Spatiotemporal Modeling of Multivariate Signals With Graph Neural Networks and Structured State Space Models

Multivariate signals are prevalent in various domains, such as healthcare, transportation systems, and space sciences. Modeling spatiotemporal dependencies in multivariate signals is challenging due to (1) long-range temporal dependencies and (2) complex spatial correlations between sensors. To address these challenges, we propose representing multivariate signals as graphs and introduce GraphS4mer, a general graph neural network (GNN) architecture that captures both spatial and temporal dependencies in multivariate signals. Specifically, (1) we leverage Structured State Spaces model (S4), a state-of-the-art sequence model, to capture long-term temporal dependencies and (2) we propose a graph structure learning layer in GraphS4mer to learn dynamically evolving graph structures in the data. We evaluate our proposed model on three distinct tasks and show that GraphS4mer consistently improves over existing models, including (1) seizure detection from electroencephalography signals, outperforming a previous GNN with self-supervised pretraining by 3.1 points in AUROC; (2) sleep staging from polysomnography signals, a 4.1 points improvement in macro-F1 score compared to existing sleep staging models; and (3) traffic forecasting, reducing MAE by 8.8% compared to existing GNNs and by 1.4% compared to Transformer-based models

Analysis of Signal Decomposition and Stain Separation methods for biomedical applications

Nowadays, the biomedical signal processing and classification and medical image interpretation play an essential role in the detection and diagnosis of several human diseases. The problem of high variability and heterogeneity of information, which is extracted from digital data, can be addressed with signal decomposition and stain separation techniques which can be useful approaches to highlight hidden patterns or rhythms in biological signals and specific cellular structures in histological color images, respectively. This thesis work can be divided into two macro-sections. In the first part (Part I), a novel cascaded RNN model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) blocks is presented with the aim to classify sleep stages automatically. A general workflow based on single-channel EEG signals is developed to enhance the low performance in staging N1 sleep without reducing the performances in the other sleep stages (i.e. Wake, N2, N3 and REM). In the same context, several signal decomposition techniques and time-frequency representations are deployed for the analysis of EEG signals. All extracted features are analyzed by using a novel correlation-based timestep feature selection and finally the selected features are fed to a bidirectional RNN model. In the second part (Part II), a fully automated method named SCAN (Stain Color Adaptive Normalization) is proposed for the separation and normalization of staining in digital pathology. This normalization system allows to standardize digitally, automatically and in a few seconds, the color intensity of a tissue slide with respect to that of a target image, in order to improve the pathologist’s diagnosis and increase the accuracy of computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) systems. Multiscale evaluation and multi-tissue comparison are performed for assessing the robustness of the proposed method. In addition, a stain normalization based on a novel mathematical technique, named ICD (Inverse Color Deconvolution) is developed for immunohistochemical (IHC) staining in histopathological images. In conclusion, the proposed techniques achieve satisfactory results compared to state-of-the-art methods in the same research field. The workflow proposed in this thesis work and the developed algorithms can be employed for the analysis and interpretation of other biomedical signals and for digital medical image analysis

Pediatric Automatic Sleep Staging: A comparative study of state-of-the-art deep learning methods.

Despite the tremendous progress recently made towards automatic sleep staging in adults, it is currently unknown if the most advanced algorithms generalize to the pediatric population, which displays distinctive characteristics in overnight polysomnography (PSG). To answer the question, in this work, we conduct a large-scale comparative study on the state-of-the-art deep learning methods for pediatric automatic sleep staging. Six different deep neural networks with diverging features are adopted to evaluate a sample of more than 1,200 children across a wide spectrum of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) severity. Our experimental results show that the individual performance of automated pediatric sleep stagers when evaluated on new subjects is equivalent to the expert-level one reported on adults. Combining the six stagers into ensemble models further boosts the staging accuracy, reaching an overall accuracy of 88.8%, a Cohens kappa of 0.852, and a macro F1-score of 85.8%. At the same time, the ensemble models lead to reduced predictive uncertainty. The results also show that the studied algorithms and their ensembles are robust to concept drift when the training and test data were recorded seven months apart and after clinical intervention. However, we show that the improvements in the staging performance are not necessarily clinically significant although the ensemble models lead to more favorable clinical measures than the six standalone models. Detailed analyses further demonstrate "almost perfect" agreement between the automatic stagers to one another and their similar patterns on the staging errors, suggesting little room for improvement

ProductGraphSleepNet: Sleep Staging using Product Spatio-Temporal Graph Learning with Attentive Temporal Aggregation

The classification of sleep stages plays a crucial role in understanding and diagnosing sleep pathophysiology. Sleep stage scoring relies heavily on visual inspection by an expert that is time consuming and subjective procedure. Recently, deep learning neural network approaches have been leveraged to develop a generalized automated sleep staging and account for shifts in distributions that may be caused by inherent inter/intra-subject variability, heterogeneity across datasets, and different recording environments. However, these networks ignore the connections among brain regions, and disregard the sequential connections between temporally adjacent sleep epochs. To address these issues, this work proposes an adaptive product graph learning-based graph convolutional network, named ProductGraphSleepNet, for learning joint spatio-temporal graphs along with a bidirectional gated recurrent unit and a modified graph attention network to capture the attentive dynamics of sleep stage transitions. Evaluation on two public databases: the Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies (MASS) SS3; and the SleepEDF, which contain full night polysomnography recordings of 62 and 20 healthy subjects, respectively, demonstrates performance comparable to the state-of-the-art (Accuracy: 0.867;0.838, F1-score: 0.818;0.774 and Kappa: 0.802;0.775, on each database respectively). More importantly, the proposed network makes it possible for clinicians to comprehend and interpret the learned connectivity graphs for sleep stages.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure