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Working memory mechanisms in spiking neural networks consisting of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons with adaptive threshold and synaptic plasticity are studied in this work. Moderate size networks including thousands of neurons were explored. Working memory is a network ability to keep in its state the information about recent stimuli presented to the network such that this information is sufficient to determine which stimulus has been presented. In this study, network state is defined as the current characteristics of network activity only — without internal state of its neurons. In order to discover the neuronal structures serving as a possible substrate of the memory mechanism, optimization of the network parameters and structure using genetic algorithm was carried out. Two kinds of neuronal structures with the desired properties were found. These are neuron pairs mutually connected by strong synaptic links and long tree-like neuronal ensembles. It was shown that only the neuron pairs are suitable for efficient and reliable implementation of working memory. Properties of such memory units and structures formed by them are explored in the present study. It is shown that characteristics of the studied two-neuron memory units can be set easily by the respective choice of the parameters of its neurons and synaptic connections. Besides that, this work demonstrates that ensembles of these structures can provide the network with capability of unsupervised learning to recognize patterns in the input signal.

The dynamics of public attention to COVID-19 epidemic is studied. The level of public attention is described by the daily number of search requests in Google made by users from a given country. In the empirical part of the work, data on the number of requests and the number of infected cases for a number of countries are considered. It is shown that in all cases the maximum of public attention occurs earlier than the maximum daily number of newly infected individuals. Thus, for a certain period of time, the growth of the epidemics occurs in parallel with the decline in public attention to it. It is also shown that the decline in the number of requests is described by an exponential function of time. In order to describe the revealed empirical pattern, a mathematical model is proposed, which is a modification of the model of the decline in attention after a one-time political event. The model develops the approach that considers decision-making by an individual as a member of the society in which the information process takes place. This approach assumes that an individual’s decision about whether or not to make a request on a given day about COVID is based on two factors. One of them is an attitude that reflects the individual’s long-term interest in a given topic and accumulates the individual’s previous experience, cultural preferences, social and economic status. The second is the dynamic factor of public attention to the epidemic, which changes during the process under consideration under the influence of informational stimuli. With regard to the subject under consideration, information stimuli are related to epidemic dynamics. The behavioral hypothesis is that if on some day the sum of the attitude and the dynamic factor exceeds a certain threshold value, then on that day the individual in question makes a search request on the topic of COVID. The general logic is that the higher the rate of infection growth, the higher the information stimulus, the slower decreases public attention to the pandemic. Thus, the constructed model made it possible to correlate the rate of exponential decrease in the number of requests with the rate of growth in the number of cases. The regularity found with the help of the model was tested on empirical data. It was found that the Student’s statistic is 4.56, which allows us to reject the hypothesis of the absence of a correlation with a significance level of 0.01.

Social media is a crucial indicator of the position of assets in the financial market. The paper describes the rigid solution for the classification problem to determine the influence of social media activity on financial market movements. Reputable crypto traders influencers are selected. Twitter posts packages are used as data. The methods of text, which are characterized by the numerous use of slang words and abbreviations, and preprocessing consist in lemmatization of Stanza and the use of regular expressions. A word is considered as an element of a vector of a data unit in the course of solving the problem of binary classification. The best markup parameters for processing Binance candles are searched for. Methods of feature selection, which is necessary for a precise description of text data and the subsequent process of establishing dependence, are represented by machine learning and statistical analysis. First, the feature selection is used based on the information criterion. This approach is implemented in a random forest model and is relevant for the task of feature selection for splitting nodes in a decision tree. The second one is based on the rigid compilation of a binary vector during a rough check of the presence or absence of a word in the package and counting the sum of the elements of this vector. Then a decision is made depending on the superiority of this sum over the threshold value that is predetermined previously by analyzing the frequency distribution of mentions of the word. The algorithm used to solve the problem was named benchmark and analyzed as a tool. Similar algorithms are often used in automated trading strategies. In the course of the study, observations of the influence of frequently occurring words, which are used as a basis of dimension 2 and 3 in vectorization, are described as well.

Segmentation of medical image is one of the most challenging tasks in analysis of medical image. It classifies the organs pixels or lesions from medical images background like MRI or CT scans, that is to provide critical information about the human organ’s volumes and shapes. In scientific imaging field, medical imaging is considered one of the most important topics due to the rapid and continuing progress in computerized medical image visualization, advances in analysis approaches and computer-aided diagnosis. Digital image processing becomes more important in healthcare field due to the growing use of direct digital imaging systems for medical diagnostics. Due to medical imaging techniques, approaches of image processing are now applicable in medicine. Generally, various transformations will be needed to extract image data. Also, a digital image can be considered an approximation of a real situation includes some uncertainty derived from the constraints on the process of vision. Since information on the level of uncertainty will influence an expert’s attitude. To address this challenge, we propose novel framework involving interval concept that consider a good tool for dealing with the uncertainty, In the proposed approach, the medical images are transformed into interval valued representation approach and entropies are defined for an image object and background. Then we determine a threshold for lower-bound image and for upper-bound image, and then calculate the mean value for the final output results. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we evaluate it by using synthetic image and its ground truth. Experimental results showed how performance of the segmentation-based entropy threshold can be enhanced using proposed approach to overcome ambiguity.

This article considers the task of multiclass classification of coniferous trees with varying degrees of damage by insect pests on images obtained using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We propose the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the classification of fir trees Abies sibirica and Siberian pine trees Pinus sibirica in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) imagery. In our approach, we develop three CNN models based on the classical U-Net architecture, designed for pixel-wise classification of images (semantic segmentation). The first model, Mo-U-Net, incorporates several changes to the classical U-Net model. The second and third models, MSC-U-Net and MSC-Res-U-Net, respectively, form ensembles of three Mo-U-Net models, each varying in depth and input image sizes. Additionally, the MSC-Res-U-Net model includes the integration of residual blocks. To validate our approach, we have created two datasets of UAV images depicting trees affected by pests, specifically Abies sibirica and Pinus sibirica, and trained the proposed three CNN models utilizing mIoULoss and Focal Loss as loss functions. Subsequent evaluation focused on the effectiveness of each trained model in classifying damaged trees. The results obtained indicate that when mIoULoss served as the loss function, the proposed models fell short of practical applicability in the forestry industry, failing to achieve classification accuracy above the threshold value of 0.5 for individual classes of both tree species according to the IoU metric. However, under Focal Loss, the MSC-Res-U-Net and Mo-U-Net models, in contrast to the third proposed model MSC-U-Net, exhibited high classification accuracy (surpassing the threshold value of 0.5) for all classes of Abies sibirica and Pinus sibirica trees. Thus, these results underscore the practical significance of the MSC-Res-U-Net and Mo-U-Net models for forestry professionals, enabling accurate classification and early detection of pest outbreaks in coniferous trees.

The mechanisms of hydrodynamical activation of blood coagulation system are investigated in stenosed vessels for a wide range of Reynolds number values (from 10 up to 500). It is assumed that the vessel wall permeability for procoagulant factors rapidly increases when wall shear stress exceeds specific threshold value. A number of patterns of blood coagulation processes development are described. The influence of blood flow topology changes on activation of blood coagulation is explored. It is established that not only blood flow decrease, but also its increase may promote activation of blood coagulation. It was found that dependence of thrombogenic danger of stenosis on vessel lumen blockage ratio is non-monotonic. The relevance of obtained theoretical results for clinical practice is discussed.

Accurate segmentation of liver plays important in contouring during diagnosis and the planning of treatment. Imaging technology analysis and processing are wide usage in medical diagnostics, and therapeutic applications. Liver segmentation referring to the process of automatic or semi-automatic detection of liver image boundaries. A major difficulty in segmentation of liver image is the high variability as; the human anatomy itself shows major variation modes. In this paper, a proposed approach for computed tomography (CT) liver segmentation is presented by combining exponential entropy and fuzzy c-partition. Entropy concept has been utilized in various applications in imaging computing domain. Threshold techniques based on entropy have attracted a considerable attention over the last years in image analysis and processing literatures and it is among the most powerful techniques in image segmentation. In the proposed approach, the computed tomography (CT) of liver is transformed into fuzzy domain and fuzzy entropies are defined for liver image object and background. In threshold selection procedure, the proposed approach considers not only the information of liver image background and object, but also interactions between them as the selection of threshold is done by find a proper parameter combination of membership function such that the total fuzzy exponential entropy is maximized. Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is utilizing to optimize the exponential entropy measure to obtain image thresholds. Experimental results in different CT livers scan are done and the results demonstrate the efficient of the proposed approach. Based on the visual clarity of segmented images with varied threshold values using the proposed approach, it was observed that liver segmented image visual quality is better with the results higher level of threshold.

Numerical modeling of shear-induced platelet activation in haemodialysis arteriovenous fistulas was carried out in this work. The goal was to investigate the mechanisms of threshold shear-induced platelet activation in fistulas. For shear-induced platelet activation to take place, shear stress accumulated by platelets along corresponding trajectories in blood flow had to exceed a definite threshold value. The threshold value of cumulative shear stress was supposed to depend on the multimer size of von Willebrand factor macromolecules acting as hydrodynamic sensors for platelets. The effect of arteriovenous fistulas parameters, such as the anastomotic angle, blood flow rate, and the multimer size of von Willebrand factor macromolecules, on platelet activation risk was studied. Parametric diagrams have been constructed that make it possible to distinguish the areas of parameters corresponding to the presence or absence of shear-induced platelet activation. Scaling relations that approximate critical curves on parametric diagrams were obtained. Analysis showed that threshold fistula flow rate is higher for obtuse anastomotic angle than for sharp ones. This means that a fistula with obtuse angle can be used in wider flow rate range without risk of platelet activation. In addition, a study of different anastomosis configurations of arteriovenous fistulas showed that the configuration “end of vein to end of artery” is among the safest. For all the investigated anastomosis configurations, the critical curves on the parametric diagrams were monotonically decreasing functions of von Willebrand factor multimer size. It was shown that fistula flow rate should have a significant impact on the probability of thrombus formation initiation, while the direction of flow through the distal artery did not affect platelet activation. The obtained results allowed to determine the safest fistula configurations with respect to thrombus formation triggering. The authors believe that the results of the work may be of interest to doctors performing surgical operations for creation of arteriovenous fistulas for haemodialysis. In the final section of the work, possible clinical applications of the obtained results by means of mathematical modeling are discussed.