Automated assessment of COVID-19 reporting and data system and chest CT severity scores in patients suspected of having COVID-19 using artificial intelligence

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread across the globe with alarming speed, morbidity, and mortality. Immediate triage of patients with chest infections suspected to be caused by COVID-19 using chest CT may be of assistance when results from definitive viral testing are delayed.Purpose: To develop and validate an artificial intelligence (AI) system to score the likelihood and extent of pulmonary COVID-19 on chest CT scans using the COVID-19 Reporting and Data System (CO-RADS) and CT severity scoring systems.Materials and Methods: The CO-RADS AI system consists of three deep-learning algorithms that automatically segment the five pulmonary lobes, assign a CO-RADS score for the suspicion of COVID-19, and assign a CT severity score for the degree of parenchymal involvement per lobe. This study retrospectively included patients who underwent a nonenhanced chest CT examination because of clinical suspicion of COVID-19 at two medical centers. The system was trained, validated, and tested with data from one of the centers. Data from the second center served as an external test set. Diagnostic performance and agreement with scores assigned by eight independent observers were measured using receiver operating characteristic analysis, linearly weighted kappa values, and classification accuracy.Results: A total of 105 patients (mean age, 62 years +/- 16 [standard deviation]; 61 men) and 262 patients (mean age, 64 years +/- 16; 154 men) were evaluated in the internal and external test sets, respectively. The system discriminated between patients with COVID-19 and those without COVID-19, with areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.95 (95% CI: 0.91, 0.98) and 0.88 (95% CI: 0.84, 0.93), for the internal and external test sets, respectively. Agreement with the eight human observers was moderate to substantial, with mean linearly weighted k values of 0.60 +/- 0.01 for CO-RADS scores and 0.54 +/- 0.01 for CT severity scores.Conclusion: With high diagnostic performance, the CO-RADS AI system correctly identified patients with COVID-19 using chest CT scans and assigned standardized CO-RADS and CT severity scores that demonstrated good agreement with findings from eight independent observers and generalized well to external data. (C) RSNA, 2020Cardiovascular Aspects of Radiolog

New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele

New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias

Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis. Pathway enrichment analyses confirmed the involvement of amyloid/tau pathways and highlighted microglia implication. Gene prioritization in the new loci identified 31 genes that were suggestive of new genetically associated processes, including the tumor necrosis factor alpha pathway through the linear ubiquitin chain assembly complex. We also built a new genetic risk score associated with the risk of future AD/dementia or progression from mild cognitive impairment to AD/dementia. The improvement in prediction led to a 1.6- to 1.9-fold increase in AD risk from the lowest to the highest decile, in addition to effects of age and the APOE ε4 allele

Exome sequencing identifies rare damaging variants in ATP8B4 and ABCA1 as risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the leading cause of dementia, has an estimated heritability of approximately 70%1. The genetic component of AD has been mainly assessed using genome-wide association studies, which do not capture the risk contributed by rare variants2. Here, we compared the gene-based burden of rare damaging variants in exome sequencing data from 32,558 individuals—16,036 AD cases and 16,522 controls. Next to variants in TREM2, SORL1 and ABCA7, we observed a significant association of rare, predicted damaging variants in ATP8B4 and ABCA1 with AD risk, and a suggestive signal in ADAM10. Additionally, the rare-variant burden in RIN3, CLU, ZCWPW1 and ACE highlighted these genes as potential drivers of respective AD-genome-wide association study loci. Variants associated with the strongest effect on AD risk, in particular loss-of-function variants, are enriched in early-onset AD cases. Our results provide additional evidence for a major role for amyloid-β precursor protein processing, amyloid-β aggregation, lipid metabolism and microglial function in AD

Segmentation and Quantification of Airways and Blood Vessels in Chest CT

Contains fulltext : 178922.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Radboud University, 18 december 2017Promotores : Ginneken, B. van, Schäfer-Prokop, C.M. Co-promotores : Rikxoort, E.M. van, Ciompi, F

Statistical and Fuzzy Models of Ambulatory Systolic Blood Pressure for Hypertension Diagnosis

International audienc

Small airway segmentation in thoracic computed tomography scans: a machine learning approach

Contains fulltext : 194505.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access

Inventaire et classification des politiques régionales et départementales de développement rural

L'étude dresse l'inventaire des mesures conçues et mises en oeuvre par les départements et les régions et en propose un classement qui cherche à rendre compte des logiques d'action de ces collectivités. L'état des lieux a été réalisé à partir du recueil et du traitement des informations disponibles auprès de 38 conseils généraux et de 9 conseils régionaux, en particulier dans les guides des aides qu'éditent ces collectivités territoriales. Le relevé systématique des interventions qui sont affichées rurales ou qui visent un objet rural par nature (agricole, forestier, etc.) a permis de reconstituer et d'analyser leurs politiques de développement rural. Le rural est le plus souvent appréhendé à partir de seuils de population ou de zonages déjà en fonction. Les domaines d'application des mesures rurales sont assez classiquement l'agriculture et la mise en valeur des espaces, mais de nouvelles orientations, en direction de l'environnement et du tourisme notamment, diversifient les cibles de l'action publique, tandis que la territorialisation permet de renouveler les modalités de l'intervention. Dans la seconde partie du rapport, le classement des mesures est effectué à partir d'un graphe d'objectifs, puis une recomposition en logique d'action permet de définir quatre types de politiques : l'orientation peut être prépondérante sur la promotion des secteurs d'activité économique, sur l'équipement et les services publics locaux, sur les domaines transversaux de l'environnement et du social, sachant que le quatrième type correspond à une répartition relativement équilibrée de ces différentes orientations. Une synthèse de l'étude en dix pages a également été réalisée