Spiking neural P systems (SN PS) exemplify the third-generation of spiking neural networks (SNNs), which perform distributed and concurrent computations. However, SN PS rely solely on the spike as the singular signaling entity, ignoring the influence of other substances in the biological nervous system. Neuromodulators have the ability to exert their effects on the postsynaptic membrane, influencing synaptic plasticity and modifying the intensity of interneuronal connections. Motivated by this biological observation, we introduce a self-adaptation spiking neural P system with neuromodulators (SSNN PS). Specifically, neuromodulators generated by neurons are designed as resources consumed by rules in the postsynaptic membrane. The postsynaptic membrane, functioning as a new computational unit with three novel rules, possesses self-adapting weights regulated by neuromodulators and reflects the intensity of connections between neurons. Therefore, the SSNN PS enhance the control of the system over the computing process. In this work, we demonstrate the Turing universality of SSNN PS as both a number-generating and a number-accepting device. In addition, to verify the application capability, an SSNN PS for gender recognition of face images was constructed. The postsynaptic membrane self-adaptively updates its weights as it receives the feedback neuromodulators, which makes the recognition result more accurate. It achieves an accuracy of 91.71% on the UTKFace dataset and 87.83% on the FairFace dataset, and outperforms the other five comparative methods.

The classic spiking neural P (SN P) systems abstract the real biological neural network into a simple structure based on graphs, where neurons can only communicate on the plane. This study proposes the hypergraph-based numerical spiking neural membrane (HNSNM) systems with novel repartition protocols. Through the introduction of hypergraphs, the HNSNM systems can characterize the high-order relationships among neurons and extend the traditional neuron structure to high-dimensional nonlinear spaces. The HNSNM systems also abstract two biological mechanisms of synapse creation and pruning, and use plasticity rules with repartition protocols to achieve planar, hierarchical and spatial communications among neurons in hypergraph neuron structures. Through imitating register machines, the Turing universality of the HNSNM systems is proved by using them as number generating and accepting devices. A universal HNSNM system consisting of 41 neurons is constructed to compute arbitrary functions. By solving NP-complete problems using the subset sum problem as an example, the computational efficiency and effectiveness of HNSNM systems are verified.

Since the spiking neural P system (SN P system) was proposed in 2006, it has become a research hotspot in the field of membrane computing. The SN P system performs computations through the encoding, processing, and transmission of spiking information and can be regarded as a third-generation neural network. As a variant of the SN P system, the global asynchronous numerical spiking neural P system (ANSN P system) is adaptable to a broader range of application scenarios. However, in biological neuroscience, some neurons work synchronously within a community to perform specific functions in the brain. Inspired by this, our work investigates a global asynchronous spiking neural P system (ANSN P system) that incorporates certain local synchronous neuron sets. Within these local synchronous sets, neurons must execute their production functions simultaneously, thereby reducing dependence on thresholds and enhancing control uncertainty in ANSN P systems. By analyzing the ADD, SUB, and FIN modules in the generating mode, as well as the INPUT and ADD modules in the accepting mode, this paper demonstrates the novel system's computational capacity as both a generator and an acceptor. Additionally, this paper compares each module to those in other SN P systems, considering the maximum number of neurons and rules per neuron. The results show that this new ANSN P system is at least as effective as the existing SN P systems.

Neural-like P systems are membrane computing models inspired by natural computing. Spiking neurral (SN) P systems, a kind of neural-like P systems, are viewed as third-generation neural network models. Although real neurons have complex structures, classical SN P systems simplify the structures and corresponding mechanisms to stationary two-dimensional graphs and lack related evolution mechanisms on spikes and channels, which limits the real applications of these models. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid SN P system with evolutionary channels (HN P systems), including three new types of rules for dynamically generating or removing one-one and one-many/many-one channels with related evolutions of spikes on the hybrid neuron structures. Two dynamic regulatory factors are also presented on rules to help guide the optimization of the HN P systems automatically. Based on the new P system, a multiple brain metastases (BMs) segmentation model is developed. The experimental results indicate that the proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art methods on the BMs, which have large variations in sizes, positions and shapes, and low contrast with their surroundings. Performances on the head and neck segmentation dataset also verifies the effectiveness of the HN P system.

Neural-like P systems are membrane computing models inspired by natural computing and are viewed as third-generation neural network models. Although real neurons have complex structures, classical neural-like P systems simplify the structures and corresponding mechanisms to two-dimensional graphs or tree-based firing and forgetting communications, which limit the real applications of these models. In this paper, we propose a hypergraph-based numerical neural-like (HNN) P system containing five types of neurons to describe the high-order correlations among neuron structures. Three new kinds of communication mechanisms among neurons are also proposed to address numerical variables and functions. Based on the new neural-like P system, a tumor/organ segmentation model for medical images is developed. The experimental results indicate that the proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art methods based on two hippocampal datasets and a multiple brain metastases dataset, thus verifying the effectiveness of the HNN P system in correctly segmenting tumors/organs.

Automatic pancreas segmentation is crucial to the diagnostic assessment of diabetes or pancreatic cancer. However, the relatively small size of the pancreas in the upper body, as well as large variations of its location and shape in retroperitoneum, make the segmentation task challenging. To alleviate these challenges, in this article, we propose a cascaded multitask 3-D fully convolution network (FCN) to automatically segment the pancreas. Our cascaded network is composed of two parts. The first part focuses on fast locating the region of the pancreas, and the second part uses a multitask FCN with dense connections to refine the segmentation map for fine voxel-wise segmentation. In particular, our multitask FCN with dense connections is implemented to simultaneously complete tasks of the voxel-wise segmentation and skeleton extraction from the pancreas. These two tasks are complementary, that is, the extracted skeleton provides rich information about the shape and size of the pancreas in retroperitoneum, which can boost the segmentation of pancreas. The multitask FCN is also designed to share the low- and mid-level features across the tasks. A feature consistency module is further introduced to enhance the connection and fusion of different levels of feature maps. Evaluations on two pancreas datasets demonstrate the robustness of our proposed method in correctly segmenting the pancreas in various settings. Our experimental results outperform both baseline and state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the ablation study shows that our proposed parts/modules are critical for effective multitask learning.

In this paper we propose a new graph based P system. The main feature of graph P system is that membrane compartments spread on edges as well as on vertices. These two kinds of compartments are topologically connected with certain communication rules. A new neural computing technique is proposed to solve cluster splitting into finding the equilibrium of Hopfield neural networks. Then we use the new graph P systems to obtain stable status of the neural networks. An example is presented to show the computing efficiency of the new P system with comparison with classical genetic algorithms.

A novel multi-agent membrane computing technique is proposed. We provide a new membrane structure on graph to construct a multi-agent membrane system, which offers a new framework for collaboration and resources sharing among designers. The new design environment provides a tool to extend designer's ideas with the help of communication rules of membrane. Shapes were generated and changed in membrane systems by rules base on the idea of genetic computing with operators crossover, mutation and selection. A multi-agent membrane system with rules is constructed in detail. Finally, a pipe design example is adopted to illustrate the entire design process, which also shows the great parallelism, less time-consuming and synchronization of MAMC.

Using membrane computing to do some creative design is a new approach in this field. We use multi-sets of P system to assign customers' requirements and experienced models, constructing P system with rewriting rules which is suit for our design, getting the results that we want. All of the above steps are carried out in membranes. Because of the high parallelism of membrane computing, we can get the results rapidly.