56,372 research outputs found
How to develop a meaningful radiomic signature for clinical use in oncologic patients.
During the last decade, there is an increasing usage of quantitative methods in Radiology in an effort to reduce the diagnostic variability associated with a subjective manner of radiological interpretation. Combined approaches where visual assessment made by the radiologist is augmented by quantitative imaging biomarkers are gaining attention. Advances in machine learning resulted in the rise of radiomics that is a new methodology referring to the extraction of quantitative information from medical images. Radiomics are based on the development of computational models, referred to as "Radiomic Signatures", trying to address either unmet clinical needs, mostly in the field of oncologic imaging, or to compare radiomics performance with that of radiologists. However, to explore this new technology, initial publications did not consider best practices in the field of machine learning resulting in publications with questionable clinical value. In this paper, our effort was concentrated on how to avoid methodological mistakes and consider critical issues in the workflow of the development of clinically meaningful radiomic signatures
Neurophysiological Profile of Antismoking Campaigns
Over the past few decades, antismoking public service announcements (PSAs) have been used by governments to promote healthy
behaviours in citizens, for instance, against drinking before the drive and against smoke. Effectiveness of such PSAs has been
suggested especially for young persons. By now, PSAs efficacy is still mainly assessed through traditional methods (questionnaires
and metrics) and could be performed only after the PSAs broadcasting, leading to waste of economic resources and time in the
case of Ineffective PSAs. One possible countermeasure to such ineffective use of PSAs could be promoted by the evaluation of the
cerebral reaction to the PSA of particular segments of population (e.g., old, young, and heavy smokers). In addition, it is crucial to
gather such cerebral activity in front of PSAs that have been assessed to be effective against smoke (Effective PSAs), comparing
results to the cerebral reactions to PSAs that have been certified to be not effective (Ineffective PSAs). &e eventual differences
between the cerebral responses toward the two PSA groups will provide crucial information about the possible outcome of new
PSAs before to its broadcasting. &is study focused on adult population, by investigating the cerebral reaction to the vision of
different PSA images, which have already been shown to be Effective and Ineffective for the promotion of an antismoking
behaviour. Results showed how variables as gender and smoking habits can influence the perception of PSA images, and how
different communication styles of the antismoking campaigns could facilitate the comprehension of PSA’s message and then
enhance the related impac
Learning to detect chest radiographs containing lung nodules using visual attention networks
Machine learning approaches hold great potential for the automated detection
of lung nodules in chest radiographs, but training the algorithms requires vary
large amounts of manually annotated images, which are difficult to obtain. Weak
labels indicating whether a radiograph is likely to contain pulmonary nodules
are typically easier to obtain at scale by parsing historical free-text
radiological reports associated to the radiographs. Using a repositotory of
over 700,000 chest radiographs, in this study we demonstrate that promising
nodule detection performance can be achieved using weak labels through
convolutional neural networks for radiograph classification. We propose two
network architectures for the classification of images likely to contain
pulmonary nodules using both weak labels and manually-delineated bounding
boxes, when these are available. Annotated nodules are used at training time to
deliver a visual attention mechanism informing the model about its localisation
performance. The first architecture extracts saliency maps from high-level
convolutional layers and compares the estimated position of a nodule against
the ground truth, when this is available. A corresponding localisation error is
then back-propagated along with the softmax classification error. The second
approach consists of a recurrent attention model that learns to observe a short
sequence of smaller image portions through reinforcement learning. When a
nodule annotation is available at training time, the reward function is
modified accordingly so that exploring portions of the radiographs away from a
nodule incurs a larger penalty. Our empirical results demonstrate the potential
advantages of these architectures in comparison to competing methodologies
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