3,141 research outputs found
Endocardial activation mapping of human atrial fibrillation
Successful ablation of arrhythmias depends upon interpretation of the mechanism. However, in persistent atrial fibrillation (AF) ablation is currently directed towards the mechanism that initiates paroxysmal AF. We sought to address the hypothesis that atrial activation patterns during persistent AF may help determine the underlying mechanism.
Activation mapping of AF wavefronts is labor intensive and often restricted to short time segments in limited atrial locations. RETRO-Mapping was developed to identify uniform wavefronts that occur during AF, and summate all wavefront vectors on to an orbital plot. Uniform wavefronts were mapped using RETRO-Mapping during sinus rhythm, atrial tachycardia, and atrial fibrillation, and validated against detailed manual analysis of the same wavefronts with conventional isochronal mapping. RETRO-Mapping was found to have comparable accuracy to isochronal mapping.
RETRO-Mapping was then used to investigate atrial activation patterns during persistent AF. Atrial activation patterns demonstrated evidence of spatiotemporal stability over long time periods. Orbital plots created at different time points in the same location remained unchanged. Together with this important discovery, both fractionation and bipolar voltage were also demonstrated to express stability over time. Spatiotemporal stability during persistent AF enables sequential mapping as an acceptable technique. This property also allowed the development of a method for displaying sequentially mapped locations on a single map – RETRO-Choropleth Map. These findings go against the multiple wavelet hypothesis with random activation.
Having gained insights in to these stable activation patterns, extensive analysis was undertaken to identify the presence of focal activation. Focal activations were identified during persistent AF. RETRO-Mapping was used to show that adjacent activation patterns were not related to focal activations.
Lastly, the effect of pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) was studied by mapping atrial activation patterns before and after PVI. RETRO-Mapping showed that PVI leads to increased organisation of AF in most patients, supporting a mechanistic role of the pulmonary veins in persistent AF.
In conclusion, a new technique has been developed and validated for automated activation mapping of persistent AF. These techniques could be used to guide additional ablation strategies beyond PVI for patients with persistent AF.Open Acces
Solar Power Plant Detection on Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery using Weakly-Supervised CNN with Feedback Features and m-PCNN Fusion
Most of the traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) implements
bottom-up approach (feed-forward) for image classifications. However, many
scientific studies demonstrate that visual perception in primates rely on both
bottom-up and top-down connections. Therefore, in this work, we propose a CNN
network with feedback structure for Solar power plant detection on
middle-resolution satellite images. To express the strength of the top-down
connections, we introduce feedback CNN network (FB-Net) to a baseline CNN model
used for solar power plant classification on multi-spectral satellite data.
Moreover, we introduce a method to improve class activation mapping (CAM) to
our FB-Net, which takes advantage of multi-channel pulse coupled neural network
(m-PCNN) for weakly-supervised localization of the solar power plants from the
features of proposed FB-Net. For the proposed FB-Net CAM with m-PCNN,
experimental results demonstrated promising results on both solar-power plant
image classification and detection task.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, 4 table
Abnormality Detection in Mammography using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide. The most common
screening technology is mammography. To reduce the cost and workload of
radiologists, we propose a computer aided detection approach for classifying
and localizing calcifications and masses in mammogram images. To improve on
conventional approaches, we apply deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) for
automatic feature learning and classifier building. In computer-aided
mammography, deep CNN classifiers cannot be trained directly on full mammogram
images because of the loss of image details from resizing at input layers.
Instead, our classifiers are trained on labelled image patches and then adapted
to work on full mammogram images for localizing the abnormalities.
State-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks are compared on their
performance of classifying the abnormalities. Experimental results indicate
that VGGNet receives the best overall accuracy at 92.53\% in classifications.
For localizing abnormalities, ResNet is selected for computing class activation
maps because it is ready to be deployed without structural change or further
training. Our approach demonstrates that deep convolutional neural network
classifiers have remarkable localization capabilities despite no supervision on
the location of abnormalities is provided.Comment: 6 page
The usefulness of nifekalant for activation mapping of premature beat-triggered atrial fibrillation: Suppression of atrial fibrillation initiation without inhibiting premature beat
AbstractA 66-year-old man underwent a second ablation for atrial fibrillation (AF). Intravenous isoproterenol administration caused the atrial premature beat (APB), triggering AF. The APB originated in the right atrium and invariably initiated AF. Therefore, contact activation mapping could not be performed without frequent electrocardioversion. To prevent the initiation of AF without inhibiting the APB firing, we administered nifekalant intravenously, which facilitated precise activation mapping and ablation of the AF-triggering APB. The administration of nifekalant may improve clinical outcomes of catheter ablation for AF triggered by non-pulmonary vein APB, which invariably initiates AF
Evaluating Generalization Ability of Convolutional Neural Networks and Capsule Networks for Image Classification via Top-2 Classification
Image classification is a challenging problem which aims to identify the
category of object in the image. In recent years, deep Convolutional Neural
Networks (CNNs) have been applied to handle this task, and impressive
improvement has been achieved. However, some research showed the output of CNNs
can be easily altered by adding relatively small perturbations to the input
image, such as modifying few pixels. Recently, Capsule Networks (CapsNets) are
proposed, which can help eliminating this limitation. Experiments on MNIST
dataset revealed that capsules can better characterize the features of object
than CNNs. But it's hard to find a suitable quantitative method to compare the
generalization ability of CNNs and CapsNets. In this paper, we propose a new
image classification task called Top-2 classification to evaluate the
generalization ability of CNNs and CapsNets. The models are trained on single
label image samples same as the traditional image classification task. But in
the test stage, we randomly concatenate two test image samples which contain
different labels, and then use the trained models to predict the top-2 labels
on the unseen newly-created two label image samples. This task can provide us
precise quantitative results to compare the generalization ability of CNNs and
CapsNets. Back to the CapsNet, because it uses Full Connectivity (FC) mechanism
among all capsules, it requires many parameters. To reduce the number of
parameters, we introduce the Parameter-Sharing (PS) mechanism between capsules.
Experiments on five widely used benchmark image datasets demonstrate the method
significantly reduces the number of parameters, without losing the
effectiveness of extracting features. Further, on the Top-2 classification
task, the proposed PS CapsNets obtain impressive higher accuracy compared to
the traditional CNNs and FC CapsNets by a large margin.Comment: This paper is under consideration at Computer Vision and Image
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