While agriculture is recognised as vital for improving nutrition, the evidence linking women's participation to sustained nutritional gains remains inconclusive. This review synthesizes studies published between 2000 and 2024 to reflect current agricultural practices and nutritional challenges. We examine how agricultural practices and time use affect nutritional outcomes among rural women through pathways such as income generation food preparation and intra-household labour allocation. A structured methodology with clear inclusion and exclusion criteria was used to assess gender-sensitive and nutrition-sensitive interventions. Using narrative synthesis the review categorizes findings around key themes and contextual factors including socio-economic status seasonality and labour intensity. The results show that while increased involvement in agriculture can boost household dietary diversity and income it also raises time burdens that affect food preparation childcare and self-care. Positive outcomes occur when interventions enhance women's decision-making power income access and use of time-saving technologies whereas negative outcomes emerge when excessive workloads compromise ene
The issue of limited household budgets and nutritional demands continues to be a challenge especially in the middle-income environment where food prices fluctuate. This paper introduces a price aware agentic AI system, which combines personal finance management with diet optimization. With household income and fixed expenditures, medical and well-being status, as well as real-time food costs, the system creates nutritionally sufficient meals plans at comparatively reasonable prices that automatically adjust to market changes. The framework is implemented in a modular multi-agent architecture, which has specific agents (budgeting, nutrition, price monitoring, and health personalization). These agents share the knowledge base and use the substitution graph to ensure that the nutritional quality is maintained at a minimum cost. Simulations with a representative Saudi household case study show a steady 12-18\% reduction in costs relative to a static weekly menu, nutrient adequacy of over 95\% and high performance with price changes of 20-30%. The findings indicate that the framework can locally combine affordability with nutritional adequacy and provide a viable avenue of capacity-buil
With diet and nutrition apps reaching 1.4 billion users in 2022 [1], it's not surprise that popular health apps, MyFitnessPal, Noom, and Calorie Counter, are surging in popularity. However, one major setback [2] of nearly all nutrition applications is that users must enter food data manually, which is time-consuming and tedious. Thus, there has been an increasing demand for applications that can accurately identify food items, analyze their nutritional content, and offer dietary recommendations in real-time. This paper introduces a comprehensive system that combines advanced computer vision techniques with nutritional analysis, implemented in a versatile mobile and web application. The system is divided into three key concepts: 1) food detection using the YOLOv8 model, 2) nutrient analysis via the Edamam Nutrition Analysis API, and 3) personalized meal recommendations using the Edamam Meal Planning and Recipe Search APIs. Preliminary results showcase the system's effectiveness by providing immediate, accurate dietary insights, with a demonstrated food recognition accuracy of nearly 80%, making it a valuable tool for users to make informed dietary decisions.
A reasonable and balanced diet is essential for maintaining good health. With the advancements in deep learning, automated nutrition estimation method based on food images offers a promising solution for monitoring daily nutritional intake and promoting dietary health. While monocular image-based nutrition estimation is convenient, efficient, and economical, the challenge of limited accuracy remains a significant concern. To tackle this issue, we proposed DPF-Nutrition, an end-to-end nutrition estimation method using monocular images. In DPF-Nutrition, we introduced a depth prediction module to generate depth maps, thereby improving the accuracy of food portion estimation. Additionally, we designed an RGB-D fusion module that combined monocular images with the predicted depth information, resulting in better performance for nutrition estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this was the pioneering effort that integrated depth prediction and RGB-D fusion techniques in food nutrition estimation. Comprehensive experiments performed on Nutrition5k evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of DPF-Nutrition.
Nutrition estimation is an important component of promoting healthy eating and mitigating diet-related health risks. Despite advances in tasks such as food classification and ingredient recognition, progress in nutrition estimation is limited due to the lack of datasets with nutritional annotations. To address this issue, we introduce FastFood, a dataset with 84,446 images across 908 fast food categories, featuring ingredient and nutritional annotations. In addition, we propose a new model-agnostic Visual-Ingredient Feature Fusion (VIF$^2$) method to enhance nutrition estimation by integrating visual and ingredient features. Ingredient robustness is improved through synonym replacement and resampling strategies during training. The ingredient-aware visual feature fusion module combines ingredient features and visual representation to achieve accurate nutritional prediction. During testing, ingredient predictions are refined using large multimodal models by data augmentation and majority voting. Our experiments on both FastFood and Nutrition5k datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method built in different backbones (e.g., Resnet, InceptionV3 and ViT), which demonstrat
Nutrition estimation is crucial for effective dietary management and overall health and well-being. Existing methods often struggle with sub-optimal accuracy and can be time-consuming. In this paper, we propose NuNet, a transformer-based network designed for nutrition estimation that utilizes both RGB and depth information from food images. We have designed and implemented a multi-scale encoder and decoder, along with two types of feature fusion modules, specialized for estimating five nutritional factors. These modules effectively balance the efficiency and effectiveness of feature extraction with flexible usage of our customized attention mechanisms and fusion strategies. Our experimental study shows that NuNet outperforms its variants and existing solutions significantly for nutrition estimation. It achieves an error rate of 15.65%, the lowest known to us, largely due to our multi-scale architecture and fusion modules. This research holds practical values for dietary management with huge potential for transnational research and deployment and could inspire other applications involving multiple data types with varying degrees of importance.
Accurate estimation of food nutrition plays a vital role in promoting healthy dietary habits and personalized diet management. Most existing food datasets primarily focus on Western cuisines and lack sufficient coverage of Chinese dishes, which restricts accurate nutritional estimation for Chinese meals. Moreover, many state-of-the-art nutrition prediction methods rely on depth sensors, restricting their applicability in daily scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce OmniFood8K, a comprehensive multimodal dataset comprising 8,036 food samples, each with detailed nutritional annotations and multi-view images. In addition, to enhance models' capability in nutritional prediction, we construct NutritionSynth-115K, a large-scale synthetic dataset that introduces compositional variations while preserving precise nutritional labels. Moreover, we propose an end-to-end framework for nutritional prediction from a single RGB image. First, we predict a depth map from a single RGB image and design the Scale-Shift Residual Adapter (SSRA) to refine it for global scale consistency and local structural preservation. Second, we propose the Frequency-Aligned Fusion Module (FAFM) to hiera
Crop yield production could be enhanced for agricultural growth if various plant nutrition deficiencies, and diseases are identified and detected at early stages. The deep learning methods have proven its superior performances in the automated detection of plant diseases and nutrition deficiencies from visual symptoms in leaves. This article proposes a new deep learning method for plant nutrition deficiencies and disease classification using a graph convolutional network (GNN), added upon a base convolutional neural network (CNN). Sometimes, a global feature descriptor might fail to capture the vital region of a diseased leaf, which causes inaccurate classification of disease. To address this issue, regional feature learning is crucial for a holistic feature aggregation. In this work, region-based feature summarization at multi-scales is explored using spatial pyramidal pooling for discriminative feature representation. A GCN is developed to capacitate learning of finer details for classifying plant diseases and insufficiency of nutrients. The proposed method, called Plant Nutrition Deficiency and Disease Network (PND-Net), is evaluated on two public datasets for nutrition deficien
Personalized nutrition management aims to tailor dietary guidance to an individual's intake and phenotype, but most existing systems handle food logging, nutrient analysis and recommendation separately. We present a next-generation mobile nutrition assistant that combines image based meal logging with an LLM driven multi agent controller to provide meal level closed loop support. The system coordinates vision, dialogue and state management agents to estimate nutrients from photos and update a daily intake budget. It then adapts the next meal plan to user preferences and dietary constraints. Experiments with SNAPMe meal images and simulated users show competitive nutrient estimation, personalized menus and efficient task plans. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of multi agent LLM control for personalized nutrition and reveal open challenges in micronutrient estimation from images and in large scale real world studies.
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle has become increasingly challenging in today's sedentary society marked by poor eating habits. To address this issue, both national and international organisations have made numerous efforts to promote healthier diets and increased physical activity. However, implementing these recommendations in daily life can be difficult, as they are often generic and not tailored to individuals. This study presents the AI4Food-NutritionDB database, the first nutrition database that incorporates food images and a nutrition taxonomy based on recommendations by national and international health authorities. The database offers a multi-level categorisation, comprising 6 nutritional levels, 19 main categories (e.g., "Meat"), 73 subcategories (e.g., "White Meat"), and 893 specific food products (e.g., "Chicken"). The AI4Food-NutritionDB opens the doors to new food computing approaches in terms of food intake frequency, quality, and categorisation. Also, we present a standardised experimental protocol and benchmark including three tasks based on the nutrition taxonomy (i.e., category, subcategory, and final product recognition). These resources are available to the rese
Deep neural networks power most recent successes of artificial intelligence, spanning from self-driving cars to computer aided diagnosis in radiology and pathology. The high-stake data intensive process of surgery could highly benefit from such computational methods. However, surgeons and computer scientists should partner to develop and assess deep learning applications of value to patients and healthcare systems. This chapter and the accompanying hands-on material were designed for surgeons willing to understand the intuitions behind neural networks, become familiar with deep learning concepts and tasks, grasp what implementing a deep learning model in surgery means, and finally appreciate the specific challenges and limitations of deep neural networks in surgery. For the associated hands-on material, please see https://github.com/CAMMA-public/ai4surgery.
Understanding the nutritional content of food from visual data is a challenging computer vision problem, with the potential to have a positive and widespread impact on public health. Studies in this area are limited to existing datasets in the field that lack sufficient diversity or labels required for training models with nutritional understanding capability. We introduce Nutrition5k, a novel dataset of 5k diverse, real world food dishes with corresponding video streams, depth images, component weights, and high accuracy nutritional content annotation. We demonstrate the potential of this dataset by training a computer vision algorithm capable of predicting the caloric and macronutrient values of a complex, real world dish at an accuracy that outperforms professional nutritionists. Further we present a baseline for incorporating depth sensor data to improve nutrition predictions. We will publicly release Nutrition5k in the hope that it will accelerate innovation in the space of nutritional understanding.
Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) plays a crucial role in the detection and characterization of focal liver lesions, with the hepatobiliary phase (HBP) providing essential diagnostic information. However, acquiring HBP images requires prolonged scan times, which may compromise patient comfort and scanner throughput. In this study, we propose a deep learning based approach for synthesizing HBP images from earlier contrast phases (precontrast and transitional) and compare three generative models: a perceptual U-Net, a perceptual GAN (pGAN), and a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM). We curated a multi-site DCE-MRI dataset from diverse clinical settings and introduced a contrast evolution score (CES) to assess training data quality, enhancing model performance. Quantitative evaluation using pixel-wise and perceptual metrics, combined with qualitative assessment through blinded radiologist reviews, showed that pGAN achieved the best quantitative performance but introduced heterogeneous contrast in out-of-distribution cases. In contrast, the U-Net produced consistent liver enhancement with fewer artifacts, while DDPM underperformed due to limited
Nutrition estimation of meals from visual data is an important problem for dietary monitoring and computational health, but existing approaches largely rely on single images of the finally completed dish. This setting is fundamentally limited because many nutritionally relevant ingredients and transformations, such as oils, sauces, and mixed components, become visually ambiguous after cooking, making accurate calorie and macronutrient estimation difficult. In this paper, we investigate whether the cooking process information from egocentric cooking videos can contribute to dish-level nutrition estimation. First, we further manually annotated the HD-EPIC dataset and established the first benchmark for video-based nutrition estimation. Most importantly, we propose V-Nutri, a staged framework that combines Nutrition5K-pretrained visual backbones with a lightweight fusion module that aggregates features from the final dish frame and cooking process keyframes extracted from the egocentric videos. V-Nutri also includes a cooking keyframes selection module, a VideoMamba-based event-detection model that targets ingredient-addition moments. Experiments on the HD-EPIC dataset show that proce
Background Analyzing kinematic and video data can help identify potentially erroneous motions that lead to sub-optimal surgeon performance and safety-critical events in robot-assisted surgery. Methods We develop a rubric for identifying task and gesture-specific Executional and Procedural errors and evaluate dry-lab demonstrations of Suturing and Needle Passing tasks from the JIGSAWS dataset. We characterize erroneous parts of demonstrations by labeling video data, and use distribution similarity analysis and trajectory averaging on kinematic data to identify parameters that distinguish erroneous gestures. Results Executional error frequency varies by task and gesture, and correlates with skill level. Some predominant error modes in each gesture are distinguishable by analyzing error-specific kinematic parameters. Procedural errors could lead to lower performance scores and increased demonstration times but also depend on surgical style. Conclusions This study provides insights into context-dependent errors that can be used to design automated error detection mechanisms and improve training and skill assessment.
The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) 2 has demonstrated remarkable foundational competence in semantic segmentation, with its memory mechanism and mask decoder further addressing challenges in video tracking and object occlusion, thereby achieving superior results in interactive segmentation for both images and videos. Building upon our previous empirical studies, we further explore the zero-shot segmentation performance of SAM 2 in robot-assisted surgery based on prompts, alongside its robustness against real-world corruption. For static images, we employ two forms of prompts: 1-point and bounding box, while for video sequences, the 1-point prompt is applied to the initial frame. Through extensive experimentation on the MICCAI EndoVis 2017 and EndoVis 2018 benchmarks, SAM 2, when utilizing bounding box prompts, outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in comparative evaluations. The results with point prompts also exhibit a substantial enhancement over SAM's capabilities, nearing or even surpassing existing unprompted SOTA methodologies. Besides, SAM 2 demonstrates improved inference speed and less performance degradation against various image corruption. Although slightly u
This article uses machine learning (ML) and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques to investigate the relationship between nutritional status and mortality rates associated with Alzheimers disease (AD). The Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) database is employed for analysis. The random forest model is selected as the base model for XAI analysis, and the Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) method is used to assess feature importance. The results highlight significant nutritional factors such as serum vitamin B12 and glycated hemoglobin. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of random forests in predicting AD mortality compared to other diseases. This research provides insights into the impact of nutrition on AD and contributes to a deeper understanding of disease progression.
In this paper, we use an adaptive modeling framework to model and study how nutritional status (measured by the protein to carbohydrate ratio) may regulate population dynamics and foraging task allocation of social insect colonies. Mathematical analysis of our model shows that both investment to brood rearing and brood nutrition are important for colony survival and dynamics. When division of labor and/or nutrition are in an intermediate value range, the model undergoes a backward bifurcation and creates multiple attractors due to bistability. This bistability implies that there is a threshold population size required for colony survival. When the investment in brood is large enough or nutritional requirements are less strict the colony tends to survive, otherwise the colony faces collapse. Our model suggests that the needs of colony survival are shaped by the brood survival probability, which requires good nutritional status. As a consequence, better nutritional status can lead to a better survival rate of larvae, and thus a larger worker population.
Food computing is both important and challenging in computer vision (CV). It significantly contributes to the development of CV algorithms due to its frequent presence in datasets across various applications, ranging from classification and instance segmentation to 3D reconstruction. The polymorphic shapes and textures of food, coupled with high variation in forms and vast multimodal information, including language descriptions and nutritional data, make food computing a complex and demanding task for modern CV algorithms. 3D food modeling is a new frontier for addressing food related problems, due to its inherent capability to deal with random camera views and its straightforward representation for calculating food portion size. However, the primary hurdle in the development of algorithms for food object analysis is the lack of nutrition values in existing 3D datasets. Moreover, in the broader field of 3D research, there is a critical need for domain-specific test datasets. To bridge the gap between general 3D vision and food computing research, we introduce MetaFood3D. This dataset consists of 743 meticulously scanned and labeled 3D food objects across 131 categories, featuring d
77% of adults over 50 want to age in place today, presenting a major challenge to ensuring adequate nutritional intake. It has been reported that one in four older adults that are 65 years or older are malnourished and given the direct link between malnutrition and decreased quality of life, there have been numerous studies conducted on how to efficiently track nutritional intake of food. Recent advancements in machine learning and computer vision show promise of automated nutrition tracking methods of food, but require a large high-quality dataset in order to accurately identify the nutrients from the food on the plate. Unlike existing datasets, a collection of 3D models with nutritional information allow for view synthesis to create an infinite number of 2D images for any given viewpoint/camera angle along with the associated nutritional information. In this paper, we develop a methodology for collecting high-quality 3D models for food items with a particular focus on speed and consistency, and introduce NutritionVerse-3D, a large-scale high-quality high-resolution dataset of 105 3D food models, in conjunction with their associated weight, food name, and nutritional value. These