In the present work, we investigate a model of the invasion of healthy tissue by cancer cells which is described by a system of nonlinear PDEs consisting of a cross-diffusion-reaction equation and two additional nonlinear ordinary differential equations. We show that when the convective part of the system, the chemotactic term, is dominant, then straightforward numerical methods for the studied system may be unstable. We present an implicit finite element method using conforming $P_1$ or $Q_1$ finite elements to discretize the model in space and the $\theta$-method for discretization in time. The discrete problem is stabilized using a nonlinear flux-corrected transport approach. It is proved that both the nonlinear scheme and the linearized problems used in fixed-point iterations are solvable and positivity preserving. Several numerical experiments are presented in 2D using the deal.II library to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.
Social insects such as ants communicate via pheromones which allows them to coordinate their activity and solve complex tasks as a swarm, e.g. foraging for food. This behavior was shaped through evolutionary processes. In computational models, self-coordination in swarms has been implemented using probabilistic or simple action rules to shape the decision of each agent and the collective behavior. However, manual tuned decision rules may limit the behavior of the swarm. In this work we investigate the emergence of self-coordination and communication in evolved swarms without defining any explicit rule. We evolve a swarm of agents representing an ant colony. We use an evolutionary algorithm to optimize a spiking neural network (SNN) which serves as an artificial brain to control the behavior of each agent. The goal of the evolved colony is to find optimal ways to forage for food and return it to the nest in the shortest amount of time. In the evolutionary phase, the ants are able to learn to collaborate by depositing pheromone near food piles and near the nest to guide other ants. The pheromone usage is not manually encoded into the network; instead, this behavior is established through the optimization procedure. We observe that pheromone-based communication enables the ants to perform better in comparison to colonies where communication via pheromone did not emerge. We assess the foraging performance by comparing the SNN based model to a rule based system. Our results show that the SNN based model can efficiently complete the foraging task in a short amount of time. Our approach illustrates self coordination via pheromone emerges as a result of the network optimization. This work serves as a proof of concept for the possibility of creating complex applications utilizing SNNs as underlying architectures for multi-agent interactions where communication and self-coordination is desired.
In this research work, we propose a high-order time adapted scheme for pricing a coupled system of fixed-free boundary constant elasticity of variance (CEV) model on both equidistant and locally refined space-grid. The performance of our method is substantially enhanced to improve irregularities in the model which are both inherent and induced. Furthermore, the system of coupled PDEs is strongly nonlinear and involves several time-dependent coefficients that include the first-order derivative of the early exercise boundary. These coefficients are approximated from a fourth-order analytical approximation which is derived using a regularized square-root function. The semi-discrete equation for the option value and delta sensitivity is obtained from a non-uniform fourth-order compact finite difference scheme. Fifth-order 5(4) Dormand-Prince time integration method is used to solve the coupled system of discrete equations. Enhancing the performance of our proposed method with local mesh refinement and adaptive strategies enables us to obtain highly accurate solution with very coarse space grids, hence reducing computational runtime substantially. We further verify the performance of our methodology as compared with some of the well-known and better-performing existing methods.
In this paper, we present a physics-informed neural network (PINN) approach for predicting the performance of an all-vanadium redox flow battery, with its physics constraints enforced by a two-dimensional (2D) mathematical model. The 2D model, which includes 6 governing equations and 24 boundary conditions, provides a detailed representation of the electrochemical reactions, mass transport and hydrodynamics occurring inside the redox flow battery. To solve the 2D model with the PINN approach, a composite neural network is employed to approximate species concentration and potentials; the input and output are normalized according to prior knowledge of the battery system; the governing equations and boundary conditions are first scaled to an order of magnitude around 1, and then further balanced with a self-weighting method. Our numerical results show that the PINN is able to predict cell voltage correctly, but the prediction of potentials shows a constant-like shift. To fix the shift, the PINN is enhanced by further constrains derived from the current collector boundary. Finally, we show that the enhanced PINN can be even further improved if a small number of labeled data is available.
Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia are common types of neurodegenerative disorders that present overlapping clinical symptoms, making their differential diagnosis very challenging. Numerous efforts have been done for the diagnosis of each disease but the problem of multi-class differential diagnosis has not been actively explored. In recent years, transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable success in various computer vision tasks. However, their use in disease diagnostic is uncommon due to the limited amount of 3D medical data given the large size of such models. In this paper, we present a novel 3D transformer-based architecture using a deformable patch location module to improve the differential diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia. Moreover, to overcome the problem of data scarcity, we propose an efficient combination of various data augmentation techniques, adapted for training transformer-based models on 3D structural magnetic resonance imaging data. Finally, we propose to combine our transformer-based model with a traditional machine learning model using brain structure volumes to better exploit the available data. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showing competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the deformable patch locations can be visualized, revealing the most relevant brain regions used to establish the diagnosis of each disease.
Counterfactual prediction methods are required when a model will be deployed in a setting where treatment policies differ from the setting where the model was developed, or when the prediction question is explicitly counterfactual. However, estimating and evaluating counterfactual prediction models is challenging because one does not observe the full set of potential outcomes for all individuals. Here, we discuss how to tailor a model to a counterfactual estimand, how to assess the model's performance, and how to perform model and tuning parameter selection. We also provide identifiability results for measures of performance for a potentially misspecified counterfactual prediction model based on training and test data from the same (factual) source population. Last, we illustrate the methods using simulation and apply them to the task of developing a statin-na\"{i}ve risk prediction model for cardiovascular disease.
Clinical trials often allow patients in the control arm to switch to the treatment arm if their physical conditions are worse than certain tolerance levels. For instance, treatment switching arises in the Concorde clinical trial, which aims to assess causal effects on the time-to-disease progression or death of immediate versus deferred treatment with zidovudine among patients with asymptomatic HIV infection. The Intention-To-Treat analysis does not measure the effect of the actual receipt of the treatment and ignores the information on treatment switching. Other existing methods reconstruct the outcome a patient would have had if they had not switched under strong assumptions. Departing from the literature, we re-define the problem of treatment switching using principal stratification and focus on causal effects for patients belonging to subpopulations defined by the switching behavior under control. We use a Bayesian approach to inference, taking into account that (i) switching happens in continuous time; (ii) switching time is not defined for patients who never switch in a particular experiment; and (iii) survival time and switching time are subject to censoring. We apply this framework to analyze synthetic data based on the Concorde study. Our data analysis reveals that immediate treatment with zidovudine increases survival time for never switcher and that treatment effects are highly heterogeneous across different types of patients defined by the switching behavior.
Machine learning has been successfully applied to various fields of scientific computing in recent years. In this work, we propose a sparse radial basis function neural network method to solve elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) with multiscale coefficients. Inspired by the deep mixed residual method, we rewrite the second-order problem into a first-order system and employ multiple radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs) to approximate unknown functions in the system. To aviod the overfitting due to the simplicity of RBFNN, an additional regularization is introduced in the loss function. Thus the loss function contains two parts: the $L_2$ loss for the residual of the first-order system and boundary conditions, and the $\ell_1$ regularization term for the weights of radial basis functions (RBFs). An algorithm for optimizing the specific loss function is introduced to accelerate the training process. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated through a collection of multiscale problems with scale separation, discontinuity and multiple scales from one to three dimensions. Notably, the $\ell_1$ regularization can achieve the goal of representing the solution by fewer RBFs. As a consequence, the total number of RBFs scales like $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-n\tau})$, where $\varepsilon$ is the smallest scale, $n$ is the dimensionality, and $\tau$ is typically smaller than $1$. It is worth mentioning that the proposed method not only has the numerical convergence and thus provides a reliable numerical solution in three dimensions when a classical method is typically not affordable, but also outperforms most other available machine learning methods in terms of accuracy and robustness.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.
We hypothesize that due to the greedy nature of learning in multi-modal deep neural networks, these models tend to rely on just one modality while under-fitting the other modalities. Such behavior is counter-intuitive and hurts the models' generalization, as we observe empirically. To estimate the model's dependence on each modality, we compute the gain on the accuracy when the model has access to it in addition to another modality. We refer to this gain as the conditional utilization rate. In the experiments, we consistently observe an imbalance in conditional utilization rates between modalities, across multiple tasks and architectures. Since conditional utilization rate cannot be computed efficiently during training, we introduce a proxy for it based on the pace at which the model learns from each modality, which we refer to as the conditional learning speed. We propose an algorithm to balance the conditional learning speeds between modalities during training and demonstrate that it indeed addresses the issue of greedy learning. The proposed algorithm improves the model's generalization on three datasets: Colored MNIST, Princeton ModelNet40, and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand Gesture.
Breast cancer remains a global challenge, causing over 1 million deaths globally in 2018. To achieve earlier breast cancer detection, screening x-ray mammography is recommended by health organizations worldwide and has been estimated to decrease breast cancer mortality by 20-40%. Nevertheless, significant false positive and false negative rates, as well as high interpretation costs, leave opportunities for improving quality and access. To address these limitations, there has been much recent interest in applying deep learning to mammography; however, obtaining large amounts of annotated data poses a challenge for training deep learning models for this purpose, as does ensuring generalization beyond the populations represented in the training dataset. Here, we present an annotation-efficient deep learning approach that 1) achieves state-of-the-art performance in mammogram classification, 2) successfully extends to digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT; "3D mammography"), 3) detects cancers in clinically-negative prior mammograms of cancer patients, 4) generalizes well to a population with low screening rates, and 5) outperforms five-out-of-five full-time breast imaging specialists by improving absolute sensitivity by an average of 14%. Our results demonstrate promise towards software that can improve the accuracy of and access to screening mammography worldwide.