaRESUMO
Goal: To predict physician fixations specifically on ophthalmology optical coherence tomography (OCT) reports from eye tracking data using CNN based saliency prediction methods in order to aid in the education of ophthalmologists and ophthalmologists-in-training. Methods: Fifteen ophthalmologists were recruited to each examine 20 randomly selected OCT reports and evaluate the likelihood of glaucoma for each report on a scale of 0-100. Eye movements were collected using a Pupil Labs Core eye-tracker. Fixation heat maps were generated using fixation data. Results: A model trained with traditional saliency mapping resulted in a correlation coefficient (CC) value of 0.208, a Normalized Scanpath Saliency (NSS) value of 0.8172, a Kullback-Leibler (KLD) value of 2.573, and a Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) of 0.169. Conclusions: The TranSalNet model was able to predict fixations within certain regions of the OCT report with reasonable accuracy, but more data is needed to improve model accuracy. Future steps include increasing data collection, improving quality of data, and modifying the model architecture.
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Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Lewy body disease (LBD), the two most common causes of neurodegenerative dementia with similar clinical manifestations, both show impaired visual attention and altered eye movements. However, prior studies have used structured tasks or restricted stimuli, limiting the insights into how eye movements alter and differ between AD and LBD in daily life. Objective: We aimed to comprehensively characterize eye movements of AD and LBD patients on naturalistic complex scenes with broad categories of objects, which would provide a context closer to real-world free viewing, and to identify disease-specific patterns of altered eye movements. Methods: We collected spontaneous viewing behaviors to 200 naturalistic complex scenes from patients with AD or LBD at the prodromal or dementia stage, as well as matched control participants. We then investigated eye movement patterns using a computational visual attention model with high-level image features of object properties and semantic information. Results: Compared with matched controls, we identified two disease-specific altered patterns of eye movements: diminished visual exploration, which differentially correlates with cognitive impairment in AD and with motor impairment in LBD; and reduced gaze allocation to objects, attributed to a weaker attention bias toward high-level image features in AD and attributed to a greater image-center bias in LBD. Conclusion: Our findings may help differentiate AD and LBD patients and comprehend their real-world visual behaviors to mitigate the widespread impact of impaired visual attention on daily activities.
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Visual crowding refers to the phenomenon where a target object that is easily identifiable in isolation becomes difficult to recognize when surrounded by other stimuli (distractors). Many psychophysical studies have investigated this phenomenon and proposed alternative models for the underlying mechanisms. One prominent hypothesis, albeit with mixed psychophysical support, posits that crowding arises from the loss of information due to pooled encoding of features from target and distractor stimuli in the early stages of cortical visual processing. However, neurophysiological studies have not rigorously tested this hypothesis. We studied the responses of single neurons in macaque (one male, one female) area V4, an intermediate stage of the object-processing pathway, to parametrically designed crowded displays and texture statistics-matched metameric counterparts. Our investigations reveal striking parallels between how crowding parameters-number, distance, and position of distractors-influence human psychophysical performance and V4 shape selectivity. Importantly, we also found that enhancing the salience of a target stimulus could alleviate crowding effects in highly cluttered scenes, and this could be temporally protracted reflecting a dynamical process. Thus, a pooled encoding of nearby stimuli cannot explain the observed responses, and we propose an alternative model where V4 neurons preferentially encode salient stimuli in crowded displays. Overall, we conclude that the magnitude of crowding effects is determined not just by the number of distractors and target-distractor separation but also by the relative salience of targets versus distractors based on their feature attributes-the similarity of distractors and the contrast between target and distractor stimuli.