6,969 research outputs found
Using Topological Data Analysis for diagnosis pulmonary embolism
Pulmonary Embolism (PE) is a common and potentially lethal condition. Most
patients die within the first few hours from the event. Despite diagnostic
advances, delays and underdiagnosis in PE are common.To increase the diagnostic
performance in PE, current diagnostic work-up of patients with suspected acute
pulmonary embolism usually starts with the assessment of clinical pretest
probability using plasma d-Dimer measurement and clinical prediction rules. The
most validated and widely used clinical decision rules are the Wells and Geneva
Revised scores. We aimed to develop a new clinical prediction rule (CPR) for PE
based on topological data analysis and artificial neural network. Filter or
wrapper methods for features reduction cannot be applied to our dataset: the
application of these algorithms can only be performed on datasets without
missing data. Instead, we applied Topological data analysis (TDA) to overcome
the hurdle of processing datasets with null values missing data. A topological
network was developed using the Iris software (Ayasdi, Inc., Palo Alto). The PE
patient topology identified two ares in the pathological group and hence two
distinct clusters of PE patient populations. Additionally, the topological
netowrk detected several sub-groups among healthy patients that likely are
affected with non-PE diseases. TDA was further utilized to identify key
features which are best associated as diagnostic factors for PE and used this
information to define the input space for a back-propagation artificial neural
network (BP-ANN). It is shown that the area under curve (AUC) of BP-ANN is
greater than the AUCs of the scores (Wells and revised Geneva) used among
physicians. The results demonstrate topological data analysis and the BP-ANN,
when used in combination, can produce better predictive models than Wells or
revised Geneva scores system for the analyzed cohortComment: 18 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:cs/0308031 by other authors without attributio
A Computer Aided Detection system for mammographic images implemented on a GRID infrastructure
The use of an automatic system for the analysis of mammographic images has
proven to be very useful to radiologists in the investigation of breast cancer,
especially in the framework of mammographic-screening programs. A breast
neoplasia is often marked by the presence of microcalcification clusters and
massive lesions in the mammogram: hence the need for tools able to recognize
such lesions at an early stage. In the framework of the GPCALMA (GRID Platform
for Computer Assisted Library for MAmmography) project, the co-working of
italian physicists and radiologists built a large distributed database of
digitized mammographic images (about 5500 images corresponding to 1650
patients) and developed a CAD (Computer Aided Detection) system, able to make
an automatic search of massive lesions and microcalcification clusters. The CAD
is implemented in the GPCALMA integrated station, which can be used also for
digitization, as archive and to perform statistical analyses. Some GPCALMA
integrated stations have already been implemented and are currently on clinical
trial in some italian hospitals. The emerging GRID technology can been used to
connect the GPCALMA integrated stations operating in different medical centers.
The GRID approach will support an effective tele- and co-working between
radiologists, cancer specialists and epidemiology experts by allowing remote
image analysis and interactive online diagnosis.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the 13th
IEEE-NPSS Real Time Conference 2003, Montreal, Canada, May 18-23 200
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