Junwen Zhu

Web of Science and Scopus are two world-leading and competing citation databases. By using the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, this paper conducts a comparative, dynamic, and empirical study focusing on the use of Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus in academic papers published during 2004 and 2018. This brief communication reveals that although both Web of Science and Scopus are increasingly used in academic papers, Scopus as a new-comer is really challenging the dominating role of WoS. Researchers from more and more countries/regions and knowledge domains are involved in the use of these two databases. Even though the main producers of related papers are developed economies, some developing economies such as China, Brazil and Iran also act important roles but with different patterns in the use of these two databases. Both two databases are widely used in meta-analysis related studies especially for researchers in China. Health/medical science related domains and the traditional Information Science & Library Science field stand out in the use of citation databases.

The effective segmentation of esophagus and esophageal cancer from Computed Tomography (CT) images can meaningfully assist doctors in the diagnosis and treatment of esophageal cancer patients. However, problems such as the small proportion of the esophageal region in CT images and the irregular shape of the esophagus will make the diagnosis difficult. In practical applications, not all esophagus and esophageal cancer morphology can be included in the training set, so the generalization ability of the model is very important. These are the difficulties in segmenting the esophagus and esophageal cancer. Since some adjacent tissues and organs of the esophagus are visually close to the esophagus and esophageal cancer, how to ensure that the network can extract effective distinguishing features has become the focus of research. In this paper, a novel U-Net structure - Channel-attention U-Net is proposed to segment esophagus and esophageal cancer from CT slices. This novel network combines a Channel Attention Module (CAM) that can distinguish the esophagus and surrounding tissues by emphasizing and inhibiting channel feature and Cross-level Feature Fusion Module (CFFM) which is utilized to strengthen the generalization ability of the network by using high-level features to weight low-level features. Because the high-level features represent specific organizational information, and the low-level features represent the characteristics of detailed information such as edges and contours, the network can learn specific detailed features of a definite organization. In addition, to locate the esophageal region better, a 3D semi-automatic method for segmenting esophagus and esophageal cancer is proposed. The proposed network is trained using 46,400 CT pictures as the training set and divides 11,600 CT images from the dataset at a ratio of 0.2 as the validation set. Finally, 7,250 CT images were used as the test set to test the performance of the network. The experimental results show that the IoU value of our network can reach 0.625, the dice value is 0.732 and the Hausdorff distance is 3.193.