Visual Attention Saccadic Models Learn to Emulate Gaze Patterns From Childhood to Adulthood

International audienceHow people look at visual information reveals fundamental information about themselves, their interests and their state of mind. While previous visual attention models output static 2-dimensional saliency maps, saccadic models aim to predict not only where observers look at but also how they move their eyes to explore the scene. In this paper, we demonstrate that saccadic models are a flexible framework that can be tailored to emulate observer's viewing tendencies. More specifically, we use fixation data from 101 observers split into 5 age groups (adults, 8-10 y.o., 6-8 y.o., 4-6 y.o. and 2 y.o.) to train our saccadic model for different stages of the development of human visual system. We show that the joint distribution of saccade amplitude and orientation is a visual signature specific to each age group, and can be used to generate age-dependent scanpaths. Our age-dependent saccadic model does not only output human-like, age-specific visual scanpaths, but also significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art saliency models. We demonstrate that the computational modelling of visual attention, through the use of saccadic model, can be efficiently adapted to emulate the gaze behavior of a specific group of observers

Newly Identified Mycobacterium africanum Lineage 10, Central Africa.

Analysis of genome sequencing data from >100,000 genomes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex using TB-Annotator software revealed a previously unknown lineage, proposed name L10, in central Africa. Phylogenetic reconstruction suggests L10 could represent a missing link in the evolutionary and geographic migration histories of M. africanum

Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation for Severe Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome associated with COVID-19: An Emulated Target Trial Analysis.

RATIONALE: Whether COVID patients may benefit from extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) compared with conventional invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) remains unknown. OBJECTIVES: To estimate the effect of ECMO on 90-Day mortality vs IMV only Methods: Among 4,244 critically ill adult patients with COVID-19 included in a multicenter cohort study, we emulated a target trial comparing the treatment strategies of initiating ECMO vs. no ECMO within 7 days of IMV in patients with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (PaO2/FiO2 <80 or PaCO2 ≥60 mmHg). We controlled for confounding using a multivariable Cox model based on predefined variables. MAIN RESULTS: 1,235 patients met the full eligibility criteria for the emulated trial, among whom 164 patients initiated ECMO. The ECMO strategy had a higher survival probability at Day-7 from the onset of eligibility criteria (87% vs 83%, risk difference: 4%, 95% CI 0;9%) which decreased during follow-up (survival at Day-90: 63% vs 65%, risk difference: -2%, 95% CI -10;5%). However, ECMO was associated with higher survival when performed in high-volume ECMO centers or in regions where a specific ECMO network organization was set up to handle high demand, and when initiated within the first 4 days of MV and in profoundly hypoxemic patients. CONCLUSIONS: In an emulated trial based on a nationwide COVID-19 cohort, we found differential survival over time of an ECMO compared with a no-ECMO strategy. However, ECMO was consistently associated with better outcomes when performed in high-volume centers and in regions with ECMO capacities specifically organized to handle high demand. This article is open access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Approches expérientielles du fait minoritaire

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The hidden diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex in Africa : the new L10 and the possible diversification histories of the complex

International audienceMycobacterium tuberculosis complex diversity in regions with reduced resources such as Africa suffers from undersampling, especially regarding sequencing. As a consequence, circulating lineages with potentially different resistance and virulence profiles might be overlooked. Still, the sharing of sequencing data in Public databases and articles offer opportunities to explore the diversity at the level of a whole continent if we manage to analyze jointly all these data. Africa is the continent where diversity is expected to be the highest in the world

A Prospective, Observational Study of Conversion From Immediate- to Prolonged-Release Tacrolimus in Renal Transplant Recipients in France: The OPALE Study

International audienc

The hidden diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex in Africa : the new L10 and the possible diversification histories of the complex

International audienceMycobacterium tuberculosis complex diversity in regions with reduced resources such as Africa suffers from undersampling, especially regarding sequencing. As a consequence, circulating lineages with potentially different resistance and virulence profiles might be overlooked. Still, the sharing of sequencing data in Public databases and articles offer opportunities to explore the diversity at the level of a whole continent if we manage to analyze jointly all these data. Africa is the continent where diversity is expected to be the highest in the world

Age-dependent saccadic models

International audienceSaliency models aim to predict where we look at within a visual scene. They are based on low-level visual features including color, intensity, and orientation. They process these visual features to generate a 2D saliency map, indicating the most salient part of the image. In contrast with saliency models, saccadic models intend to predict the sequence of eye fixations, i.e. the way observers deploy their gaze while viewing a stimulus on screen. Rather than computing a unique saliency map, saccadic models compute plausible visual scanpaths, i.e. the actual sequence of fixations and saccades unfolding across time. By the term plausible, we mean that the predicted scanpaths should be as similar as possible to human scanpaths. They should exhibit similar characteristics, such as the same distributions of saccade amplitudes and saccade orientations. Saccadic models offer many advantages over saliency models. The most important one is the ability to tailor the saccadic model to a particular context, such as a particular type of scene, a particular population or to a particular task at hand. This modelling framework not only relies on the image salience (i.e. properties of the stimulus) but most importantly on our ability to model viewing biases and systematic gaze patterns of observers. In this presentation, we introduce an age-dependent saccadic model able to reproduce the gaze behavior of a certain target age group

Age-dependent saccadic models for predicting eye movements

International audienceHow people look at visual information reveals fundamental information about themselves, their interests and their state of mind. While previous visual attention models output static 2-dimensional saliency maps, saccadic models predict not only what observers look at but also how they move their eyes to explore the scene. Here we demonstrate that saccadic models are a flexible framework that can be tailored to emulate the gaze patterns from childhood to adulthood. The proposed age-dependent saccadic model not only outputs human-like, i.e. age-specific visual scanpath, but also significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art saliency models

Your gaze betrays your age

International audienceVisual attention networks are so pervasive in thehuman brain that eye movements carry a wealth of informationthat can be exploited for many purposes. In this paper, we presentevidence that information derived from observers’ gaze can beused to infer their age. This is the first study showing thatsimple features extracted from the ordered sequence of fixationsand saccades allow us to predict the age of an observer. Eyemovements of 101 participants split into 4 age groups (adults,6-10 year-old, 4-6 year-old and 2 year-old) were recorded whileexploring static images. The analysis of observers’ gaze providesevidence of age-related differences in viewing patterns. Therefore,we extract from the scanpaths several features, including fixationdurations and saccade amplitudes, and learn a direct mappingfrom those features to age using Gentle AdaBoost classifiers.Experimental results show that the proposed image-blind methodsucceeds in predicting the age of the observer up to 92% of thetime. The use of predicted salience does not further improve theclassification’s accuracy