Soroush Elyasi

Soroush Elyasi, Sara Adibzadeh, Nasim Dadashi Serej et al.

Deep learning models for echocardiography segmentation often struggle to generalise across institutions, scanners, and patient populations, where collecting large, consistently annotated datasets is infeasible. Data augmentation is widely used to improve the robustness of deep learning models; however, its role in enhancing cross-dataset generalisability in echocardiography remains insufficiently understood. This study presents a large-scale multi-dataset evaluation of 29 data augmentation techniques and their pairwise combinations for 2D left ventricular segmentation using a U-Net trained on Unity, CAMUS, and EchoNet Dynamic datasets. Each augmentation was explored under several hyperparameter settings and assessed through repeated runs using Dice and IoU in both in-domain and cross-dataset scenarios, with statistical significance quantified via independent t-tests. Results show that anatomically plausible geometric transformations, particularly affine, shift-scale-rotate, perspective, and random horizontal flip, substantially improve cross-dataset performance, whereas aggressive intensity- or artefact-based augmentations often degrade generalisability. Pairwise augmentation combinations outperform individual augmentations and show that moderate flip-centric combinations, especially random horizontal flip with affine, yield consistent gains across most transfer scenarios. These findings provide empirically grounded guidance for designing augmentation policies that enhance the robustness and transferability of echocardiography segmentation models.

Arya VarastehNezhad, Reza Tavasoli, Soroush Elyasi et al.

Depression, anxiety, and stress are widespread mental health concerns that increasingly drive individuals to seek information from Large Language Models (LLMs). This study investigates how eight LLMs (Claude Sonnet, Copilot, Gemini Pro, GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, Llama, Mixtral, and Perplexity) reply to twenty pragmatic questions about depression, anxiety, and stress when those questions are framed for six user profiles (baseline, woman, man, young, old, and university student). The models generated 2,880 answers, which we scored for sentiment and emotions using state-of-the-art tools. Our analysis revealed that optimism, fear, and sadness dominated the emotional landscape across all outputs, with neutral sentiment maintaining consistently high values. Gratitude, joy, and trust appeared at moderate levels, while emotions such as anger, disgust, and love were rarely expressed. The choice of LLM significantly influenced emotional expression patterns. Mixtral exhibited the highest levels of negative emotions including disapproval, annoyance, and sadness, while Llama demonstrated the most optimistic and joyful responses. The type of mental health condition dramatically shaped emotional responses: anxiety prompts elicited extraordinarily high fear scores (0.974), depression prompts generated elevated sadness (0.686) and the highest negative sentiment, while stress-related queries produced the most optimistic responses (0.755) with elevated joy and trust. In contrast, demographic framing of queries produced only marginal variations in emotional tone. Statistical analyses confirmed significant model-specific and condition-specific differences, while demographic influences remained minimal. These findings highlight the critical importance of model selection in mental health applications, as each LLM exhibits a distinct emotional signature that could significantly impact user experience and outcomes.