Abstract
Biomedical engineering has been targeted as a potential research candidate for machine learning applications, with the purpose of detecting or diagnosing pathologies. However, acquiring relevant, high-quality, and heterogeneous medical datasets is challenging due to privacy and security issues and the effort required to annotate the data. Generative models have recently gained a growing interest in the computer vision field due to their ability to increase dataset size by generating new high-quality samples from the initial set, which can be used as data augmentation of a training dataset. This study aimed to synthesize artificial lung images from corresponding positional and semantic annotations using two generative adversarial networks and databases of real computed tomography scans: the Pix2Pix approach that generates lung images from the lung segmentation maps; and the conditional generative adversarial network (cCGAN) approach that was implemented with additional semantic labels in the generation process. To evaluate the quality of the generated images, two quantitative measures were used: the domain-specific Frechet Inception Distance and Structural Similarity Index. Additionally, an expert assessment was performed to measure the capability to distinguish between real and generated images. The assessment performed shows the high quality of synthesized images, which was confirmed by the expert evaluation. This work represents an innovative application of GAN approaches for medical application taking into consideration the pathological findings in the CT images and the clinical evaluation to assess the realism of these features in the generated images.

Abstract

Abstract
Globally, insect pests are the primary reason for reduced crop yield and quality. Although pesticides are commonly used to control and eliminate these pests, they can have adverse effects on the environment, human health, and natural resources. As an alternative, integrated pest management has been devised to enhance insect pest control, decrease the excessive use of pesticides, and enhance the output and quality of crops. With the improvements in artificial intelligence technologies, several applications have emerged in the agricultural context, including automatic detection, monitoring, and identification of insects. The purpose of this article is to outline the leading techniques for the automated detection of insects, highlighting the most successful approaches and methodologies while also drawing attention to the remaining challenges and gaps in this area. The aim is to furnish the reader with an overview of the major developments in this field. This study analysed 92 studies published between 2016 and 2022 on the automatic detection of insects in traps using deep learning techniques. The search was conducted on six electronic databases, and 36 articles met the inclusion criteria. The inclusion criteria were studies that applied deep learning techniques for insect classification, counting, and detection, written in English. The selection process involved analysing the title, keywords, and abstract of each study, resulting in the exclusion of 33 articles. The remaining 36 articles included 12 for the classification task and 24 for the detection task. Two main approaches-standard and adaptable-for insect detection were identified, with various architectures and detectors. The accuracy of the classification was found to be most influenced by dataset size, while detection was significantly affected by the number of classes and dataset size. The study also highlights two challenges and recommendations, namely, dataset characteristics (such as unbalanced classes and incomplete annotation) and methodologies (such as the limitations of algorithms for small objects and the lack of information about small insects). To overcome these challenges, further research is recommended to improve insect pest management practices. This research should focus on addressing the limitations and challenges identified in this article to ensure more effective insect pest management.

Abstract

Abstract
Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer and the second cause of cancer-related deaths in the world. Colonoscopic surveillance is extremely important to find cancer precursors such as adenomas or serrated polyps. Identifying small or flat polyps can be challenging during colonoscopy and highly dependent on the colonoscopist's skills. Deep learning algorithms can enable improvement of polyp detection rate and consequently assist to reduce physician subjectiveness and operation errors. This study aims to compare YOLO object detection architecture with self-attention models. In this study, the Kvasir-SEG polyp dataset, composed of 1000 colonoscopy annotated still images, were used to train (700 images) and validate (300images) the performance of polyp detection algorithms. Well-defined architectures such as YOLOv4 and different YOLOv5 models were compared with more recent algorithms that rely on self-attention mechanisms, namely the DETR model, to understand which technique can be more helpful and reliable in clinical practice. In the end, the YOLOv5 proved to be the model achieving better results for polyp detection with 0.81 mAP, however, the DETR had 0.80 mAP proving to have the potential of reaching similar performances when compared to more well-established architectures. © 2023 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

Abstract
SAR Interferometry (InSAR) techniques are for detecting and monitoring ground deformation all over the planet. Natural disasters such as volcanoes and earthquakes deformations are among the main applications, and the great developments that we have witnessed in recent years suggests that near real-time monitoring will soon be possible. InSAR is developing fast - space agencies are launching more satellites, leading to exponential data growth. Consequently, conventional techniques cannot process all the acquired data. Modern deep learning methods can be a solution since they reach high accuracy in automatically detecting patterns in images and are fast to operate. In this work, we explore the contribution of deep learning vision transformer models to automatically detect seismic deformation in SAR interferograms. A VGG19 model is trained as baseline and ViT model uses 256x256 pixels patches and the full interferogram. The ViT model outperforms the state-of-the-art both for patch and full interferogram approaches, achieving 0.88 and 0.92 F1-score, respectively.