This article focuses on the control center of each human body: the brain. We will point out the pivotal role of the cerebral vasculature and how its complex mechanisms may vary between subjects. We then emphasize a specific acute pathological state, i.e., acute ischemic stroke, and show how medical imaging and its analysis can be used to define the treatment. We show how the core-penumbra concept is used in practice using mismatch criteria and how machine learning can be used to make predictions of the final infarct, either via deconvolution or convolutional neural networks.

The clinical interest is often to measure the volume of a structure, which is typically derived from a segmentation. In order to evaluate and compare segmentation methods, the similarity between a segmentation and a predefined ground truth is measured using popular discrete metrics, such as the Dice score. Recent segmentation methods use a differentiable surrogate metric, such as soft Dice, as part of the loss function during the learning phase. In this work, we first briefly describe how to derive volume estimates from a segmentation that is, potentially, inherently uncertain or ambiguous. This is followed by a theoretical analysis and an experimental validation linking the inherent uncertainty to common loss functions for training CNNs, namely cross-entropy and soft Dice. We find that, even though soft Dice optimization leads to an improved performance with respect to the Dice score and other measures, it may introduce a volume bias for tasks with high inherent uncertainty. These findings indicate some of the method's clinical limitations and suggest doing a closer ad-hoc volume analysis with an optional re-calibration step.

尽管骰子损失是医学图像分割中的主要损失函数之一，但大多数研究都忽略了其导数，即使用梯度下降时优化的真实电动机。在本文中，我们强调了在缺少或空的标签存在下骰子丢失的特殊作用。首先，我们制定一个理论基础，对骰子丢失及其导数进行了一般描述。事实证明，减少尺寸$ \ phi $和平滑项$ \ epsilon $的选择是无处不在的，并且极大地影响了其行为。我们找到并提出了$ \ phi $和$ \ epsilon $的启发式组合，它们在细分设置中使用，带有缺失或空标签。其次，我们使用两个公开可用的数据集在二进制和多类分段设置中验证这些发现。我们确认，$ \ phi $和$ \ epsilon $的选择确实是关键的。选择了$ \ phi $，因此减少的单个元素（和类）元素以及可忽略不计的$ \ epsilon $进行，骰子损失与缺失的标签自然交易，并且与最近缺少标签的最新适应性相似。选择$ \ phi $，以使减少量发生在多个批处理元素上，或以$ \ epsilon $的启发式值进行，骰子损失正确处理空标签。我们认为，这项工作强调了一些基本观点，并希望它鼓励研究人员更好地描述他们对未来工作中骰子损失的确切实施。

磁共振成像（MRI）是中风成像的中心方式。它被用来接受患者的治疗决定，例如选择患者进行静脉溶栓或血管内治疗。随后在住院期间使用MRI来通过可视化梗塞核心大小和位置来预测结果。此外，它可以用来表征中风病因，例如（心脏） - 栓塞和非胚胎中风之间的区分。基于计算机的自动医疗图像处理越来越多地进入临床常规。缺血性中风病变分割（ISLE）挑战的先前迭代有助于生成鉴定急性和急性缺血性中风病变分割的基准方法。在这里，我们介绍了一个专家注册的多中心MRI数据集，以分割急性到亚急性中风病变。该数据集包括400个多供应商MRI案例，中风病变大小，数量和位置的可变性很高。它分为n = 250的训练数据集和n = 150的测试数据集。所有培训数据将公开可用。测试数据集将仅用于模型验证，并且不会向公众发布。该数据集是Isles 2022挑战的基础，目的是找到算法方法，以实现缺血性中风的稳健和准确分割算法的开发和基准测试。

最近关于Covid-19的研究表明，CT成像提供了评估疾病进展和协助诊断的有用信息，以及帮助理解疾病。有越来越多的研究，建议使用深度学习来使用胸部CT扫描提供快速准确地定量Covid-19。兴趣的主要任务是胸部CT扫描的肺和肺病变的自动分割，确认或疑似Covid-19患者。在这项研究中，我们使用多中心数据集比较12个深度学习算法，包括开源和内部开发的算法。结果表明，合并不同的方法可以提高肺部分割，二元病变分割和多种子病变分割的总体测试集性能，从而分别为0.982,0.724和0.469的平均骰子分别。将得到的二元病变分段为91.3ml的平均绝对体积误差。通常，区分不同病变类型的任务更加困难，分别具有152mL的平均绝对体积差，分别为整合和磨碎玻璃不透明度为0.369和0.523的平均骰子分数。所有方法都以平均体积误差进行二元病变分割，该分段优于人类评估者的视觉评估，表明这些方法足以用于临床实践中使用的大规模评估。

In this paper, we propose a novel technique, namely INVALIDATOR, to automatically assess the correctness of APR-generated patches via semantic and syntactic reasoning. INVALIDATOR reasons about program semantic via program invariants while it also captures program syntax via language semantic learned from large code corpus using the pre-trained language model. Given a buggy program and the developer-patched program, INVALIDATOR infers likely invariants on both programs. Then, INVALIDATOR determines that a APR-generated patch overfits if: (1) it violates correct specifications or (2) maintains errors behaviors of the original buggy program. In case our approach fails to determine an overfitting patch based on invariants, INVALIDATOR utilizes a trained model from labeled patches to assess patch correctness based on program syntax. The benefit of INVALIDATOR is three-fold. First, INVALIDATOR is able to leverage both semantic and syntactic reasoning to enhance its discriminant capability. Second, INVALIDATOR does not require new test cases to be generated but instead only relies on the current test suite and uses invariant inference to generalize the behaviors of a program. Third, INVALIDATOR is fully automated. We have conducted our experiments on a dataset of 885 patches generated on real-world programs in Defects4J. Experiment results show that INVALIDATOR correctly classified 79% overfitting patches, accounting for 23% more overfitting patches being detected by the best baseline. INVALIDATOR also substantially outperforms the best baselines by 14% and 19% in terms of Accuracy and F-Measure, respectively.

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

Variational autoencoders model high-dimensional data by positing low-dimensional latent variables that are mapped through a flexible distribution parametrized by a neural network. Unfortunately, variational autoencoders often suffer from posterior collapse: the posterior of the latent variables is equal to its prior, rendering the variational autoencoder useless as a means to produce meaningful representations. Existing approaches to posterior collapse often attribute it to the use of neural networks or optimization issues due to variational approximation. In this paper, we consider posterior collapse as a problem of latent variable non-identifiability. We prove that the posterior collapses if and only if the latent variables are non-identifiable in the generative model. This fact implies that posterior collapse is not a phenomenon specific to the use of flexible distributions or approximate inference. Rather, it can occur in classical probabilistic models even with exact inference, which we also demonstrate. Based on these results, we propose a class of latent-identifiable variational autoencoders, deep generative models which enforce identifiability without sacrificing flexibility. This model class resolves the problem of latent variable non-identifiability by leveraging bijective Brenier maps and parameterizing them with input convex neural networks, without special variational inference objectives or optimization tricks. Across synthetic and real datasets, latent-identifiable variational autoencoders outperform existing methods in mitigating posterior collapse and providing meaningful representations of the data.

Cashews are grown by over 3 million smallholders in more than 40 countries worldwide as a principal source of income. As the third largest cashew producer in Africa, Benin has nearly 200,000 smallholder cashew growers contributing 15% of the country's national export earnings. However, a lack of information on where and how cashew trees grow across the country hinders decision-making that could support increased cashew production and poverty alleviation. By leveraging 2.4-m Planet Basemaps and 0.5-m aerial imagery, newly developed deep learning algorithms, and large-scale ground truth datasets, we successfully produced the first national map of cashew in Benin and characterized the expansion of cashew plantations between 2015 and 2021. In particular, we developed a SpatioTemporal Classification with Attention (STCA) model to map the distribution of cashew plantations, which can fully capture texture information from discriminative time steps during a growing season. We further developed a Clustering Augmented Self-supervised Temporal Classification (CASTC) model to distinguish high-density versus low-density cashew plantations by automatic feature extraction and optimized clustering. Results show that the STCA model has an overall accuracy of 80% and the CASTC model achieved an overall accuracy of 77.9%. We found that the cashew area in Benin has doubled from 2015 to 2021 with 60% of new plantation development coming from cropland or fallow land, while encroachment of cashew plantations into protected areas has increased by 70%. Only half of cashew plantations were high-density in 2021, suggesting high potential for intensification. Our study illustrates the power of combining high-resolution remote sensing imagery and state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to better understand tree crops in the heterogeneous smallholder landscape.

Coronary Computed Tomography Angiography (CCTA) provides information on the presence, extent, and severity of obstructive coronary artery disease. Large-scale clinical studies analyzing CCTA-derived metrics typically require ground-truth validation in the form of high-fidelity 3D intravascular imaging. However, manual rigid alignment of intravascular images to corresponding CCTA images is both time consuming and user-dependent. Moreover, intravascular modalities suffer from several non-rigid motion-induced distortions arising from distortions in the imaging catheter path. To address these issues, we here present a semi-automatic segmentation-based framework for both rigid and non-rigid matching of intravascular images to CCTA images. We formulate the problem in terms of finding the optimal \emph{virtual catheter path} that samples the CCTA data to recapitulate the coronary artery morphology found in the intravascular image. We validate our co-registration framework on a cohort of $n=40$ patients using bifurcation landmarks as ground truth for longitudinal and rotational registration. Our results indicate that our non-rigid registration significantly outperforms other co-registration approaches for luminal bifurcation alignment in both longitudinal (mean mismatch: 3.3 frames) and rotational directions (mean mismatch: 28.6 degrees). By providing a differentiable framework for automatic multi-modal intravascular data fusion, our developed co-registration modules significantly reduces the manual effort required to conduct large-scale multi-modal clinical studies while also providing a solid foundation for the development of machine learning-based co-registration approaches.