The deposition of micron particles finds importance in meteorology and several engineering applications such as deposition of dust in gas lines, carbon deposition in engine exhaust, designing effective air-cleaning systems and estimating deposition of inhaled drug or atmospheric pollutants to determine its consequences on human health. Although the existing literature on deposition in straight tubes is quite mature, an experimental study on deposition in micro capillaries with a wide ranges of Re that models particle dynamics in lungs, is missing. The deposition of atmospheric pollutants and nebulized drugs in the lung depends on various biological factors such as flow properties, lung morphology, breathing patterns, particle properties, deposition mechanism, etc. To complicate matters, each breath manifests flows spanning a wide range of Reynolds numbers in various regions of the lung. In this study, the deposition of nebulized aerosol was experimentally investigated in phantom bronchioles of diameters relevant to the 7th to the 23rd branching generations and over the entire range of Re manifest during one breathing cycle. The aerosol fluid was loaded with boron doped carbon quant
Lung cancer, a malignancy originating in lung tissues, is commonly diagnosed and classified using medical imaging techniques, particularly computed tomography (CT). Despite the integration of machine learning and deep learning methods, the predictive efficacy of automated systems for lung cancer classification from CT images remains below the desired threshold for clinical adoption. Existing research predominantly focuses on binary classification, distinguishing between malignant and benign lung nodules. In this study, a novel deep learning-based approach is introduced, aimed at an improved multi-class classification, discerning various subtypes of lung cancer from CT images. Leveraging a pre-trained ResNet model, lung tissue images were classified into three distinct classes, two of which denote malignancy and one benign. Employing a dataset comprising 15,000 lung CT images sourced from the LC25000 histopathological images, the ResNet50 model was trained on 10,200 images, validated on 2,550 images, and tested on the remaining 2,250 images. Through the incorporation of custom layers atop the ResNet architecture and meticulous hyperparameter fine-tuning, a remarkable test accuracy o
Periodontitis and dental caries are common oral diseases affecting billions globally. While observational studies suggest links between these conditions and lung cancer, causality remains uncertain. This study used two sample Mendelian randomization (MR) to explore causal relationships between dental traits (periodontitis, dental caries) and lung cancer subtypes, and to assess mediation by pulmonary function. Genetic instruments were derived from the largest available genome wide association studies, including data from 487,823 dental caries and 506,594 periodontitis cases, as well as lung cancer data from the Transdisciplinary Research of Cancer in Lung consortium. Inverse variance weighting was the main analytical method; lung function mediation was assessed using the delta method. The results showed a significant positive causal effect of dental caries on overall lung cancer and its subtypes. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in dental caries incidence was associated with a 188.0% higher risk of squamous cell lung carcinoma (OR = 2.880, 95% CI = 1.236--6.713, p = 0.014), partially mediated by declines in forced vital capacity (FVC) and forced expiratory volume in o
Due to silence in early stages, lung cancer has been one of the most leading causes of mortality in cancer patients world-wide. Moreover, major symptoms of lung cancer are hard to differentiate with other respiratory disease symptoms such as COPD, further leading patients to overlook cancer progression in early stages. Thus, to enhance survival rates in lung cancer, early detection from consistent proactive respiratory system monitoring becomes crucial. One of the most prevalent and effective methods for lung cancer monitoring would be low-dose computed tomography(LDCT) chest scans, which led to remarkable enhancements in lung cancer detection or tumor classification tasks under rapid advancements and applications of computer vision based AI models such as EfficientNet or ResNet in image processing. However, though advanced CNN models under transfer learning or ViT based models led to high performing lung cancer detections, due to its intrinsic limitations in terms of correlation dependence and low interpretability due to complexity, expansions of deep learning models to lung cancer treatment analysis or causal intervention analysis simulations are still limited. Therefore, this re
Carbon-ion radiotherapy provides high dose conformity for lung cancer, but its benefit is limited by two sources of uncertainties: interplay between scanned beam delivery and tumor motion, and dose modulation from heterogeneous lung tissue. This study quantifies the separate and combined dosimetric impact of these effects using the GSI TRiP4D treatment planning system. Eighteen lung cancer 4DCT datasets from TCIA were analyzed. A modulation power ($P_{\mathrm{mod}}$) was assigned to lung voxels. Three values were sampled from a Gaussian distribution ($200μ\mathrm{m} \pm 67μ\mathrm{m}$), and an extreme value of $750μ\mathrm{m}$ was tested. Interplay doses were computed by combining scanned-beam delivery with patient-specific respiratory motion. Four scenarios were studied: static, static with modulation, interplay, and interplay with modulation. Metrics included $D95\%$, $V95\%$, homogeneity index (HI), lung $V16\mathrm{Gy}$, and heart $V20\mathrm{Gy}$. Interplay reduced target coverage by $5.2 \pm 1.5$ pp ($D95\%$), $12.1 \pm 5.9$ pp ($V95\%$), and $8.3 \pm 2.4$ pp (HI). Extreme $P_{\mathrm{mod}}$ alone caused small degradations. When combined with interplay, it partially compensat
Vision transformer-based methods are advancing the field of medical artificial intelligence and cancer imaging, including lung cancer applications. Recently, many researchers have developed vision transformer-based AI methods for lung cancer diagnosis and prognosis. This scoping review aims to identify the recent developments on vision transformer-based AI methods for lung cancer imaging applications. It provides key insights into how vision transformers complemented the performance of AI and deep learning methods for lung cancer. Furthermore, the review also identifies the datasets that contributed to advancing the field. Of the 314 retrieved studies, this review included 34 studies published from 2020 to 2022. The most commonly addressed task in these studies was the classification of lung cancer types, such as lung squamous cell carcinoma versus lung adenocarcinoma, and identifying benign versus malignant pulmonary nodules. Other applications included survival prediction of lung cancer patients and segmentation of lungs. The studies lacked clear strategies for clinical transformation. SWIN transformer was a popular choice of the researchers; however, many other architectures wer
This paper presents a scientometric analysis of research output from the University of Lagos, focusing on the two decades spanning 2004 to 2023. Using bibliometric data retrieved from the Web of Science, we examine trends in publication volume, collaboration patterns, citation impact, and the most prolific authors, departments, and research domains at the university. The study reveals a consistent increase in research productivity, with the highest publication output recorded in 2023. Health Sciences, Engineering, and Social Sciences are identified as dominant fields, reflecting the university's interdisciplinary research strengths. Collaborative efforts, both locally and internationally, show a positive correlation with higher citation impact, with the United States and the United Kingdom being the leading international collaborators. Notably, open-access publications account for a significant portion of the university's research output, enhancing visibility and citation rates. The findings offer valuable insights into the university's research performance over the past two decades, providing a foundation for strategic planning and policy formulation to foster research excellence
Advances in healthcare research have significantly enhanced our understanding of disease mechanisms, diagnostic precision, and therapeutic options. Yet, lung cancer remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide due to challenges in early and accurate diagnosis. While current lung cancer detection models show promise, there is considerable potential for further improving the accuracy for timely intervention. To address this challenge, we introduce a hybrid deep convolution model leveraging transfer learning, named the Maximum Sensitivity Neural Network (MSNN). MSNN is designed to improve the precision of lung cancer detection by refining sensitivity and specificity. This model has surpassed existing deep learning approaches through experimental validation, achieving an accuracy of 98% and a sensitivity of 97%. By overlaying sensitivity maps onto lung Computed Tomography (CT) scans, it enables the visualization of regions most indicative of malignant or benign classifications. This innovative method demonstrates exceptional performance in distinguishing lung cancer with minimal false positives, thereby enhancing the accuracy of medical diagnoses.
Software is at the core of most scientific discoveries today. Therefore, the quality of research results highly depends on the quality of the research software. Rigorous testing, as we know it from software engineering in the industry, could ensure the quality of the research software but it also requires a substantial effort that is often not rewarded in academia. Therefore, this research explores the effects of research software testing integrated into teaching on research software. In an in-vivo experiment, we integrated the engineering of a test suite for a large-scale network simulation as group projects into a course on software testing at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and qualitatively measured the effects of this integration on the research software. We found that the research software benefited from the integration through substantially improved documentation and fewer hardware and software dependencies. However, this integration was effortful and although the student teams developed elegant and thoughtful test suites, no code by students went directly into the research software since we were not able to make the integration back into the research software
Scientists' topic choices strongly influence both individual careers and the advancement of the scientific frontier. While a sizeable body of literature shows that specialisation in a few topics benefits individual careers and fosters impactful research, the role of research teams and their experience have been largely overlooked. This paper introduces experience as a concept distinct from specialisation and shifts the level of analysis from the individual to the research team, reflecting the increasingly team-based nature of science. Using novel publication-level measures of team specialisation and team experience applied to nearly 1 million biomedical publications, the study finds that both are positively associated with citation impact. However, the correlation with citation impact is markedly stronger for team experience than for team specialisation. The study demonstrates how science can be examined at the team level and suggests that future research should pay more attention to studying experience.
Demographic data collection is essential in education research, as demographic data allows researchers to better describe the participant population they study and to contextualize findings. However, current research practices for neurodiversity demographics often rely on prescriptive methods (e.g., requiring participants to report official diagnoses) rather than allowing participants to self-identify. This approach can: a) not allow participants to express their intersecting identities in ways that are authentic; and b) limit trustworthiness and reliability of the data and interpretation. In addition, inconsistent dissemination and representation of demographic data across studies hinder the accessibility and usability of this work. Through a literature review of neurodivergent student experiences with learning and performing STEM, we identified widespread discrepancies in how demographic information is collected and reported. This paper explores how neurodivergent identities can be more accurately and inclusively represented in education research. We present findings of a thematic analysis on the ways neurodivergent demographic data collection is done in the literature using data
Modern research heavily relies on software. A significant challenge researchers face is understanding the complex software used in specific research fields. We target two scenarios in this context, namely long onboarding times for newcomers and conference reviewers evaluating replication packages. We hypothesize that both scenarios can be significantly improved when there is a clear link between the paper's ideas and the code that implements them. As a time- and staff-saving approach, we propose an LLM-based automation tool that takes in a paper and the software implementing the paper, and generates a trace mapping between research ideas and their locations in code. Initial experiments have shown that the tool can generate quite useful mappings.
Radiomics is the established approach for CT-based lung cancer phenotyping, yet comparisons with foundation models rarely isolate contributions of feature extractor, classification head, and segmentation choice, or test cross-cohort robustness. We benchmark five feature extractors (Curia, Curia-2, DINOv3, Radiomics2D, Radiomics3D), seven classification heads (TabPFN, TabICL, XGBoost, CatBoost, Random Forest, logistic regression, Ridge), and three segmentation regimes on five tasks: tumor volume and stage classification, 2-year survival prediction, histology classification, and age prediction. Models are trained on LUNG1 (n=338) and evaluated on an internal test set (n=84) and the external LUNG2 cohort (n=211), with worst-case cross-cohort performance as the primary metric. The dominant design factor is task-dependent: segmentation drives volume and stage classification, while classifier choice drives survival, histology, and age prediction. Radiomics is competitive for tumor volume, tumor stage and survival (partly due to label-derivation effects for the former); Curia variants reach comparable peak scores for survival; DINOv3 falls slightly short across tasks. Patch and slice aggr
In recent years, advancements in deep learning techniques have considerably enhanced the efficiency and accuracy of medical diagnostics. In this work, a novel approach using multi-task learning (MTL) for the simultaneous classification of lung sounds and lung diseases is proposed. Our proposed model leverages MTL with four different deep learning models such as 2D CNN, ResNet50, MobileNet and Densenet to extract relevant features from the lung sound recordings. The ICBHI 2017 Respiratory Sound Database was employed in the current study. The MTL for MobileNet model performed better than the other models considered, with an accuracy of74\% for lung sound analysis and 91\% for lung diseases classification. Results of the experimentation demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in classifying both lung sounds and lung diseases concurrently. In this study,using the demographic data of the patients from the database, risk level computation for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease is also carried out. For this computation, three machine learning algorithms namely Logistic Regression, SVM and Random Forest classifierswere employed. Among these ML algorithms, the Random Forest classifier h
This study evaluates publicly available deep-learning based lung segmentation models in transplant-eligible patients to determine their performance across disease severity levels, pathology categories, and lung sides, and to identify limitations impacting their use in preoperative planning in lung transplantation. This retrospective study included 32 patients who underwent chest CT scans at Duke University Health System between 2017 and 2019 (total of 3,645 2D axial slices). Patients with standard axial CT scans were selected based on the presence of two or more lung pathologies of varying severity. Lung segmentation was performed using three previously developed deep learning models: Unet-R231, TotalSegmentator, MedSAM. Performance was assessed using quantitative metrics (volumetric similarity, Dice similarity coefficient, Hausdorff distance) and a qualitative measure (four-point clinical acceptability scale). Unet-R231 consistently outperformed TotalSegmentator and MedSAM in general, for different severity levels, and pathology categories (p<0.05). All models showed significant performance declines from mild to moderate-to-severe cases, particularly in volumetric similarity (p
Today, scientific research is increasingly data-centric and compute-intensive, relying on data and models across distributed sources. However, it still faces challenges in the traditional cooperation mode, due to the high storage and computing cost, geo-location barriers, and local confidentiality regulations. The Jupyter environment has recently emerged and evolved as a vital virtual research environment for scientific computing, which researchers can use to scale computational analyses up to larger datasets and high-performance computing resources. Nevertheless, existing approaches lack robust support of a decentralized cooperation mode to unlock the full potential of decentralized collaborative scientific research, e.g., seamlessly secure data sharing. In this work, we change the basic structure and legacy norms of current research environments via the seamless integration of Jupyter with Ethereum blockchain capabilities. As such, it creates a Decentralized Virtual Research Environment (D-VRE) from private computational notebooks to decentralized collaborative research ecosystem. We propose a novel architecture for the D-VRE and prototype some essential D-VRE elements for enabli
Lung cancer remains among the deadliest types of cancer in recent decades, and early lung nodule detection is crucial for improving patient outcomes. The limited availability of annotated medical imaging data remains a bottleneck in developing accurate computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. Self-supervised learning can help leverage large amounts of unlabeled data to develop more robust CAD systems. With the recent advent of transformer-based architecture and their ability to generalize to unseen tasks, there has been an effort within the healthcare community to adapt them to various medical downstream tasks. Thus, we propose a novel "LungNodule-SSM" method, which utilizes selfsupervised learning with DINOv2 as a backbone to enhance lung nodule detection and classification without annotated data. Our methodology has two stages: firstly, the DINOv2 model is pre-trained on unlabeled CT scans to learn robust feature representations, then secondly, these features are fine-tuned using transformer-based architectures for lesionlevel detection and accurate lung nodule diagnosis. The proposed method has been evaluated on the challenging LUNA 16 dataset, consisting of 888 CT scans, and com
This scientometric study analyzes Avian Influenza research from 2014 to 2023 using bibliographic data from the Web of Science database. We examined publication trends, sources, authorship, collaborative networks, document types, and geographical distribution to gain insights into the global research landscape. Results reveal a steady increase in publications, with high contributions from Chinese and American institutions. Journals such as PLoS One and the Journal of Virology published the highest number of studies, indicating their influence in this field. The most prolific institutions include the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Hong Kong, while the College of Veterinary Medicine at South China Agricultural University emerged as the most productive department. China and the USA lead in publication volume, though developed nations like the United Kingdom and Germany exhibit a higher rate of international collaboration. "Articles" are the most common document type, constituting 84.6% of the total, while "Reviews" account for 7.6%. This study provides a comprehensive view of global trends in Avian Influenza research, emphasizing the need for collaborative efforts ac
Accurate quantification of lung disease severity from chest imaging is critical for clinical decision-making and resource allocation. We propose a tri-modal deep learning framework, TMF-RSE (Tri-Modal Fusion with Regional Semantics and Evidential Uncertainty), that combines appearance features from two-dimensional chest inputs, structural features from lung segmentation masks, and semantic features from vision-language models (VLMs) for severity quantification. Our approach employs complementary fusion mechanisms that integrate semantic guidance, structural priors, and hierarchical interactions across modalities. The model employs evidential regression to provide both severity predictions and uncertainty estimates. Experiments on the Per-COVID-19 CT and RALO datasets show that TMF-RSE outperforms recent transformer-based baselines, achieving MAE of 4.02 and Pearson correlation of 0.9629 on Per-COVID-19 validation, and 0.339 MAE / 0.973 PC on RALO geographic extent.
This paper addresses the problem of pathological lung segmentation, a significant challenge in medical image analysis, particularly pronounced in cases of peripheral opacities (severe fibrosis and consolidation) because of the textural similarity between lung tissue and surrounding areas. To overcome these challenges, this paper emphasizes the use of CycleGAN for unpaired image-to-image translation, in order to provide an augmentation method able to generate fake pathological images matching an existing ground truth. Although previous studies have employed CycleGAN, they often neglect the challenge of shape deformation, which is crucial for accurate medical image segmentation. Our work introduces an innovative strategy that incorporates additional loss functions. Specifically, it proposes an L1 loss based on the lung surrounding which shape is constrained to remain unchanged at the transition from the healthy to pathological domains. The lung surrounding is derived based on ground truth lung masks available in the healthy domain. Furthermore, preprocessing steps, such as cropping based on ribs/vertebra locations, are applied to refine the input for the CycleGAN, ensuring that the n