Deep Learning for Multiclass Classification, Predictive Modeling and Segmentation of Disease Prone Regions in Alzheimer’s Disease

One of the challenges facing accurate diagnosis and prognosis of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is identifying the subtle changes that define the early onset of the disease. This dissertation investigates three of the main challenges confronted when such subtle changes are to be identified in the most meaningful way. These are (1) the missing data challenge, (2) longitudinal modeling of disease progression, and (3) the segmentation and volumetric calculation of disease-prone brain areas in medical images. The scarcity of sufficient data compounded by the missing data challenge in many longitudinal samples exacerbates the problem as we seek statistical meaningfulness in multiclass classification and regression analysis. Although there are many participants in the AD Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) study, many of the observations have a lot of missing features which often lead to the exclusion of potentially valuable data points that could add significant meaning in many ongoing experiments. Motivated by the necessity of examining all participants, even those with missing tests or imaging modalities, multiple techniques of handling missing data in this domain have been explored. Specific attention was drawn to the Gradient Boosting (GB) algorithm which has an inherent capability of addressing missing values. Prior to applying state-of-the-art classifiers such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF), the impact of imputing data in common datasets with numerical techniques has been also investigated and compared with the GB algorithm. Furthermore, to discriminate AD subjects from healthy control individuals, and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), longitudinal multimodal heterogeneous data was modeled using recurring neural networks (RNNs). In the segmentation and volumetric calculation challenge, this dissertation places its focus on one of the most relevant disease-prone areas in many neurological and neurodegenerative diseases, the hippocampus region. Changes in hippocampus shape and volume are considered significant biomarkers for AD diagnosis and prognosis. Thus, a two-stage model based on integrating the Vision Transformer and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is developed to automatically locate, segment, and estimate the hippocampus volume from the brain 3D MRI. The proposed architecture was trained and tested on a dataset containing 195 brain MRIs from the 2019 Medical Segmentation Decathlon Challenge against the manually segmented regions provided therein and was deployed on 326 MRI from our own data collected through Mount Sinai Medical Center as part of the 1Florida Alzheimer Disease Research Center (ADRC)

Ensemble Learning for Fusion of Multiview Vision with Occlusion and Missing Information: Framework and Evaluations with Real-World Data and Applications in Driver Hand Activity Recognition

Multi-sensor frameworks provide opportunities for ensemble learning and sensor fusion to make use of redundancy and supplemental information, helpful in real-world safety applications such as continuous driver state monitoring which necessitate predictions even in cases where information may be intermittently missing. We define this problem of intermittent instances of missing information (by occlusion, noise, or sensor failure) and design a learning framework around these data gaps, proposing and analyzing an imputation scheme to handle missing information. We apply these ideas to tasks in camera-based hand activity classification for robust safety during autonomous driving. We show that a late-fusion approach between parallel convolutional neural networks can outperform even the best-placed single camera model in estimating the hands' held objects and positions when validated on within-group subjects, and that our multi-camera framework performs best on average in cross-group validation, and that the fusion approach outperforms ensemble weighted majority and model combination schemes

Spatio-temporal analysis and machine learning for traffic accidents prediction

Traffic accidents impose significant problems in our daily life due to the huge social, environmental, and economic expenses associated with them. The rapid development in data science, geographic data collection, and processing methods encourage researchers to evaluate, delineate traffic accident hotspots, and to effectively predict and estimate traffic accidents. In this study, traffic accidents dataset that covers United Kingdom for the time period between 2012-2014 is investigated. The methodology consists of extracting features weights, and then using these weights with statistical methods provided in ArcGIS in order to classify accidents according to severity and perform hotspot analysis and severity prediction. The proposed method can be effectively used by different authorities to implement an improved planning and management approaches for traffic accident reduction. Moreover, it can identify and locate road risk segments where immediate action should be considered

Deep Learning for Survival Analysis: A Review

The influx of deep learning (DL) techniques into the field of survival analysis in recent years, coupled with the increasing availability of high-dimensional omics data and unstructured data like images or text, has led to substantial methodological progress; for instance, learning from such high-dimensional or unstructured data. Numerous modern DL-based survival methods have been developed since the mid-2010s; however, they often address only a small subset of scenarios in the time-to-event data setting - e.g., single-risk right-censored survival tasks - and neglect to incorporate more complex (and common) settings. Partially, this is due to a lack of exchange between experts in the respective fields. In this work, we provide a comprehensive systematic review of DL-based methods for time-to-event analysis, characterizing them according to both survival- and DL-related attributes. In doing so, we hope to provide a helpful overview to practitioners who are interested in DL techniques applicable to their specific use case as well as to enable researchers from both fields to identify directions for future investigation. We provide a detailed characterization of the methods included in this review as an open-source, interactive table: https://survival-org.github.io/DL4Survival. As this research area is advancing rapidly, we encourage the research community to contribute to keeping the information up to date.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, 1 interactive tabl