HDC-Net: A hierarchical dilation convolutional network for retinal vessel segmentation.

The cardinal symptoms of some ophthalmic diseases observed through exceptional retinal blood vessels, such as retinal vein occlusion, diabetic retinopathy, etc. The advanced deep learning models used to obtain morphological and structural information of blood vessels automatically are conducive to the early treatment and initiative prevention of ophthalmic diseases. In our work, we propose a hierarchical dilation convolutional network (HDC-Net) to extract retinal vessels in a pixel-to-pixel manner. It utilizes the hierarchical dilation convolution (HDC) module to capture the fragile retinal blood vessels usually neglected by other methods. An improved residual dual efficient channel attention (RDECA) module can infer more delicate channel information to reinforce the discriminative capability of the model. The structured Dropblock can help our HDC-Net model to solve the network overfitting effectively. From a holistic perspective, the segmentation results obtained by HDC-Net are superior to other deep learning methods on three acknowledged datasets (DRIVE, CHASE-DB1, STARE), the sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, f1-score and AUC score are {0.8252, 0.9829, 0.9692, 0.8239, 0.9871}, {0.8227, 0.9853, 0.9745, 0.8113, 0.9884}, and {0.8369, 0.9866, 0.9751, 0.8385, 0.9913}, respectively. It surpasses most other advanced retinal vessel segmentation models. Qualitative and quantitative analysis demonstrates that HDC-Net can fulfill the task of retinal vessel segmentation efficiently and accurately.

Pharmaceutical policy in China: challenges and opportunities for reform

China has a complex pharmaceutical system that is currently undergoing significant reforms. This book provides a comprehensive overview of China's pharmaceutical system and covers key topics such as drug approvals and quality regulation, expenditure trends, pricing and reimbursement, irrational prescribing, traditional Chinese medicine, industrial policy, and the role of hospitals, primary care, and pharmacies.

Is the traditional family doctor an anachronism?

KEY MESSAGES: The polyclinics debate should recognise the need to balance the benefits of long-term personal doctor-patient relationship with the broader improved health outcomes from evidence based inputs from multidisciplinary teams in primary care. There is increasing evidence from the international health literature that a focus on integrated health systems is the key to better health outcomes both at the individual and population levels, in addition to being more cost effective. Although there is some evidence that other healthcare professionals such as nurse practitioners can deliver equally high health outcomes for patients, the GP role is not an anachronism and even seems increasingly more important in the 21st century given the increasing complexity of primary care and long term conditions.