Deep convolutional neural networks for multi-modality isointense infant brain image segmentation

The segmentation of infant brain tissue images into white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) plays an important role in studying early brain development in health and disease. In the isointense stage (approximately 6–8 months of age), WM and GM exhibit similar levels of intensity in both T1 and T2 MR images, making the tissue segmentation very challenging. Only a small number of existing methods have been designed for tissue segmentation in this isointense stage; however, they only used a single T1 or T2 images, or the combination of T1 and T2 images. In this paper, we propose to use deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for segmenting isointense stage brain tissues using multi-modality MR images. CNNs are a type of deep models in which trainable filters and local neighborhood pooling operations are applied alternatingly on the raw input images, resulting in a hierarchy of increasingly complex features. Specifically, we used multimodality information from T1, T2, and fractional anisotropy (FA) images as inputs and then generated the segmentation maps as outputs. The multiple intermediate layers applied convolution, pooling, normalization, and other operations to capture the highly nonlinear mappings between inputs and outputs. We compared the performance of our approach with that of the commonly used segmentation methods on a set of manually segmented isointense stage brain images. Results showed that our proposed model significantly outperformed prior methods on infant brain tissue segmentation. In addition, our results indicated that integration of multi-modality images led to significant performance improvement

Diagnostic monitoring of high-dimensional networked systems via a LASSO-BN formulation

<p>Quality control of multivariate processes has been extensively studied in the past decades; however, fundamental challenges still remain due to the complexity and the decision-making challenges that require not only sensitive fault detection but also identification of the truly out-of-control variables. In existing approaches, fault detection and diagnosis are considered as two separate tasks. Recent developments have revealed that selective monitoring of the potentially out-of-control variables, identified by a variable selection procedure combined with the process monitoring method, could lead to promising performances. Following this line, we propose the diagnostic monitoring that takes an additional step on from the selective monitoring idea and directs the monitoring effort on the potentially out-of-control variables. The identification of the truly out-of-control variables can be achieved by integrating the process monitoring formulation with process cascade knowledge represented by a Bayesian Network. Computationally efficient algorithms are developed for solving the optimization formulation with connection to the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) problem being identified. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on a simulated data set and real-world applications are conducted that show the superior performance.</p

Detecting the Early Stage of Phaeosphaeria Leaf Spot Infestations in Maize Crop Using In Situ Hyperspectral Data and Guided Regularized Random Forest Algorithm

Phaeosphaeria leaf spot (PLS) is considered one of the major diseases that threaten the stability of maize production in tropical and subtropical African regions. The objective of the present study was to investigate the use of hyperspectral data in detecting the early stage of PLS in tropical maize. Field data were collected from healthy and the early stage of PLS over two years (2013 and 2014) using a handheld spectroradiometer. An integration of a newly developed guided regularized random forest (GRRF) and a traditional random forest (RF) was used for feature selection and classification, respectively. The 2013 dataset was used to train the model, while the 2014 dataset was used as independent test dataset. Results showed that there were statistically significant differences in biochemical concentration between the healthy leaves and leaves that were at an early stage of PLS infestation. The newly developed GRRF was able to reduce the high dimensionality of hyperspectral data by selecting key wavelengths with less autocorrelation. These wavelengths are located at 420 nm, 795 nm, 779 nm, 1543 nm, 1747 nm, and 1010 nm. Using these variables (n=6), a random forest classifier was able to discriminate between the healthy maize and maize at an early stage of PLS infestation with an overall accuracy of 88% and a kappa value of 0.75. Overall, our study showed potential application of hyperspectral data, GRRF feature selection, and RF classifiers in detecting the early stage of PLS infestation in tropical maize