Quantitative magnetic resonance image analysis via the EM algorithm with stochastic variation

Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (qMRI) provides researchers insight into pathological and physiological alterations of living tissue, with the help of which researchers hope to predict (local) therapeutic efficacy early and determine optimal treatment schedule. However, the analysis of qMRI has been limited to ad-hoc heuristic methods. Our research provides a powerful statistical framework for image analysis and sheds light on future localized adaptive treatment regimes tailored to the individual's response. We assume in an imperfect world we only observe a blurred and noisy version of the underlying pathological/physiological changes via qMRI, due to measurement errors or unpredictable influences. We use a hidden Markov random field to model the spatial dependence in the data and develop a maximum likelihood approach via the Expectation--Maximization algorithm with stochastic variation. An important improvement over previous work is the assessment of variability in parameter estimation, which is the valid basis for statistical inference. More importantly, we focus on the expected changes rather than image segmentation. Our research has shown that the approach is powerful in both simulation studies and on a real dataset, while quite robust in the presence of some model assumption violations.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOAS157 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A semiparametric extension of the stochastic block model for longitudinal networks

To model recurrent interaction events in continuous time, an extension of the stochastic block model is proposed where every individual belongs to a latent group and interactions between two individuals follow a conditional inhomogeneous Poisson process with intensity driven by the individuals' latent groups. The model is shown to be identifiable and its estimation is based on a semiparametric variational expectation-maximization algorithm. Two versions of the method are developed, using either a nonparametric histogram approach (with an adaptive choice of the partition size) or kernel intensity estimators. The number of latent groups can be selected by an integrated classification likelihood criterion. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our procedure on synthetic experiments, analyse two datasets to illustrate the utility of our approach and comment on competing methods