Abstract
Simple Summary Nowadays, colorectal cancer is the third most incident cancer worldwide and, although it can be detected by imaging techniques, diagnosis is always based on biopsy samples. This assessment includes neoplasia grading, a subjective yet important task for pathologists. With the growing availability of digital slides, the development of robust and high-performance computer vision algorithms can help to tackle such a task. In this work, we propose an approach to automatically detect and grade lesions in colorectal biopsies with high sensitivity. The presented model attempts to support slide decision reasoning in terms of the spatial distribution of lesions, focusing the pathologist's attention on key areas. Thus, it can be integrated into clinical practice as a second opinion or as a flag for details that may have been missed at first glance. Colorectal cancer (CRC) diagnosis is based on samples obtained from biopsies, assessed in pathology laboratories. Due to population growth and ageing, as well as better screening programs, the CRC incidence rate has been increasing, leading to a higher workload for pathologists. In this sense, the application of AI for automatic CRC diagnosis, particularly on whole-slide images (WSI), is of utmost relevance, in order to assist professionals in case triage and case review. In this work, we propose an interpretable semi-supervised approach to detect lesions in colorectal biopsies with high sensitivity, based on multiple-instance learning and feature aggregation methods. The model was developed on an extended version of the recent, publicly available CRC dataset (the CRC+ dataset with 4433 WSI), using 3424 slides for training and 1009 slides for evaluation. The proposed method attained 90.19% classification ACC, 98.8% sensitivity, 85.7% specificity, and a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.888 at slide-based evaluation. Its generalisation capabilities are also studied on two publicly available external datasets.

Abstract
The field of Deep Learning (DL) has seen a remarkable series of developments with increasingly accurate and robust algorithms. However, the increase in performance has been accompanied by an increase in the parameters, complexity, and training and inference time of the models, which means that we are rapidly reaching a point where DL may no longer be feasible. On the other hand, some specific applications need to be carefully considered when developing DL models due to hardware limitations or power requirements. In this context, there is a growing interest in efficient DL algorithms, with Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) being one of the most promising paradigms. Due to the inherent asynchrony and sparseness of spike trains, these types of networks have the potential to reduce power consumption while maintaining relatively good performance. This is attractive for efficient DL and, if successful, could replace traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in many applications. However, despite significant progress, the performance of SNNs on benchmark datasets is often lower than that of traditional ANNs. Moreover, due to the non-differentiable nature of their activation functions, it is difficult to train SNNs with direct backpropagation, so appropriate training strategies must be found. Nevertheless, significant efforts have been made to develop competitive models. This survey covers the main ideas behind SNNs and reviews recent trends in learning rules and network architectures, with a particular focus on biologically inspired strategies. It also provides some practical considerations of state-of-the-art SNNs and discusses relevant research opportunities.

Abstract
Over the years, the evolution of face recognition (FR) algorithms has been steep and accelerated by a myriad of factors. Motivated by the unexpected elements found in real-world scenarios, researchers have investigated and developed a number of methods for occluded face recognition (OFR). However, due to the SarS-Cov2 pandemic, masked face recognition (MFR) research branched from OFR and became a hot and urgent research challenge. Due to time and data constraints, these models followed different and novel approaches to handle lower face occlusions, i.e., face masks. Hence, this study aims to evaluate the different approaches followed for both MFR and OFR, find linked details about the two conceptually similar research directions and understand future directions for both topics. For this analysis, several occluded and face recognition algorithms from the literature are studied. First, they are evaluated in the task that they were trained on, but also on the other. These methods were picked accordingly to the novelty of their approach, proven state-of-the-art results, and publicly available source code. We present quantitative results on 4 occluded and 5 masked FR datasets, and a qualitative analysis of several MFR and OFR models on the Occ-LFW dataset. The analysis presented, sustain the interoperable deployability of MFR methods on OFR datasets, when the occlusions are of a reasonable size. Thus, solutions proposed for MFR can be effectively deployed for general OFR.

Abstract
Manual assessment of fragments during the pro-cessing of pathology specimens is critical to ensure that the material available for slide analysis matches that captured during grossing without losing valuable material during this process. However, this step is still performed manually, resulting in lost time and delays in making the complete case available for evaluation by the pathologist. To overcome this limitation, we developed an autonomous system that can detect and count the number of fragments contained on each slide. We applied and compared two different methods: conventional machine learning methods and deep convolutional network methods. For conventional machine learning methods, we tested a two-stage approach with a supervised classifier followed by unsupervised hierarchical clustering. In addition, Fast R-CNN and YOLOv5, two state-of-the-art deep learning models for detection, were used and compared. All experiments were performed on a dataset comprising 1276 images of colorec-tal biopsy and polypectomy specimens manually labeled for fragment/set detection. The best results were obtained with the YOLOv5 architecture with a map@0.5 of 0.977 for fragment/set detection.

Abstract
The increasing popularity of attention mechanisms in deep learning algorithms for computer vision and natural language processing made these models attractive to other research domains. In healthcare, there is a strong need for tools that may improve the routines of the clinicians and the patients. Naturally, the use of attention-based algorithms for medical applications occurred smoothly. However, being healthcare a domain that depends on high-stake decisions, the scientific community must ponder if these high-performing algorithms fit the needs of medical applications. With this motto, this paper extensively reviews the use of attention mechanisms in machine learning methods (including Transformers) for several medical applications based on the types of tasks that may integrate several works pipelines of the medical domain. This work distinguishes itself from its predecessors by proposing a critical analysis of the claims and potentialities of attention mechanisms presented in the literature through an experimental case study on medical image classification with three different use cases. These experiments focus on the integrating process of attention mechanisms into established deep learning architectures, the analysis of their predictive power, and a visual assessment of their saliency maps generated by post-hoc explanation methods. This paper concludes with a critical analysis of the claims and potentialities presented in the literature about attention mechanisms and proposes future research lines in medical applications that may benefit from these frameworks.

Abstract
With the advent of self-driving cars and the push by large companies into fully driverless transportation services, monitoring passenger behaviour in vehicles is becoming increasingly important for several reasons, such as ensuring safety and comfort. Although several human action recognition (HAR) methods have been proposed, developing a true HAR system remains a very challenging task. If the dataset used to train a model contains a small number of actors, the model can become biased towards these actors and their unique characteristics. This can cause the model to generalise poorly when confronted with new actors performing the same actions. This limitation is particularly acute when developing models to characterise the activities of vehicle occupants, for which data sets are short and scarce. In this study, we describe and evaluate three different methods that aim to address this actor bias and assess their performance in detecting in-vehicle violence. These methods work by removing specific information about the actor from the model's features during training or by using data that is independent of the actor, such as information about body posture. The experimental results show improvements over the baseline model when evaluated with real data. On the Hanau03 Vito dataset, the accuracy improved from 65.33% to 69.41%. On the Sunnyvale dataset, the accuracy improved from 82.81% to 86.62%.