176 research outputs found
A condition-specific codon optimization approach for improved heterologous gene expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae
All authors are with the Department of Chemical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 200 E Dean Keeton St. Stop C0400, Austin, TX 78712, USA -- Hal S. Alper is with the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, The University of Texas at Austin, 2500 Speedway Avenue, Austin, TX 78712, USA
-- Amanda M. Lanza Current Address: Bristol-Myers Squibb, Biologics Development, 35 South Street, Hopkinton, MA 01748, USABackground: Heterologous gene expression is an important tool for synthetic biology that enables metabolic engineering and the production of non-natural biologics in a variety of host organisms. The translational efficiency of heterologous genes can often be improved by optimizing synonymous codon usage to better match the host organism. However, traditional approaches for optimization neglect to take into account many factors known to influence synonymous codon distributions. Results: Here we define an alternative approach for codon optimization that utilizes systems level information and codon context for the condition under which heterologous genes are being expressed. Furthermore, we utilize a probabilistic algorithm to generate multiple variants of a given gene. We demonstrate improved translational efficiency using this condition-specific codon optimization approach with two heterologous genes, the fluorescent protein-encoding eGFP and the catechol 1,2-dioxygenase gene CatA, expressed in S. cerevisiae. For the latter case, optimization for stationary phase production resulted in nearly 2.9-fold improvements over commercial gene optimization algorithms. Conclusions: Codon optimization is now often a standard tool for protein expression, and while a variety of tools and approaches have been developed, they do not guarantee improved performance for all hosts of applications. Here, we suggest an alternative method for condition-specific codon optimization and demonstrate its utility in Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a proof of concept. However, this technique should be applicable to any organism for which gene expression data can be generated and is thus of potential interest for a variety of applications in metabolic and cellular engineering.Chemical EngineeringInstitute for Cellular and Molecular [email protected]
Evaluate Fine-tuning Strategies for Fetal Head Ultrasound Image Segmentation with U-Net
Fetal head segmentation is a crucial step in measuring the fetal head
circumference (HC) during gestation, an important biometric in obstetrics for
monitoring fetal growth. However, manual biometry generation is time-consuming
and results in inconsistent accuracy. To address this issue, convolutional
neural network (CNN) models have been utilized to improve the efficiency of
medical biometry. But training a CNN network from scratch is a challenging
task, we proposed a Transfer Learning (TL) method. Our approach involves
fine-tuning (FT) a U-Net network with a lightweight MobileNet as the encoder to
perform segmentation on a set of fetal head ultrasound (US) images with limited
effort. This method addresses the challenges associated with training a CNN
network from scratch. It suggests that our proposed FT strategy yields
segmentation performance that is comparable when trained with a reduced number
of parameters by 85.8%. And our proposed FT strategy outperforms other
strategies with smaller trainable parameter sizes below 4.4 million. Thus, we
contend that it can serve as a dependable FT approach for reducing the size of
models in medical image analysis. Our key findings highlight the importance of
the balance between model performance and size in developing Artificial
Intelligence (AI) applications by TL methods. Code is available at
https://github.com/13204942/FT_Methods_for_Fetal_Head_Segmentation.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Unlearning Spurious Correlations in Chest X-ray Classification
Medical image classification models are frequently trained using training
datasets derived from multiple data sources. While leveraging multiple data
sources is crucial for achieving model generalization, it is important to
acknowledge that the diverse nature of these sources inherently introduces
unintended confounders and other challenges that can impact both model accuracy
and transparency. A notable confounding factor in medical image classification,
particularly in musculoskeletal image classification, is skeletal
maturation-induced bone growth observed during adolescence. We train a deep
learning model using a Covid-19 chest X-ray dataset and we showcase how this
dataset can lead to spurious correlations due to unintended confounding
regions. eXplanation Based Learning (XBL) is a deep learning approach that goes
beyond interpretability by utilizing model explanations to interactively
unlearn spurious correlations. This is achieved by integrating interactive user
feedback, specifically feature annotations. In our study, we employed two
non-demanding manual feedback mechanisms to implement an XBL-based approach for
effectively eliminating these spurious correlations. Our results underscore the
promising potential of XBL in constructing robust models even in the presence
of confounding factors.Comment: Accepted at the Discovery Science 2023 conference. arXiv admin note:
text overlap with arXiv:2307.0602
Full tensor registration of diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging for assessment of cardiac pathologies
FewSOME: One-Class Few Shot Anomaly Detection with Siamese Networks
Recent Anomaly Detection techniques have progressed the field considerably
but at the cost of increasingly complex training pipelines. Such techniques
require large amounts of training data, resulting in computationally expensive
algorithms that are unsuitable for settings where only a small amount of normal
samples are available for training. We propose 'Few Shot anOMaly detection'
(FewSOME), a deep One-Class Anomaly Detection algorithm with the ability to
accurately detect anomalies having trained on 'few' examples of the normal
class and no examples of the anomalous class. We describe FewSOME to be of low
complexity given its low data requirement and short training time. FewSOME is
aided by pretrained weights with an architecture based on Siamese Networks. By
means of an ablation study, we demonstrate how our proposed loss, 'Stop Loss',
improves the robustness of FewSOME. Our experiments demonstrate that FewSOME
performs at state-of-the-art level on benchmark datasets MNIST, CIFAR-10,
F-MNIST and MVTec AD while training on only 30 normal samples, a minute
fraction of the data that existing methods are trained on. Moreover, our
experiments show FewSOME to be robust to contaminated datasets. We also report
F1 score and balanced accuracy in addition to AUC as a benchmark for future
techniques to be compared against. Code available;
https://github.com/niamhbelton/FewSOME
Breastfeeding experience differentially impacts recognition of happiness and anger in mothers
Breastfeeding is a dynamic biological and social process based on hormonal regulation involving oxytocin. While there is much work on the role of breastfeeding in infant development and on the role of oxytocin in socio-emotional functioning in adults, little is known about how breastfeeding impacts emotion perception during motherhood. We therefore examined whether breastfeeding influences emotion recognition in mothers. Using a dynamic emotion recognition task, we found that longer durations of exclusive breastfeeding were associated with faster recognition of happiness, providing evidence for a facilitation of processing positive facial expressions. In addition, we found that greater amounts of breastfed meals per day were associated with slower recognition of anger. Our findings are in line with current views of oxytocin function and support accounts that view maternal behaviour as tuned to prosocial responsiveness, by showing that vital elements of maternal care can facilitate the rapid responding to affiliative stimuli by reducing importance of threatening stimuli
Distance-Aware eXplanation Based Learning
eXplanation Based Learning (XBL) is an interactive learning approach that
provides a transparent method of training deep learning models by interacting
with their explanations. XBL augments loss functions to penalize a model based
on deviation of its explanations from user annotation of image features. The
literature on XBL mostly depends on the intersection of visual model
explanations and image feature annotations. We present a method to add a
distance-aware explanation loss to categorical losses that trains a learner to
focus on important regions of a training dataset. Distance is an appropriate
approach for calculating explanation loss since visual model explanations such
as Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAMs) are not strictly
bounded as annotations and their intersections may not provide complete
information on the deviation of a model's focus from relevant image regions. In
addition to assessing our model using existing metrics, we propose an
interpretability metric for evaluating visual feature-attribution based model
explanations that is more informative of the model's performance than existing
metrics. We demonstrate performance of our proposed method on three image
classification tasks.Comment: Accepted at the 35th IEEE International Conference on Tools with
Artificial Intelligence, ICTAI 202
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