Semantic segmentation is an important step in understanding the scene for many practical applications such as autonomous driving. Although Deep Convolutional Neural Networks-based methods have significantly improved segmentation accuracy, small/thin objects remain challenging to segment due to convolutional and pooling operations that result in information loss, especially for small objects. This article presents a novel attention-based method called Across Feature Map Attention (AFMA) to address this challenge. It quantifies the inner-relationship between small and large objects belonging to the same category by utilizing the different feature levels of the original image. The AFMA could compensate for the loss of high-level feature information of small objects and improve the small/thin object segmentation. Our method can be used as an efficient plug-in for a wide range of existing architectures and produces much more interpretable feature representation than former studies. Extensive experiments on eight widely used segmentation methods and other existing small-object segmentation models on CamVid and Cityscapes demonstrate that our method substantially and consistently improves the segmentation of small/thin objects.

Nowadays, the amount of biomedical literatures is growing at an explosive speed, and much useful knowledge is yet undiscovered in the literature. Classical information retrieval techniques allow to access explicit information from a given collection of information, but are not able to recognize implicit connections. Literature-based discovery (LBD) is characterized by uncovering hidden associations in non-interacting literature. It could significantly support scientific research by identifying new connections between biomedical entities. However, most of the existing approaches to LBD are not scalable and may not be sufficient to detect complex associations in non-directly-connected literature. In this article, we present a model which incorporates biomedical knowledge graph, graph embedding, and deep learning methods for literature-based discovery. First, the relations between biomedical entities are extracted from biomedical abstracts and then a knowledge graph is constructed by using these obtained relations. Second, the graph embedding technologies are applied to convert the entities and relations in the knowledge graph into a low-dimensional vector space. Third, a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) network is trained based on the entity associations represented by the pre-trained graph embeddings. Finally, the learned model is used for open and closed literature-based discovery tasks. The experimental results show that our method could not only effectively discover hidden associations between entities, but also reveal the corresponding mechanism of interactions. It suggests that incorporating knowledge graph and deep learning methods is an effective way for capturing the underlying complex associations between entities hidden in the literature.

In order to save time and cost, many disease gene prediction methods have been proposed in recent years. However, the traditional network model uses a binary relationship to represent the relationship between different proteins or gene molecules and phenotypes, which leads to the loss of information. Recently, hypergraph shows that it can overcome this loss of information to some extent and preserve the multivariate relationship, so we transformed the disease gene prediction problem into the problem of ranking the multivariate-relationship object. In this paper, we propose a method of Heterogeneous Probabilistic Hypergraph Ranking (HPHR) to predict disease genes. Firstly, fix a graph centroid for each hyperedge and according to different associations, and add other nodes related to the graph centroid to hyperedges with a certain probability. Then transform the problem of predicting disease genes into the problem of ranking heterogeneous objects, and the candidate genes are sorted by hypergraph ranking. The method is then applied to the integrated disease gene network. Compared with other prediction methods achieved better results, which was verified by this experiment.

BACKGROUND: Protein complexes are one of the keys to deciphering the behavior of a cell system. During the past decade, most computational approaches used to identify protein complexes have been based on discovering densely connected subgraphs in protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. However, many true complexes are not dense subgraphs and these approaches show limited performances for detecting protein complexes from PPI networks. RESULTS: To solve these problems, in this paper we propose a supervised learning method based on network node embeddings which utilizes the informative properties of known complexes to guide the search process for new protein complexes. First, node embeddings are obtained from human protein interaction network. Then the protein interactions are weighted through the similarities between node embeddings. After that, the supervised learning method is used to detect protein complexes. Then the random forest model is used to filter the candidate complexes in order to obtain the final predicted complexes. Experimental results on real human and yeast protein interaction networks show that our method effectively improves the performance for protein complex detection. CONCLUSIONS: We provided a new method for identifying protein complexes from human and yeast protein interaction networks, which has great potential to benefit the field of protein complex detection.

BACKGROUND: Drug discovery is the process through which potential new medicines are identified. High-throughput screening and computer-aided drug discovery/design are the two main drug discovery methods for now, which have successfully discovered a series of drugs. However, development of new drugs is still an extremely time-consuming and expensive process. Biomedical literature contains important clues for the identification of potential treatments. It could support experts in biomedicine on their way towards new discoveries. METHODS: Here, we propose a biomedical knowledge graph-based drug discovery method called SemaTyP, which discovers candidate drugs for diseases by mining published biomedical literature. We first construct a biomedical knowledge graph with the relations extracted from biomedical abstracts, then a logistic regression model is trained by learning the semantic types of paths of known drug therapies' existing in the biomedical knowledge graph, finally the learned model is used to discover drug therapies for new diseases. RESULTS: The experimental results show that our method could not only effectively discover new drug therapies for new diseases, but also could provide the potential mechanism of action of the candidate drugs. CONCLUSIONS: In this paper we propose a novel knowledge graph based literature mining method for drug discovery. It could be a supplementary method for current drug discovery methods.

BACKGROUND: Accurate determination of protein complexes has become a key task of system biology for revealing cellular organization and function. Up to now, the protein complex prediction methods are mostly focused on static protein protein interaction (PPI) networks. However, cellular systems are highly dynamic and responsive to cues from the environment. The shift from static PPI networks to dynamic PPI networks is essential to accurately predict protein complex. RESULTS: The gene expression data contains crucial dynamic information of proteins and PPIs, along with high-throughput experimental PPI data, are valuable for protein complex prediction. Firstly, we exploit gene expression data to calculate the active time point and the active probability of each protein and PPI. The dynamic active information is integrated into high-throughput PPI data to construct dynamic PPI networks. Secondly, a novel method for predicting protein complexes from the dynamic PPI networks is proposed based on core-attachment structural feature. Our method can effectively exploit not only the dynamic active information but also the topology structure information based on the dynamic PPI networks. CONCLUSIONS: We construct four dynamic PPI networks, and accurately predict many well-characterized protein complexes. The experimental results show that (i) the dynamic active information significantly improves the performance of protein complex prediction; (ii) our method can effectively make good use of both the dynamic active information and the topology structure information of dynamic PPI networks to achieve state-of-the-art protein complex prediction capabilities.

Hardware/software partitioning is a key issue in the design of embedded systems where performance, chip area and/or power dissipation constraints have to be met. The granularity for automatic partitioning has great impact on the run-time of the partitioning and the quality of the final implementation. In this paper we present a new approach that generates partitioning objects using the dependency of the operations in the system. By clustering the dependent operations into one object, the number of the objects and the coupling between them are lowered. Compared to the fine-grain partitioning, our approach, which is called dependency driven partitioning, prunes a great portion of invalid solution space during partitioning objects formation, so as to expedite the partitioning without loss of the quality. Experiments with simulated annealing optimization show a faster convergence than that of fine-granularity with comparable partitioning quality