Purpose: Lung disease assessment in precapillary pulmonary hypertension (PH) is essential for appropriate patient management. This study aims to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning model for lung texture classification in CT Pulmonary Angiography (CTPA), and evaluate its correlation with clinical assessment methods. Materials and Methods: In this retrospective study with external validation, 122 patients with pre-capillary PH were used to train (n=83), validate (n=17) and test (n=10 internal test, n=12 external test) a patch based DenseNet-121 classification model. "Normal", "Ground glass", "Ground glass with reticulation", "Honeycombing", and "Emphysema" were classified as per the Fleishner Society glossary of terms. Ground truth classes were segmented by two radiologists with patches extracted from the labelled regions. Proportion of lung volume for each texture was calculated by classifying patches throughout the entire lung volume to generate a coarse texture classification mapping throughout the lung parenchyma. AI output was assessed against diffusing capacity of carbon monoxide (DLCO) and specialist radiologist reported disease severity. Results: Micro-average AUCs for the validation, internal test, and external test were 0.92, 0.95, and 0.94, respectively. The model had consistent performance across parenchymal textures, demonstrated strong correlation with diffusing capacity of carbon monoxide (DLCO), and showed good correspondence with disease severity reported by specialist radiologists. Conclusion: The classification model demonstrates excellent performance on external validation. The clinical utility of its output has been demonstrated. This objective, repeatable measure of disease severity can aid in patient management in adjunct to radiological reporting.
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are responsible for a large proportion of premature deaths in low- and middle-income countries. Early CVD detection and intervention is critical in these populations, yet many existing CVD risk scores require a physical examination or lab measurements, which can be challenging in such health systems due to limited accessibility. Here we investigated the potential to use photoplethysmography (PPG), a sensing technology available on most smartphones that can potentially enable large-scale screening at low cost, for CVD risk prediction. We developed a deep learning PPG-based CVD risk score (DLS) to predict the probability of having major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE: non-fatal myocardial infarction, stroke, and cardiovascular death) within ten years, given only age, sex, smoking status and PPG as predictors. We compared the DLS with the office-based refit-WHO score, which adopts the shared predictors from WHO and Globorisk scores (age, sex, smoking status, height, weight and systolic blood pressure) but refitted on the UK Biobank (UKB) cohort. In UKB cohort, DLS's C-statistic (71.1%, 95% CI 69.9-72.4) was non-inferior to office-based refit-WHO score (70.9%, 95% CI 69.7-72.2; non-inferiority margin of 2.5%, p<0.01). The calibration of the DLS was satisfactory, with a 1.8% mean absolute calibration error. Adding DLS features to the office-based score increased the C-statistic by 1.0% (95% CI 0.6-1.4). DLS predicts ten-year MACE risk comparable with the office-based refit-WHO score. It provides a proof-of-concept and suggests the potential of a PPG-based approach strategies for community-based primary prevention in resource-limited regions.
Starches are important energy sources found in plants with many uses in the pharmaceutical industry such as binders, disintegrants, bulking agents in drugs and thus require very careful physicochemical analysis for proper identification and verification which includes microscopy. In this work, we applied artificial intelligence techniques (using transfer learning and deep convolution neural network CNNs to microscopical images obtained from 9 starch samples of different botanical sources. Our approach obtained an accuracy of 61% when the machine learning model was pretrained on microscopic images from MicroNet dataset. However the accuracy jumped to 81% for model pretrained on random day to day images obtained from Imagenet dataset. The model pretrained on the imagenet dataset also showed a better precision, recall and f1 score than that pretrained on the imagenet dataset.
Purpose: To analyze the demographic and imaging characteristics associated with increased risk of failure for abnormality classification in screening mammograms. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study used data from the Emory BrEast Imaging Dataset (EMBED) which includes mammograms from 115,931 patients imaged at Emory University Healthcare between 2013 to 2020. Clinical and imaging data includes Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) assessment, region of interest coordinates for abnormalities, imaging features, pathologic outcomes, and patient demographics. Multiple deep learning models were developed to distinguish between patches of abnormal tissue and randomly selected patches of normal tissue from the screening mammograms. We assessed model performance overall and within subgroups defined by age, race, pathologic outcome, and imaging characteristics to evaluate reasons for misclassifications. Results: On a test set size of 5,810 studies (13,390 patches), a ResNet152V2 model trained to classify normal versus abnormal tissue patches achieved an accuracy of 92.6% (95% CI = 92.0-93.2%), and area under the receiver operative characteristics curve 0.975 (95% CI = 0.972-0.978). Imaging characteristics associated with higher misclassifications of images include higher tissue densities (risk ratio [RR]=1.649; p=.010, BI-RADS density C and RR=2.026; p=.003, BI-RADS density D), and presence of architectural distortion (RR=1.026; p<.001). Conclusion: Even though deep learning models for abnormality classification can perform well in screening mammography, we demonstrate certain imaging features that result in worse model performance. This is the first such work to systematically evaluate breast abnormality classification by various subgroups and better-informed developers and end-users of population subgroups which are likely to experience biased model performance.
Single-Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM) has expanded our ability to visualize subcellular structures but is limited in its temporal resolution. Increasing emitter density will improve temporal resolution, but current analysis algorithms struggle as emitter images significantly overlap. Here we present a deep convolutional neural network called LUENN which utilizes a unique architecture that rejects the isolated emitter assumption; it can smoothly accommodate emitters that range from completely isolated to co-located. This architecture, alongside an accurate estimator of location uncertainty, extends the range of usable emitter densities by a factor of 6 to over 31 emitters per micrometer-squared with reduced penalty to localization precision and improved temporal resolution. Apart from providing uncertainty estimation, the algorithm improves usability in laboratories by reducing imaging times and easing requirements for successful experiments.
Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (CSLAM) is a critical capability for enabling multiple robots to operate in complex environments. Most CSLAM techniques rely on the transmission of low-level features for visual and LiDAR-based approaches, which are used for pose graph optimization. However, these low-level features can lead to incorrect loop closures, negatively impacting map generation.Recent approaches have proposed the use of high-level semantic information in the form of Hierarchical Semantic Graphs to improve the loop closure procedures and overall precision of SLAM algorithms. In this work, we present Multi S-Graphs, an S-graphs [1] based distributed CSLAM algorithm that utilizes high-level semantic information for cooperative map generation while minimizing the amount of information exchanged between robots. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed algorithm in map generation tasks.
This paper considers the problem of helping humans exercise scalable oversight over deep neural networks (DNNs). Adversarial examples can be useful by helping to reveal weaknesses in DNNs, but they can be difficult to interpret or draw actionable conclusions from. Some previous works have proposed using human-interpretable adversarial attacks including copy/paste attacks in which one natural image pasted into another causes an unexpected misclassification. We build on these with two contributions. First, we introduce Search for Natural Adversarial Features Using Embeddings (SNAFUE) which offers a fully automated method for finding copy/paste attacks. Second, we use SNAFUE to red team an ImageNet classifier. We reproduce copy/paste attacks from previous works and find hundreds of other easily-describable vulnerabilities, all without a human in the loop. Code is available at //github.com/thestephencasper/snafue
External validation is often recommended to ensure the generalizability of ML models. However, it neither guarantees generalizability nor equates to a model's clinical usefulness (the ultimate goal of any clinical decision-support tool). External validation is misaligned with current healthcare ML needs. First, patient data changes across time, geography, and facilities. These changes create significant volatility in the performance of a single fixed model (especially for deep learning models, which dominate clinical ML). Second, newer ML techniques, current market forces, and updated regulatory frameworks are enabling frequent updating and monitoring of individual deployed model instances. We submit that external validation is insufficient to establish ML models' safety or utility. Proposals to fix the external validation paradigm do not go far enough. Continued reliance on it as the ultimate test is likely to lead us astray. We propose the MLOps-inspired paradigm of recurring local validation as an alternative that ensures the validity of models while protecting against performance-disruptive data variability. This paradigm relies on site-specific reliability tests before every deployment, followed by regular and recurrent checks throughout the life cycle of the deployed algorithm. Initial and recurrent reliability tests protect against performance-disruptive distribution shifts, and concept drifts that jeopardize patient safety.
Graph convolutional networks (GCN) leverage topology-driven graph convolutional operations to combine information across the graph for inference tasks. In our recent work, we have studied GCNs with covariance matrices as graphs in the form of coVariance neural networks (VNNs) that draw similarities with traditional PCA-driven data analysis approaches while offering significant advantages over them. In this paper, we first focus on theoretically characterizing the transferability of VNNs. The notion of transferability is motivated from the intuitive expectation that learning models could generalize to "compatible" datasets (possibly of different dimensionalities) with minimal effort. VNNs inherit the scale-free data processing architecture from GCNs and here, we show that VNNs exhibit transferability of performance over datasets whose covariance matrices converge to a limit object. Multi-scale neuroimaging datasets enable the study of the brain at multiple scales and hence, can validate the theoretical results on the transferability of VNNs. To gauge the advantages offered by VNNs in neuroimaging data analysis, we focus on the task of "brain age" prediction using cortical thickness features. In clinical neuroscience, there has been an increased interest in machine learning algorithms which provide estimates of "brain age" that deviate from chronological age. We leverage the architecture of VNNs to extend beyond the coarse metric of brain age gap in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and make two important observations: (i) VNNs can assign anatomical interpretability to elevated brain age gap in AD, and (ii) the interpretability offered by VNNs is contingent on their ability to exploit specific principal components of the anatomical covariance matrix. We further leverage the transferability of VNNs to cross validate the above observations across different datasets.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a part of everyday conversation and our lives. It is considered as the new electricity that is revolutionizing the world. AI is heavily invested in both industry and academy. However, there is also a lot of hype in the current AI debate. AI based on so-called deep learning has achieved impressive results in many problems, but its limits are already visible. AI has been under research since the 1940s, and the industry has seen many ups and downs due to over-expectations and related disappointments that have followed. The purpose of this book is to give a realistic picture of AI, its history, its potential and limitations. We believe that AI is a helper, not a ruler of humans. We begin by describing what AI is and how it has evolved over the decades. After fundamentals, we explain the importance of massive data for the current mainstream of artificial intelligence. The most common representations for AI, methods, and machine learning are covered. In addition, the main application areas are introduced. Computer vision has been central to the development of AI. The book provides a general introduction to computer vision, and includes an exposure to the results and applications of our own research. Emotions are central to human intelligence, but little use has been made in AI. We present the basics of emotional intelligence and our own research on the topic. We discuss super-intelligence that transcends human understanding, explaining why such achievement seems impossible on the basis of present knowledge,and how AI could be improved. Finally, a summary is made of the current state of AI and what to do in the future. In the appendix, we look at the development of AI education, especially from the perspective of contents at our own university.
Knowledge is a formal way of understanding the world, providing a human-level cognition and intelligence for the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI). One of the representations of knowledge is the structural relations between entities. An effective way to automatically acquire this important knowledge, called Relation Extraction (RE), a sub-task of information extraction, plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Its purpose is to identify semantic relations between entities from natural language text. To date, there are several studies for RE in previous works, which have documented these techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) become a prevailing technique in this research. Especially, the supervised and distant supervision methods based on DNNs are the most popular and reliable solutions for RE. This article 1)introduces some general concepts, and further 2)gives a comprehensive overview of DNNs in RE from two points of view: supervised RE, which attempts to improve the standard RE systems, and distant supervision RE, which adopts DNNs to design the sentence encoder and the de-noise method. We further 3)cover some novel methods and describe some recent trends and discuss possible future research directions for this task.