Meshfree methods for in silico modelling and simulation of cardiac electrophysiology are gaining more and more popularity. These methods do not require a mesh and are more suitable than the Finite Element Method (FEM) to simulate the activity of complex geometrical structures like the human heart. However, challenges such as numerical integration accuracy and time efficiency remain and limit their applicability. Recently, the Fragile Points Method (FPM) has been introduced in the meshfree methods family. It uses local, simple, polynomial, discontinuous functions to construct trial and test functions in the Galerkin weak form. This allows for accurate integration and improved efficiency while enabling the imposition of essential and natural boundary conditions as in the FEM. In this work, we consider the application of FPM for cardiac electrophysiology simulation. We derive the cardiac monodomain model using the FPM formulation and we solve several benchmark problems in 2D and 3D. We show that FPM leads to solutions of similar accuracy and efficiency with FEM while alleviating the need for a mesh. Additionally, FPM demonstrates better convergence than FEM in the considered benchmarks.
The Wiener-Hopf equations are a Toeplitz system of linear equations that naturally arise in several applications in time series. These include the update and prediction step of the stationary Kalman filter equations and the prediction of bivariate time series. The celebrated Wiener-Hopf technique is usually used for solving these equations and is based on a comparison of coefficients in a Fourier series expansion. However, a statistical interpretation of both the method and solution is opaque. The purpose of this note is to revisit the (discrete) Wiener-Hopf equations and obtain an alternative solution that is more aligned with classical techniques in time series analysis. Specifically, we propose a solution to the Wiener-Hopf equations that combines linear prediction with deconvolution. The Wiener-Hopf solution requires the spectral factorization of the underlying spectral density function. For ease of evaluation it is often assumed that the spectral density is rational. This allows one to obtain a computationally tractable solution. However, this leads to an approximation error when the underlying spectral density is not a rational function. We use the proposed solution with Baxter's inequality to derive an error bound for the rational spectral density approximation.
Stochastic PDE eigenvalue problems often arise in the field of uncertainty quantification, whereby one seeks to quantify the uncertainty in an eigenvalue, or its eigenfunction. In this paper we present an efficient multilevel quasi-Monte Carlo (MLQMC) algorithm for computing the expectation of the smallest eigenvalue of an elliptic eigenvalue problem with stochastic coefficients. Each sample evaluation requires the solution of a PDE eigenvalue problem, and so tackling this problem in practice is notoriously computationally difficult. We speed up the approximation of this expectation in four ways: we use a multilevel variance reduction scheme to spread the work over a hierarchy of FE meshes and truncation dimensions; we use QMC methods to efficiently compute the expectations on each level; we exploit the smoothness in parameter space and reuse the eigenvector from a nearby QMC point to reduce the number of iterations of the eigensolver; and we utilise a two-grid discretisation scheme to obtain the eigenvalue on the fine mesh with a single linear solve. The full error analysis of a basic MLQMC algorithm is given in the companion paper [Gilbert and Scheichl, 2022], and so in this paper we focus on how to further improve the efficiency and provide theoretical justification for using nearby QMC points and two-grid methods. Numerical results are presented that show the efficiency of our algorithm, and also show that the four strategies we employ are complementary.
Stochastic PDE eigenvalue problems are useful models for quantifying the uncertainty in several applications from the physical sciences and engineering, e.g., structural vibration analysis, the criticality of a nuclear reactor or photonic crystal structures. In this paper we present a simple multilevel quasi-Monte Carlo (MLQMC) method for approximating the expectation of the minimal eigenvalue of an elliptic eigenvalue problem with coefficients that are given as a series expansion of countably-many stochastic parameters. The MLQMC algorithm is based on a hierarchy of discretisations of the spatial domain and truncations of the dimension of the stochastic parameter domain. To approximate the expectations, randomly shifted lattice rules are employed. This paper is primarily dedicated to giving a rigorous analysis of the error of this algorithm. A key step in the error analysis requires bounds on the mixed derivatives of the eigenfunction with respect to both the stochastic and spatial variables simultaneously. Under stronger smoothness assumptions on the parametric dependence, our analysis also extends to multilevel higher-order quasi-Monte Carlo rules. An accompanying paper [Gilbert and Scheichl, 2022], focusses on practical extensions of the MLQMC algorithm to improve efficiency, and presents numerical results.
We investigate the nonlinear dynamics of a moving interface in a Hele-Shaw cell subject to an in-plane applied electric field. We develop a spectrally accurate boundary integral method where a coupled integral equation system is formulated. Although the stiffness due to the high order spatial derivatives can be removed, the long-time simulation is still expensive since the evolving velocity of the interface drops dramatically as the interface expands. We remove this physically imposed stiffness by employing a rescaling scheme, which accelerates the slow dynamics and reduces the computational cost. Our nonlinear results reveal that positive currents restrain finger ramification and promote overall stabilization of patterns. On the other hand, negative currents make the interface more unstable and lead to the formation of thin tail structures connecting the fingers and a small inner region. When no flux is injected, and a negative current is utilized, the interface tends to approach the origin and break up into several drops. We investigate the temporal evolution of the smallest distance between the interface and the origin and find that it obeys an algebraic law $\displaystyle (t_*-t)^b$, where $t_*$ is the estimated pinch-off time.
The paper discusses a reuse of matrix factorization as a building block in the Augmented Lagrangian (AL) and modified AL preconditioners for non-symmetric saddle point linear algebraic systems. The strategy is applied to solve two-dimensional incompressible fluid problems with efficiency rates independent of the Reynolds number. The solver is then tested to simulate motion of a surface fluid, an example of a 2D flow motivated by an interest in lateral fluidity of inextensible viscous membranes. Numerical examples include the Kelvin--Helmholtz instability problem posed on the sphere and on the torus. Some new eigenvalue estimates for the AL preconditioner are derived.
We propose the particle dual averaging (PDA) method, which generalizes the dual averaging method in convex optimization to the optimization over probability distributions with quantitative runtime guarantee. The algorithm consists of an inner loop and outer loop: the inner loop utilizes the Langevin algorithm to approximately solve for a stationary distribution, which is then optimized in the outer loop. The method can thus be interpreted as an extension of the Langevin algorithm to naturally handle nonlinear functional on the probability space. An important application of the proposed method is the optimization of neural network in the mean field regime, which is theoretically attractive due to the presence of nonlinear feature learning, but quantitative convergence rate can be challenging to obtain. By adapting finite-dimensional convex optimization theory into the space of measures, we analyze PDA in regularized empirical / expected risk minimization, and establish quantitative global convergence in learning two-layer mean field neural networks under more general settings. Our theoretical results are supported by numerical simulations on neural networks with reasonable size.
Physic-Informed Neural Networks (PINN) are neural networks (NNs) that encode model equations, like Partial Differential Equations (PDE), as a component of the neural network itself. PINNs are nowadays used to solve PDEs, fractional equations, and integral-differential equations. This novel methodology has arisen as a multi-task learning framework in which a NN must fit observed data while reducing a PDE residual. This article provides a comprehensive review of the literature on PINNs: while the primary goal of the study was to characterize these networks and their related advantages and disadvantages, the review also attempts to incorporate publications on a larger variety of issues, including physics-constrained neural networks (PCNN), where the initial or boundary conditions are directly embedded in the NN structure rather than in the loss functions. The study indicates that most research has focused on customizing the PINN through different activation functions, gradient optimization techniques, neural network structures, and loss function structures. Despite the wide range of applications for which PINNs have been used, by demonstrating their ability to be more feasible in some contexts than classical numerical techniques like Finite Element Method (FEM), advancements are still possible, most notably theoretical issues that remain unresolved.
Feature attribution is often loosely presented as the process of selecting a subset of relevant features as a rationale of a prediction. This lack of clarity stems from the fact that we usually do not have access to any notion of ground-truth attribution and from a more general debate on what good interpretations are. In this paper we propose to formalise feature selection/attribution based on the concept of relaxed functional dependence. In particular, we extend our notions to the instance-wise setting and derive necessary properties for candidate selection solutions, while leaving room for task-dependence. By computing ground-truth attributions on synthetic datasets, we evaluate many state-of-the-art attribution methods and show that, even when optimised, some fail to verify the proposed properties and provide wrong solutions.
Deep learning has become the most widely used approach for cardiac image segmentation in recent years. In this paper, we provide a review of over 100 cardiac image segmentation papers using deep learning, which covers common imaging modalities including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and ultrasound (US) and major anatomical structures of interest (ventricles, atria and vessels). In addition, a summary of publicly available cardiac image datasets and code repositories are included to provide a base for encouraging reproducible research. Finally, we discuss the challenges and limitations with current deep learning-based approaches (scarcity of labels, model generalizability across different domains, interpretability) and suggest potential directions for future research.
Fully convolutional deep neural networks have been asserted to be fast and precise frameworks with great potential in image segmentation. One of the major challenges in utilizing such networks raises when data is unbalanced, which is common in many medical imaging applications such as lesion segmentation where lesion class voxels are often much lower in numbers than non-lesion voxels. A trained network with unbalanced data may make predictions with high precision and low recall, being severely biased towards the non-lesion class which is particularly undesired in medical applications where false negatives are actually more important than false positives. Various methods have been proposed to address this problem including two step training, sample re-weighting, balanced sampling, and similarity loss functions. In this paper we developed a patch-wise 3D densely connected network with an asymmetric loss function, where we used large overlapping image patches for intrinsic and extrinsic data augmentation, a patch selection algorithm, and a patch prediction fusion strategy based on B-spline weighted soft voting to take into account the uncertainty of prediction in patch borders. We applied this method to lesion segmentation based on the MSSEG 2016 and ISBI 2015 challenges, where we achieved average Dice similarity coefficient of 69.9% and 65.74%, respectively. In addition to the proposed loss, we trained our network with focal and generalized Dice loss functions. Significant improvement in $F_1$ and $F_2$ scores and the APR curve was achieved in test using the asymmetric similarity loss layer and our 3D patch prediction fusion. The asymmetric similarity loss based on $F_\beta$ scores generalizes the Dice similarity coefficient and can be effectively used with the patch-wise strategy developed here to train fully convolutional deep neural networks for highly unbalanced image segmentation.