High-performance Imaging Research Articles

High-Performance Polarization Microscopy Reveals Structural Remodeling in Rat Calcaneal Tendons Cultivated In Vitro.

Collagenous tissues exhibit anisotropic optical properties such as birefringence and linear dichroism (LD) as a result of their structurally oriented supraorganization from the nanometer level to the collagen bundle scale. Changes in macromolecular order and in aggregational states can be evaluated in tendon collagen bundles using polarization microscopy. Because there are no reports on the status of the macromolecular organization in tendon explants, the objective of this work was to evaluate the birefringence and LD characteristics of collagen bundles in rat calcaneal tendons cultivated in vitro on substrates that differ in their mechanical stiffness (plastic vs. glass) while accompanying the expected occurrence of cell migration from these structures. Tendon explants from adult male Wistar rats were cultivated for 8 and 12 days on borosilicate glass coverslips (n = 3) and on nonpyrogenic polystyrene plastic dishes (n = 4) and were compared with tendons not cultivated in vitro (n = 3). Birefringence was investigated in unstained tendon sections using high-performance polarization microscopy and image analysis. LD was studied under polarized light in tendon sections stained with the dichroic dyes Ponceau SS and toluidine blue at pH 4.0 to evaluate the orientation of proteins and acid glycosaminoglycans (GAG) macromolecules, respectively. Structural remodeling characterized by the reduction in the macromolecular orientation, aggregation and alignment of collagen bundles, based on decreased average gray values concerned with birefringence intensity, LD and morphological changes, was detected especially in the tendon explants cultivated on the plastic substrate. These changes may have facilitated cell migration from the lateral regions of the explants to the substrates, an event that was observed earlier and more intensely upon tissue cultivation on the plastic substrate. The axial alignment of the migrating cells relative to the explant, which occurred with increased cultivation times, may be due to the mechanosensitive nature of the tenocytes. Collagen fibers possibly played a role as a signal source to cells, a hypothesis that requires further investigation, including studies on the dynamics of cell membrane receptors and cytoskeletal organization, and collagen shearing electrical properties.

Contributions of Support Point Number to Mirror Assembly Thermal Sensitivity Control.

Due to the extreme environmental temperature variations, solutions that enable ultra-low thermal sensitivity in a mirror assembly are crucial for high-performance aerial optical imaging sensors (AOIS). Strategies such as the elimination of the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) mismatch and the employment of a flexure connection at the interface cannot be simply duplicated for the application involved, demanding specific design constraints. The contributions of support point number to the surface thermal sensitivity reduction and support stiffness improvement have been studied. A synthetic six-point support system that integrates equally spaced multiple ultra-low radial stiffness mirror flexure units and assembly external interface flexure units has been demonstrated on a 260 mm apertured annular mirror that involves significant CTE mismatch and demanding support stiffness constraint. The surface deformation RMS, due to the 35 °C temperature variation, is 16.7 nm.

Achieving safe and high-performance gastrointestinal tract spectral CT imaging with small-molecule lanthanide complex

BackgroundNon-intrusive imaging of gastrointestinal (GI) tract using computed tomography (CT) contrast agents is of the most significant issues in the diagnosis and treatment of GI diseases. Moreover, spectral CT, which can generate monochromatic images to display the X-ray attenuation characteristics of contrast agents, provides a better imaging sensitivity for diagnose inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) than convention CT imaging.MethodsHerein, a convenient and one-pot synthesis method is provided for the fabrication of small-molecule lanthanide complex Holmium-tetraazacyclododecane-1, 4, 7, 10-tetraacetic acid (Ho-DOTA) as a biosafe and high-performance spectral CT contrast agent for GI imaging with IBD. In vivo CT imaging was administered with both healthy mice and colitis mice induced by dextran sodium sulfate.ResultsWe found that Ho-DOTA accumulated in inflammation sites of large intestines and produced high CT contrast compared with healthy mice. Both in vitro and in vivo experimental results also showed that Ho-DOTA provided much more diagnostic sensitivity and accuracy due to the excellent X-ray attenuation characteristics of Ho-DOTA compared with clinical iodinate agent. Furthermore, the proposed contrast media could be timely excreted from the body via the urinary and digestive system, keeping away from the potential side effects due to long-term retention in vivo.ConclusionAccordingly, Ho-DOTA with excellent biocompatibility can be useful as a potential high-performance spectral CT contrast agent for further clinical imaging of gastrointestinal tract and diagnosis of intestinal system diseases.Graphical

Multilayer SnS2/few-layer MoS2 heterojunctions with in-situ floating photogate toward high-performance photodetectors and optical imaging application

Since the successful preparation of the monolayer MoS2 phototransistor, two-dimensional (2D) layered materials (2DLMs) have been regarded as one of the most compelling candidates toward the implementation of the next generation of novel optoelectronic devices and systems. However, most reported 2DLM photodetectors suffer from specific shortcomings, such as low responsivity, large dark current, low specific detectivity, low on/off ratio, and sluggish response rate. Herein, multilayer SnS2/few-layer MoS2 van der Waals heterostructures have been constructed by stacking the MoS2 and SnS2 nanosheets grown by a single atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition method. The SnS2/MoS2 heterojunction photodetector demonstrates competitive overall performance with a large on/off ratio of 171, a high responsivity of 28.3 A W−1, and an excellent detectivity of 1.2 × 1013 Jones. In addition, an ultrafast response rate with the response/recovery time down to 1.38 ms/600 is achieved. The excellent properties are associated with the synergy of type-II band alignment of SnS2/MoS2 and the in-situ formed seamless floating photogate, which contribute to separating the photoexcited electron-hole pairs and extending the carrier lifetime. Taking advantage of the excellent photosensitivity, the SnS2/MoS2 device demonstrates proof-of-concept optical imaging application. On the whole, this study provides a distinctive perspective to implement advanced photodetectors with competitive overall performance.

Learn Single-horizon Disease Evolution for Predictive Generation of Post-therapeutic Neovascular Age-related Macular Degeneration

Background and ObjectiveMost of the existing disease prediction methods in the field of medical image processing fall into two classes, namely image-to-category predictions and image-to-parameter predictions.Few works have focused on image-to-image predictions. Different from multi-horizon predictions in other fields, ophthalmologists prefer to show more confidence in single-horizon predictions due to the low tolerance of predictive risk. MethodsWe propose a single-horizon disease evolution network (SHENet) to predictively generate post-therapeutic SD-OCT images by inputting pre-therapeutic SD-OCT images with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD). In SHENet, a feature encoder converts the input SD-OCT images to deep features, then a graph evolution module predicts the process of disease evolution in high-dimensional latent space and outputs the predicted deep features, and lastly, feature decoder recovers the predicted deep features to SD-OCT images. We further propose an evolution reinforcement module to ensure the effectiveness of disease evolution learning and obtain realistic SD-OCT images by adversarial training. ResultsSHENet is validated on 383 SD-OCT cubes of 22 nAMD patients based on three well-designed schemes (P-0, P-1 and P-M) based on the quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Three metrics (PSNR, SSIM, 1-LPIPS) are used here for quantitative evaluations. Compared with other generative methods, the generative SD-OCT images of SHENet have the highest image quality (P-0: 23.659, P-1: 23.875, P-M: 24.198) by PSNR. Besides, SHENet achieves the best structure protection (P-0: 0.326, P-1: 0.337, P-M: 0.349) by SSIM and content prediction (P-0: 0.609, P-1: 0.626, P-M: 0.642) by 1-LPIPS. Qualitative evaluations also demonstrate that SHENet has a better visual effect than other methods. ConclusionsSHENet can generate post-therapeutic SD-OCT images with both high prediction performance and good image quality, which has great potential to help ophthalmologists forecast the therapeutic effect of nAMD.

Recent Advances in Contrast-Enhanced Photoacoustic Imaging: Overcoming the Physical and Practical Challenges.

For decades now, photoacoustic imaging (PAI) has been investigated to realize its potential as a niche biomedical imaging modality. Despite its highly desirable optical contrast and ultrasonic spatiotemporal resolution, PAI is challenged by such physical limitations as a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), diminished image contrast due to strong optical attenuation, and a lower-bound on spatial resolution in deep tissue. In addition, contrast-enhanced PAI has faced practical limitations such as insufficient cell-specific targeting due to low delivery efficiency and difficulties in developing clinically translatable agents. Identifying these limitations is essential to the continuing expansion of the field, and substantial advances in developing contrast-enhancing agents, complemented by high-performance image acquisition systems, have synergistically dealt with the challenges of conventional PAI. This review covers the past four years of research on pushing the physical and practical challenges of PAI in terms of SNR/contrast, spatial resolution, targeted delivery, and clinical application. Promising strategies for dealing with each challenge are reviewed in detail, and future research directions for next generation contrast-enhanced PAI are discussed.

Generative adversarial network–assisted image classification for imbalanced tire X-ray defect detection

A high-performance tire X-ray defect image classification method plays a key role in enhancing the automation level of tire defect detection. In industrial practice, however, a typical challenge is that the collected datasets of diverse tire defects are often imbalanced. To address this issue, a Wasserstein generative adversarial network (WGAN)–assisted image classification method is proposed for imbalanced tire X-ray defect detection. To expand the minority classes in original datasets, a WGAN model is established to generate high-quality X-ray defect images. Considering the feature similarity of different defect grades in the same type, the WGAN is trained based on a pre-trained model to extract deep features. An improved deep convolutional neural network model is restructured for performance improvement. Finally, the augmented balanced datasets are used to train the improved network for image classification of tire X-ray defects. The experiments validate that the proposed method is effective for type and grade classification of imbalanced tire X-ray defect detection, and shows better classification performance than existing popular models.

High-Performance and Polarization-Sensitive Imaging Photodetector Based on WS2 /Te Tunneling Heterostructure.

Next-generation imaging systems require photodetectors with high sensitivity, polarization sensitivity, miniaturization, and integration. By virtue of their intriguing attributes, emerging 2D materials offer innovative avenues to meet these requirements. However, the current performance of 2Dphotodetectors is stillbelow the requirements forpractical application owing to the severe interfacial recombination, the lack of photoconductive gain, and insufficient photocarrier collection. Here, a tunneling dominant imaging photodetector based on WS2 /Te heterostructure is reported. This device demonstrates competitive performance, including a remarkable responsivity of 402 A W-1 , an outstanding detectivity of 9.28 × 1013 Jones, a fast rise/decay time of 1.7/3.2ms, and a high photocurrent anisotropic ratio of 2.5. These outstanding performances can be attributed to the type-I band alignment with carrier transmission barriers and photoinduced tunneling mechanism, allowing reduced interfacial trapping effect, effective photoconductive gains, and anisotropic collection of photocarriers. Significantly, the constructed photodetector is successfully integrated into a polarized light imaging system and an ultra-weak light imaging system to illustrate the imaging capability. These results suggest the promising application prospect of the device in future imaging systems.

The high-performance linear scan imaging system of terahertz Si-based blocked-impurity-band detector

Terahertz (THz) Si-based blocked-impurity-band (BIB) detector is becoming the overwhelming choice for applications in space-based instruments, airborne, and imaging systems. A high-performance linear scan imaging system based on the THz Si-based BIB detector is designed. Through the optimized design of cryogenic Dewar and a suitable optical system, the imaging system reduces background stray radiation, and then improves the THz imaging performance of the detector. At the temperature of 4.2 K and the bias of 2.6V, the blackbody peak responsivity of the Si-based BIB detector is 23.77A/W, while the dark current is 4.72×10−11 A and the corresponding responsivity non-uniformity is less than 6.8%. Moreover, the experiment results show that the noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD) of the whole system reaches 10mK, and the spatial resolution reaches 50 µm. This work is beneficial to the larger scale array integrated BIB imaging system.

Spatial modulation of scalable nanostructures by combining maskless plasmonic lithography and grayscale-patterned strategy.

Nanolithography techniques providing good scalability and feature size controllability are of great importance for the fabrication of integrated circuits (IC), MEMS/NEMS, optical devices, nanophotonics, etc. Herein, a cost-effective, easy access, and high-fidelity patterning strategy that combines the high-resolution capability of maskless plasmonic lithography with the spatial morphology controllability of grayscale lithography is proposed to generate the customized pattern profile from microscale to nanoscale. Notably, the scaling effect of gap size in plasmonic lithography with a contact bowtie-shaped nanoaperture (BNA) is found to be essential to the rapid decay characteristics of an evanescent field, which leads to a wide energy bandwidth of the required optimal dose to record pattern in per unit volume, and hence, achieves the volumetrically scalable control of the photon energy deposition in the space more precisely. Based on the proper calibration and cooperation of pattern width and depth, a grayscale-patterned map is designed to compensate for the dose difference caused by the loss of the high spatial frequency component of the evanescent field. A Lena nanostructure with varying feature sizes by spatially modulating the exposure dose distribution was successfully demonstrated, and besides, we also successfully generated a microlens array (MLA) with high uniformity. The practical patterning method makes plasmonic lithography significant in the fabrication of functional nanostructures with high performance, including metasurfaces, plasmonics, and optical imaging systems.

Ultra-small NIR J-aggregates of BODIPY for potent phototheranostics.

Cancer phototheranostics that combines diagnosis with phototherapy has emerged as a new mode of precise treatment. Nevertheless, taking highly effective phototheranostics into consideration, it is still a tremendous challenge to design multifunctional photothermal agents (PTAs) that combine the features of intensive near-infrared (NIR) absorption/emission, high photothermal conversion efficiency (PCE) and preferable tumor accumulation. Herein, seeking a convenient method to facilitate absorption red-shift, promote the accumulation of drugs in tumors and heighten the PCE appears to be particularly important for cancer theranostics. In this work, heavy-atom-free boron dipyrromethene (BODIPY) was assembled with F127 to fabricate ultra-small J-aggregated nanoparticles (named as BNPs). Compared to free BODIPY, BNPs exhibited 63 nm redshifted absorption, deep-tissue fluorescence imaging, enhanced cellular uptake, preferable tumor accumulation, elevated PCE, excellent photothermal stability and water dispersibility. In vivo experiments demonstrated that BNPs could behave as high-performance tumor fluorescent imaging probes and antitumor PTAs to conduct NIR imaging-guided PTT. This work offers a novel J-aggregated framework on developing robust diagnostic and therapeutic agents.

Micro X-ray fluorescence reveals pore space details and spatially-resolved porosity of rock-based microfluidic devices.

Characterization of microscopic details of the fabric of mudstones and shales (i.e., structure and composition) is important to understand their storage and transport properties. Current characterization methods struggle to probe reliably multiple scales of interest (e.g., pore and fracture) and measure properties at the finest resolution under representative in situ conditions. Micro X-ray fluorescence (μXRF) is a high-performance imaging technique that produces elemental images at sub-10 μm spatial resolution and could offer insight into a diversity of shale properties, such as mineral composition, porosity, and in situ pressure gradients. This study designed and carried out a porosity mapping protocol using model and real-rock microfluidic devices and contrast fluids. Etched silicon micromodels with real-rock pore network patterns served as ideal models to establish a proof of concept. Measurements were performed on a novel μXRF microscope not powered by synchrotron radiation. We registered the μXRF datasets with the binary rock masks used for micromodel fabrication and applied segmentation algorithms to compare porosities. We assessed expected advantages and limitations through a sensitivity analysis and beam study. μXRF is an important new imaging technique for microfluidic applications.

Solution-based fullerene-free route enables high-performance green-selective organic photodetectors

Ongoing developments in machine vision, wearables, and the Internet of Things have led to strong demand for easy-to-fabricate, color-selective photodetectors. Narrowband-absorption-type (NBA) printable organic photodetectors provide an attractive solution, given their spectral robustness and fabrication simplicity. However, a key remaining challenge to realizing their potential is to concurrently achieve high photoconversion efficiency and spectral selectivity. Herein, this challenge is tackled by investigating a non-fullerene-based route to green-selective, solution-based photodetectors. Soluble phthalocyanine acceptor PhO-Cl6BsubPc is considered due to its high absorption selectivity to green photons. Blends with soluble quinacridones are pursued to realize the ideal of a donor:acceptor layer selectively absorbing the target photons throughout its volume. A latent-pigment route to the solution-based deposition of linear trans-quinacridone (QA) enables well-intermixed QA:PhO-Cl6BsubPc layers. Green-selective photodetectors with cutting-edge performance are thus realized, achieving a 25% increase in external quantum efficiency compared to all prior solution-based NBA implementations, as well as a nearly five-fold enhancement of the green-to-blue spectral rejection ratio. The merit of this approach is further illustrated by comparison with the corresponding fullerene-based photodetectors. By demonstrating an approach to solution-based NBA photodetectors with cutting-edge photoconversion efficiency and spectral selectivity, this study represents an important step toward printable, high-performance organic color sensors and imagers.

Gadolinium-hybridized mesoporous organosilica nanoparticles with high magnetic resonance imaging performance for targeted drug delivery

Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging techniques, which can provide images with excellent anatomical detail, are widely used in clinical diagnosis. However, the current clinical small molecule gadolinium (Gd) contrast agents have the defects of relatively low sensitivity and poor tumor-target specificity, preventing their adoption in biology and medicine. Herein, a facile synthetic strategy to fabricate gadolinium-hybridized mesoporous organosilica nanoparticles (MOSG) through a nanoprecipitation reaction, with the surface of nanoparticles grafted with the fluorescent dye isothiocyanate (FITC) and arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) for delivery of the antitumour drug doxorubicin hydrochloride (DOX), resulting in a high-performance nanotheranostic (RGD-MOSG-FITC/DOX) for targeted magnetic resonance imaging and chemotherapy of tumors. The prepared MOSG had a particle size of 60–80 nm and gadolinium elements were distributed in clusters that exhibited boosted longitudinal relaxivity. Routine blood tests and histopathology indicated good biocompatibility of MOSG. Furthermore, after being decorated with Arg-Gly-Asp peptide (RGD), RGD-MOSG-FITC demonstrated more preferable cellular uptake by HeLa cells (high expression of αⅤβ3) than MOSG without RGD grafting. Additionally, the tumor growth inhibition effect of RGD-MOSG-FITC/DOX was substantially more effective than that of the other groups. Therefore, this new delivery platform has good application potential in the field of tumor diagnosis and treatment.

Real-Time Phaseless Microwave Frequency-Diverse Imaging with Deep Prior Generative Neural Network

The millimeter-wave frequency-diverse imaging regime has recently received considerable attention in both the security screening and synthetic aperture radar imaging literature. Considering that the minor systematic errors and alignment errors could still produce heavily corrupted images, these complex-based imaging reconstructions rely heavily on the precise measurement of both phase and amplitude of radiation field patterns and echo signals. In the literature, it is shown that by leveraging phase-retrieval techniques, salient reconstruction images can still be acquired, even in the presence of significant phase errors, which could ease the phase error calibration pressure to a large extent in practical imaging applications. In this paper, in the regime of phaseless frequency-diverse imaging, with the powerful feature inference and generation power of unsupervised generative models, an end-to-end deep prior generative neural network is designed to achieve near real-time imaging. The harsh imaging reconstruction with both the high radiation mode correlations and extremely low scene compression sampling ratio, which are extremely troublesome to tackle for generally applied matched-filter and compressed sensing approach in the current frequency-diverse imaging literature, can still be preferably handled with our reconstruction network. The well-trained reconstruction network is constituted by prior inference and deep generative modules with excellent generative capabilities and significant prior inference abilities. Using simulation experiments with radiation field data, we verify that the integration of phase-free frequency-change imaging with deep learning networks can effectively improve reconstruction capabilities and improve robustness to systematic phase errors. Compared with existing imaging methods, our imaging method has high imaging performance and can even reconstruct targets under low compression ratio conditions, which is somewhat competitive with current state-of-the-art algorithms. Moreover, we find that the proposed method has good anti-noise and stability.

Fast and Highly Sensitive Photodetectors Based on Pb‐Free Sn‐Based Perovskite with Additive Engineering

AbstractOrganic–inorganic halide perovskites have been widely investigated for the fabrication of photodetectors because of their excellent optoelectronic properties. However, the toxicity of Pb‐based perovskites and the lack of manufacturing technology in air limits the commercialization of perovskite‐based photodetectors. Tin halide perovskite (THP) is a promising candidate to replace Pb‐based perovskites due to its low toxicity and potential commercialization. However, THP suffers poor stability in air because Sn2+ is easily oxidized to Sn4+. This “self‐doping” effect not only degrades device performance rapidly, but also makes it difficult to fabricate THP‐based devices in air. Here, Pb‐free Sn‐based 2D perovskite PEA2SnI4 films with tin fluoride (SnF2) additive are prepared in air using a nitrogen quenching hot casting method. The photodetectors with an optimal SnF2 concentration of 20% exhibit a fast response speed of 0.56 ms and an excellent specific detectivity of 6.32 × 1013 Jones, the best combination of THP‐based photodetectors reported hitherto. The SnF2 additive is found to suppress the formation of Sn vacancies and improve the crystallinity of PEA2SnI4 films. The work provides an air‐processing technology of Pb‐free perovskite, which is easy to commercialize, and SnF2 additive engineering offering an effective way to demonstrate high performance photodetectors and image recognition applications.

Heavy-atom engineering of thermally activated delayed fluorophores for high-performance X-ray imaging scintillators

The architectural design and fabrication of low-cost and reliable organic X-ray imaging scintillators with high light yield, ultralow detection limits and excellent imaging resolution is becoming one of the most attractive research directions for chemists, materials scientists, physicists and engineers due to the devices’ promising scientific and applied technological implications. However, the optimal balance among X-ray absorption capability, exciton utilization efficiency and photoluminescence quantum yield of organic scintillation materials is extremely difficult to achieve because of several competitive non-radiative processes, including intersystem crossing and internal conversion. Here we introduced heavy atoms (Cl, Br and I) into thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) chromophores to significantly increase their X-ray absorption cross-section and maintaining their unique TADF properties and high photoluminescence quantum yield. The X-ray imaging screens fabricated using TADF-Br chromophores exhibited highly improved X-ray sensitivity and imaging resolution compared with the TADF-H counterpart. More importantly, the high X-ray imaging resolution of >18.0 line pairs per millimetre achieved from the TADF-Br screen exceeds most reported organic and conventional inorganic scintillators. This study could help revive research on organic X-ray imaging scintillators and pave the way towards exciting applications for radiology and security screening. Heavy atoms like Cl, Br and I introduced into thermally activated delayed fluorescence chromophores can increase the X-ray absorption cross-section. Light yield of ~20,000 photons MeV–1, detection limit of 45.5 nGy s−1 and imaging resolution of >18.0 line pairs per millimetre is demonstrated.

High-performance full-color imaging system based on end-to-end joint optimization of computer-generated holography and metalens.

Metasurface has drawn extensive attention due to its capability of modulating light with a high degree of freedom through ultrathin and sub-wavelength optical elements, and metalens, as one of its important applications, promises to replace the bulky refractive optics, facilitating the imaging system light-weight and compact characteristics. Besides, computer-generated holography (CGH) is of substantial interest for three-dimensional (3D) imaging technology by virtue of its ability of restoring the whole optical wave field and re-constructing the true 3D scene. Consequently, the combination of metalens and CGH holds transformative potential in enabling the miniaturization of 3D imaging systems. However, its imaging performance is subject to the aberrations and speckle noises originating from the metalens and CGH. Inspired by recent progress that computational imaging can be applied to close the gap, a novel full-color imaging system, adopting end-to-end joint optimization of metalens and CGH for high imaging quality, is proposed in this paper. The U-net based network as the pre-processing adjusts weights to make the holographic reconstruction offset imaging defects, incorporating the imaging processing into the step of generating hologram. Optimized by deep learning, the proposed imaging system is capable of full-color imaging with high fidelity in a compact form factor, envisioned to take an essential step towards the high-performance miniaturized imaging system.

Data augmentation based on multiple oversampling fusion for medical image segmentation

A high-performance medical image segmentation model based on deep learning depends on the availability of large amounts of annotated training data. However, it is not trivial to obtain sufficient annotated medical images. Generally, the small size of most tissue lesions, e.g., pulmonary nodules and liver tumours, could worsen the class imbalance problem in medical image segmentation. In this study, we propose a multidimensional data augmentation method combining affine transform and random oversampling. The training data is first expanded by affine transformation combined with random oversampling to improve the prior data distribution of small objects and the diversity of samples. Secondly, class weight balancing is used to avoid having biased networks since the number of background pixels is much higher than the lesion pixels. The class imbalance problem is solved by utilizing weighted cross-entropy loss function during the training of the CNN model. The LUNA16 and LiTS17 datasets were introduced to evaluate the performance of our works, where four deep neural network models, Mask-RCNN, U-Net, SegNet and DeepLabv3+, were adopted for small tissue lesion segmentation in CT images. In addition, the small tissue segmentation performance of the four different deep learning architectures on both datasets could be greatly improved by incorporating the data augmentation strategy. The best pixelwise segmentation performance for both pulmonary nodules and liver tumours was obtained by the Mask-RCNN model, with DSC values of 0.829 and 0.879, respectively, which were similar to those of state-of-the-art methods.

High-Performance UV-Vis Broad-Spectra Photodetector Based on a β-Ga2O3/Au/MAPbBr3 Sandwich Structure.

The UV-vis photodetector (PD), a detector that can simultaneously detect light in the ultraviolet region and the visible region, has a wide range of applications in military and civilian fields. Currently, it is very difficult to obtain good detection performance in the UV region (especially in the solar-blind range) like in the visible region with most UV-vis PDs. This severely affects the practical application of UV-vis broad-spectra PDs. Here, a simple sandwich structure PD (SSPD) composed of β-Ga2O3, Au electrodes, and the MAPbBr3 perovskite is designed and fabricated to simultaneous enhance the detection performance in the UV and visible light regions. The β-Ga2O3/Au/MAPbBr3 SSPD exhibits enhanced optoelectronic performance with high responsivities of 0.47 and 1.43 A W-1 at 240 and 520 nm under a bias of 6 voltage (V), respectively, which are 8.5 and 23 times than that of the metal-semiconductor-metal (MSM) structure MAPbBr3 PD at 6 V, respectively. The enhanced performance was attributed to the effective suppression of carrier recombination due to the efficient interface charge separation in the device structure. In addition, the self-powered response characteristic is also realized by forming a type-II heterojunction between β-Ga2O3 and MAPbBr3, which gives the β-Ga2O3/Au/MAPbBr3 SSPD superior single-pixel photo-imaging ability without an external power supply. This work provides a simple and effective method for the preparation of high-performance self-powered imaging PDs in the UV-visible region.