242 research outputs found
SOIL CARBON DYNAMICS AND GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS IN CONSERVATION TILLAGE SYSTEMS AT MULTIPLE SCALES
Conservation tillage practices like no-tillage and reduced tillage have been widely implemented worldwide, with expectations they would provide multiple benefits (e.g., yield enhancement and soil carbon sequestration) for food security and climate adaptation and mitigation. However, the adoption of conservation tillage faces both opportunities and challenges. A knowledge gap still exists regarding the effects of conservation tillage on the carbon cycle in agroecosystems. This dissertation reflects a comprehensive evaluation of conservation tillage at multiple scales using an integrated systems approach, a combination of data synthesis, the agriculture ecosystem model, and field observations and measurements. I first conducted a meta-analysis to assess the effects of no-tillage (one widespread conservation tillage) on crop yield, greenhouse gas (i.e., CO2, CH4, and N2O) emissions, and the global warming potential of major cereal cropping systems in the world. Compared to conventional tillage, no-tillage reduced greenhouse gas emissions and increased crop yield in dry climate conditions. It reduced the global warming potential at sites with acidic soils. Considering the crucial role of soil organic carbon in providing ecosystem services, I further analyzed conservation tillage effects on soil carbon sequestration and the environmental controlling factors. Based on the meta-analysis review, I developed a conceptual tillage module accordingly and integrated it into a process-based agroecosystem model, the DLEM-Ag. At a long-term tillage experiment site in Lexington, KY, the improved model captured the changes and trends in soil organic carbon under different tillage treatments during 1970-2018, with no-tillage retaining more soil carbon than moldboard plow. Model factorial analyses revealed that this was mainly due to the lower CO2 emissions in no-tillage than in the moldboard plow treatments. Then, I expanded the simulation to the maize and soybean croplands in Kentucky to explore the conservation tillage effects on greenhouse gas emissions at the regional scale. Sensitivity analyses showed that, compared to conventional tillage, no-tillage significantly reduced CO2 and N2O emissions in both croplands. Lastly, the effects of conservation tillage on the coupled carbon and water cycles at the Ohio River Basin were examined using the improved DLEM-Ag model. Simulation results suggested higher crop water productivity in maize and soybean croplands under conservation tillage than under conventional tillage at the basin level. This dissertation is based on and adapted from three articles recently published in peer-review journals and two manuscripts prepared for publication
Cross-Modality Feature Learning for Three-Dimensional Brain Image Synthesis
Multi-modality medical imaging is increasingly used for comprehensive assessment of complex diseases in either diagnostic examinations or as part of medical research trials. Different imaging modalities provide complementary information about living tissues. However, multi-modal examinations are not always possible due to adversary factors such as patient discomfort, increased cost, prolonged scanning time and scanner unavailability. In addition, in large imaging studies, incomplete records are not uncommon owing to image artifacts, data corruption or data loss, which compromise the potential of multi-modal acquisitions. Moreover, independently of how well an imaging system is, the performance of the imaging equipment usually comes to a certain limit through different physical devices. Additional interferences arise (particularly for medical imaging systems), for example, limited acquisition times, sophisticated and costly equipment and patients with severe medical conditions, which also cause image degradation. The acquisitions can be considered as the degraded version of the original high-quality images.
In this dissertation, we explore the problems of image super-resolution and cross-modality synthesis for one Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) modality from an image of another MRI modality of the same subject using an image synthesis framework for reconstructing the missing/complex modality data. We develop models and techniques that allow us to connect the domain of source modality data and the domain of target modality data, enabling transformation between elements of
the two domains. In particular, we first introduce the models that project both source modality data and target modality data into a common multi-modality feature space in a supervised setting. This common space then allows us to connect cross-modality features that depict a relationship between each other, and we can impose the learned association function that synthesizes any target modality image. Moreover, we develop a weakly-supervised method that takes a few registered multi-modality image pairs as training data and generates the desired modality data without being constrained a large number of multi-modality images collection of well-processed (\textit{e.g.}, skull-stripped and strictly registered) brain data. Finally, we propose an approach that provides a generic way of learning a dual mapping between source and target domains while considering both visually high-fidelity synthesis and task-practicability. We demonstrate that this model can be used to take any arbitrary modality and efficiently synthesize the desirable modality data in an unsupervised manner.
We show that these proposed models advance the state-of-the-art on image super-resolution and cross-modality synthesis tasks that need jointly processing of multi-modality images and that we can design the algorithms in ways to generate the practically beneficial data to medical image analysis
OpTree: An Efficient Algorithm for All-gather Operation in Optical Interconnect Systems
All-gather collective communication is one of the most important
communication primitives in parallel and distributed computation, which plays
an essential role in many HPC applications such as distributed Deep Learning
(DL) with model and hybrid parallelism. To solve the communication bottleneck
of All-gather, optical interconnection network can provide unprecedented high
bandwidth and reliability for data transfer among the distributed nodes.
However, most traditional All-gather algorithms are designed for electrical
interconnection, which cannot fit well for optical interconnect systems,
resulting in poor performance. This paper proposes an efficient scheme, called
OpTree, for All-gather operation on optical interconnect systems. OpTree
derives an optimal -ary tree corresponding to the optimal number of
communication stages, achieving minimum communication time. We further analyze
and compare the communication steps of OpTree with existing All-gather
algorithms. Theoretical results exhibit that OpTree requires much less number
of communication steps than existing All-gather algorithms on optical
interconnect systems. Simulation results show that OpTree can reduce
communication time by 72.21%, 94.30%, and 88.58%, respectively, compared with
three existing All-gather schemes, WRHT, Ring, and NE.Comment: This paper is under review at a conferenc
Accelerating Fully Connected Neural Network on Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC)
Fully Connected Neural Network (FCNN) is a class of Artificial Neural
Networks widely used in computer science and engineering, whereas the training
process can take a long time with large datasets in existing many-core systems.
Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC), an emerging chip-scale optical interconnection
technology, has great potential to accelerate the training of FCNN with low
transmission delay, low power consumption, and high throughput. However,
existing methods based on Electrical Network-on-Chip (ENoC) cannot fit in ONoC
because of the unique properties of ONoC. In this paper, we propose a
fine-grained parallel computing model for accelerating FCNN training on ONoC
and derive the optimal number of cores for each execution stage with the
objective of minimizing the total amount of time to complete one epoch of FCNN
training. To allocate the optimal number of cores for each execution stage, we
present three mapping strategies and compare their advantages and disadvantages
in terms of hotspot level, memory requirement, and state transitions.
Simulation results show that the average prediction error for the optimal
number of cores in NN benchmarks is within 2.3%. We further carry out extensive
simulations which demonstrate that FCNN training time can be reduced by 22.28%
and 4.91% on average using our proposed scheme, compared with traditional
parallel computing methods that either allocate a fixed number of cores or
allocate as many cores as possible, respectively. Compared with ENoC,
simulation results show that under batch sizes of 64 and 128, on average ONoC
can achieve 21.02% and 12.95% on reducing training time with 47.85% and 39.27%
on saving energy, respectively.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures. This paper is under the second review of IEEE
Transactions of Computer
MCMT-GAN: Multi-Task Coherent Modality Transferable GAN for 3D Brain Image Synthesis
© 1992-2012 IEEE. The ability to synthesize multi-modality data is highly desirable for many computer-aided medical applications, e.g. clinical diagnosis and neuroscience research, since rich imaging cohorts offer diverse and complementary information unraveling human tissues. However, collecting acquisitions can be limited by adversary factors such as patient discomfort, expensive cost and scanner unavailability. In this paper, we propose a multi-task coherent modality transferable GAN (MCMT-GAN) to address this issue for brain MRI synthesis in an unsupervised manner. Through combining the bidirectional adversarial loss, cycle-consistency loss, domain adapted loss and manifold regularization in a volumetric space, MCMT-GAN is robust for multi-modality brain image synthesis with visually high fidelity. In addition, we complement discriminators collaboratively working with segmentors which ensure the usefulness of our results to segmentation task. Experiments evaluated on various cross-modality synthesis show that our method produces visually impressive results with substitutability for clinical post-processing and also exceeds the state-of-the-art methods
WRHT: Efficient All-reduce for Distributed DNN Training in Optical Interconnect System
Communication efficiency plays an important role in accelerating the
distributed training of Deep Neural Networks (DNN). All-reduce is the key
communication primitive to reduce model parameters in distributed DNN training.
Most existing all-reduce algorithms are designed for traditional electrical
interconnect systems, which cannot meet the communication requirements for
distributed training of large DNNs. One of the promising alternatives for
electrical interconnect is optical interconnect, which can provide high
bandwidth, low transmission delay, and low power cost. We propose an efficient
scheme called WRHT (Wavelength Reused Hierarchical Tree) for implementing
all-reduce operation in optical interconnect system, which can take advantage
of WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) to reduce the communication time of
distributed data-parallel DNN training. We further derive the minimum number of
communication steps and communication time to realize the all-reduce using
WRHT. Simulation results show that the communication time of WRHT is reduced by
75.59%, 49.25%, and 70.1% respectively compared with three traditional
all-reduce algorithms simulated in optical interconnect system. Simulation
results also show that WRHT can reduce the communication time for all-reduce
operation by 86.69% and 84.71% in comparison with two existing all-reduce
algorithms in electrical interconnect system.Comment: This paper is under the submission of GLOBECOM 202
Automatic view plane prescription for cardiac magnetic resonance imaging via supervision by spatial relationship between views
Background: View planning for the acquisition of cardiac magnetic resonance
(CMR) imaging remains a demanding task in clinical practice. Purpose: Existing
approaches to its automation relied either on an additional volumetric image
not typically acquired in clinic routine, or on laborious manual annotations of
cardiac structural landmarks. This work presents a clinic-compatible,
annotation-free system for automatic CMR view planning. Methods: The system
mines the spatial relationship, more specifically, locates the intersecting
lines, between the target planes and source views, and trains deep networks to
regress heatmaps defined by distances from the intersecting lines. The
intersection lines are the prescription lines prescribed by the technologists
at the time of image acquisition using cardiac landmarks, and retrospectively
identified from the spatial relationship. As the spatial relationship is
self-contained in properly stored data, the need for additional manual
annotation is eliminated. In addition, the interplay of multiple target planes
predicted in a source view is utilized in a stacked hourglass architecture to
gradually improve the regression. Then, a multi-view planning strategy is
proposed to aggregate information from the predicted heatmaps for all the
source views of a target plane, for a globally optimal prescription, mimicking
the similar strategy practiced by skilled human prescribers. Results: The
experiments include 181 CMR exams. Our system yields the mean angular
difference and point-to-plane distance of 5.68 degrees and 3.12 mm,
respectively. It not only achieves superior accuracy to existing approaches
including conventional atlas-based and newer deep-learning-based in prescribing
the four standard CMR planes but also demonstrates prescription of the first
cardiac-anatomy-oriented plane(s) from the body-oriented scout.Comment: Medical Physics. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2109.1171
Orientation-Shared Convolution Representation for CT Metal Artifact Learning
During X-ray computed tomography (CT) scanning, metallic implants carrying
with patients often lead to adverse artifacts in the captured CT images and
then impair the clinical treatment. Against this metal artifact reduction (MAR)
task, the existing deep-learning-based methods have gained promising
reconstruction performance. Nevertheless, there is still some room for further
improvement of MAR performance and generalization ability, since some important
prior knowledge underlying this specific task has not been fully exploited.
Hereby, in this paper, we carefully analyze the characteristics of metal
artifacts and propose an orientation-shared convolution representation strategy
to adapt the physical prior structures of artifacts, i.e., rotationally
symmetrical streaking patterns. The proposed method rationally adopts
Fourier-series-expansion-based filter parametrization in artifact modeling,
which can better separate artifacts from anatomical tissues and boost the model
generalizability. Comprehensive experiments executed on synthesized and
clinical datasets show the superiority of our method in detail preservation
beyond the current representative MAR methods. Code will be available at
\url{https://github.com/hongwang01/OSCNet
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