Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions have revolutionized our world, using extensive datasets and computational resources to create automatic tools for complex tasks that, until now, have been performed by humans. Massive data is a fundamental aspect of the most powerful AI-based algorithms. However, for AI-based healthcare solutions, there are several socioeconomic, technical/infrastructural, and most importantly, legal restrictions, which limit the large collection and access of biomedical data, especially medical imaging. To overcome this important limitation, several alternative solutions have been suggested, including transfer learning approaches, generation of artificial data, adoption of blockchain technology, and creation of an infrastructure composed of anonymous and abstract data. However, none of these strategies is currently able to completely solve this challenge. The need to build large datasets that can be used to develop healthcare solutions deserves special attention from the scientific community, clinicians, all the healthcare players, engineers, ethicists, legislators, and society in general. This paper offers an overview of the data limitation in medical predictive models; its impact on the development of healthcare solutions; benefits and barriers of sharing data; and finally, suggests future directions to overcome data limitations in the medical field and enable AI to enhance healthcare. This perspective is dedicated to the technical requirements of the learning models, and it explains the limitation that comes from poor and small datasets in the medical domain and the technical options that try or can solve the problem related to the lack of massive healthcare data.

Abstract
In this study, we used machine learning techniques to reconstruct the wavelength dependence of the absorption coefficient of human normal and pathological colorectal mucosa tissues. Using only diffuse reflectance spectra from the ex vivo mucosa tissues as input to algorithms, several approaches were tried before obtaining good matching between the generated absorption coefficients and the ones previously calculated for the mucosa tissues from invasive experimental spectral measurements. Considering the optimized match for the results generated with the multilayer perceptron regression method, we were able to identify differentiated accumulation of lipofuscin in the absorption coefficient spectra of both mucosa tissues as we have done before with the corresponding results calculated directly from invasive measurements. Considering the random forest regressor algorithm, the estimated absorption coefficient spectra almost matched the ones previously calculated. By subtracting the absorption of lipofuscin from these spectra, we obtained similar hemoglobin ratios at 410/550 nm: 18.9-fold/9.3-fold for the healthy mucosa and 46.6-fold/24.2-fold for the pathological mucosa, while from direct calculations, those ratios were 19.7-fold/10.1-fold for the healthy mucosa and 33.1-fold/17.3-fold for the pathological mucosa. The higher values obtained in this study indicate a higher blood content in the pathological samples used to measure the diffuse reflectance spectra. In light of such accuracy and sensibility to the presence of hidden absorbers, with a different accumulation between healthy and pathological tissues, good perspectives become available to develop minimally invasive spectroscopy methods for in vivo early detection and monitoring of colorectal cancer.

Abstract
Antibiotics are widely applied for the treatment of humans and animals, being the Sulfonamides a special group. The presence of antibiotics in the aquatic environment causes the development antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is related to the emerging of untreatable infectious diseases. One of the most common methods for determine it consists in high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrom-etrym, which is not suitable for an in situ analysis strategy. One important property of sulfonamides is how the compound reacts when added the colorimetric reagent p-dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde, opening the possibility of using colorimetry to measure the concentration. To allow an analysis on the field, the solution needs to be fully mobile and practical. In this context, we recently developed a new screening method based on a computational application running over a picture of the sample; however, despite this approach improving the analysis process when compared to traditional methods, it is still not fully mobile. Smartphones’ computational capabilities are increasing and more powerful than many laptops of older generations. Taking this into account, we developed a mobile analysis application that leverages the computing power and ease of use of a smartphone. The acquired picture will pass through a color correction algorithm to normalize the capture considering the environmental lighting. When the algorithm finishes processing the image, the app will return the estimated concentration of the sample. This approach enables in situ analysis, without requiring an Internet connection nor specific analysis equipment, and the ability to have a rather precise guess of the level of contamination of any water. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

Abstract
Lung segmentation represents a fundamental step in the development of computer-aided decision systems for the investigation of interstitial lung diseases. In a holistic lung analysis, eliminating background areas from Computed Tomography (CT) images is essential to avoid the inclusion of noise information and spend unnecessary computational resources on non-relevant data. However, the major challenge in this segmentation task relies on the ability of the models to deal with imaging manifestations associated with severe disease. Based on U-net, a general biomedical image segmentation architecture, we proposed a light-weight and faster architecture. In this 2D approach, experiments were conducted with a combination of two publicly available databases to improve the heterogeneity of the training data. Results showed that, when compared to the original U-net, the proposed architecture maintained performance levels, achieving 0.894 +/- 0.060, 4.493 +/- 0.633 and 4.457 +/- 0.628 for DSC, HD and HD-95 metrics, respectively, when using all patients from the ILD database for testing only, while allowing a more efficient computational usage. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the ability to cope with high-density lung patterns associated with severe disease were conducted, supporting the idea that more representative and diverse data is necessary to build robust and reliable segmentation tools.

Abstract
The misuse and overuse of antibiotics lead to antibiotic resistance becoming a serious problem and a threat to world health. Bacteria developing resistance results in more dangerous infections and a more difficult treatment. To monitor the antibiotic pollution of environmental waters, different detection methods have been developed, however these are normally complex, costly and time-consuming. In a previous work, we developed a method based on digital colorimetry, using smartphone cameras to acquire sample images and color correction to ensure color constancy between images. A reference chart with 24 colors, with known ground truth values, is included in the photographs in order to color correct the images using least squares minimization. Then, the color of the sample is detected and correlated to antibiotic concentration. Although achieving promising results, the method was too sensitive to contrasting illumination conditions, with high standard deviations in these cases. Here, we test different methods for improving the stability and precision of the previous algorithm. By using only the 13 patches closest to the color of the targets and more parameters for the least squares minimization, better results were achieved, with an improvement of up to 83.33% relative to the baseline. By improving the color constancy, a more precise, less influenced by extreme conditions, estimation of sulfonamides is possible, using a practical and cost-efficient method. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Lung cancer treatments that are accurate and effective are urgently needed. The diagnosis of advanced-stage patients accounts for the majority of the cases, being essential to provide a specialized course of treatment. One emerging course of treatment relies on target therapy through the testing of biomarkers, such as the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) gene. Such testing can be obtained from invasive methods, namely through biopsy, which may be avoided by applying machine learning techniques to the imaging phenotypes extracted from Computerized Tomography (CT). This study aims to explore the contribution of ensemble methods when applied to the prediction of EGFR mutation status. The obtained results translate in a direct correlation between the semantic predictive model and the outcome of the combined ensemble methods, showing that the utilized features do not have a positive contribution to the predictive developed models.