Zhichun Li

Background: Adaptive radiation therapy (ART) can improve prognosis for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients. However, the inter-individual variability in anatomical changes, along with the resulting extension of treatment duration and increased workload for the radiologists, makes the selection of eligible patients a persistent challenge in clinical practice. The purpose of this study was to predict eligible ART candidates prior to radiation therapy (RT) for NPC patients using a classification neural network. By leveraging the fusion of medical imaging and clinical data, this method aimed to save time and resources in clinical workflows and improve treatment efficiency. Methods: We collected retrospective data from 305 NPC patients who received RT at Hong Kong Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Each patient sample included pre-treatment computed tomographic (CT) images, T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, and T2-weighted MRI images, along with clinical data. We developed and trained a novel multi-modal classification neural network that combines ResNet-50, cross-attention, multi-scale features, and clinical data for multi-modal fusion. The patients were categorized into two labels based on their re-plan status: patients who received ART during RT treatment, as determined by the radiation oncologist, and those who did not. Results: The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed multi-modal deep prediction model outperformed other commonly used deep learning networks, achieving an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.9070. These results indicated the ability of the model to accurately classify and predict ART eligibility for NPC patients. Conclusions: The proposed method showed good performance in predicting ART eligibility among NPC patients, highlighting its potential to enhance clinical decision-making, optimize treatment efficiency, and support more personalized cancer care.

Catch fish optimization algorithm (CFOA) is a newly proposed meta-heuristic algorithm based on human behaviors. CFOA shows better performance on multiple test functions and clustering problems. However, CFOA shows poor performance in some cases, and there is still room for improvement in convergence accuracy, getting rid of local traps, and so on. To further enhance the performance of CFOA, a multi-strategy improved catch fish optimization algorithm (MICFOA) is proposed in this paper. In the exploration phase, we propose a Lévy-based differential independent search strategy to enhance the global search capability of the algorithm while minimizing the impact on the convergence speed. Secondly, in the exploitation phase, a weight-balanced selection mechanism is used to maintain population diversity, enhance the algorithm’s ability to get rid of local optima during the search process, and effectively boost the convergence accuracy. Furthermore, the structure of CFOA is also modified in this paper. A fishermen position replacement strategy is added at the end of the algorithm as a way to strengthen the robustness of the algorithm. To evaluate the performance of MICFOA, a comprehensive comparison with nine other metaheuristic algorithms is performed on the 10/30/50/100 dimensions of the CEC 2017 test functions and the 10/20 dimensions of the CEC2022 test functions. Statistical experiments show that MICFOA has more significant dominance in numerical optimization problems, and its overall performance outperforms the CFOA, PEOA, TLBO, COA, ARO, EDO, YDSE, and other state-of-the-art algorithms such as LSHADE, JADE, IDE-EDA, and APSM-jSO.

The widespread application of mobile robots holds significant importance for advancing social intelligence. However, as the complexity of the environment increases, existing Obstacle Avoidance Path Planning (OAPP) methods tend to fall into local optimal paths, compromising reliability and practicality. Therefore, based on the Spider-Wasp Optimizer (SWO), this paper proposes an improved OAPP method called the LMBSWO to address these challenges. Firstly, the learning strategy is introduced to enhance the diversity of the algorithm population, thereby improving its global optimization performance. Secondly, the dual-median-point guidance strategy is incorporated to enhance the algorithm’s exploitation capability and increase its path searchability. Lastly, a better guidance strategy is introduced to enhance the algorithm’s ability to escape local optimal paths. Subsequently, the LMBSWO is employed for OAPP in five different map environments. The experimental results show that the LMBSWO achieves an advantage in collision-free path length, with 100% probability, across five maps of different complexity, while obtaining 80% fault tolerance across different maps, compared to nine existing novel OAPP methods with efficient performance. The LMBSWO ranks first in the trade-off between planning time and path length. With these results, the LMBSWO can be considered as a robust OAPP method with efficient solving performance, along with high robustness.