Ervin Sejdić

Nathan T. Riek, Murat Akcakaya, Zeineb Bouzid et al.

Objective: In this paper we develop and evaluate ECG-SMART-NET for occlusion myocardial infarction (OMI) identification. OMI is a severe form of heart attack characterized by complete blockage of one or more coronary arteries requiring immediate referral for cardiac catheterization to restore blood flow to the heart. Two thirds of OMI cases are difficult to visually identify from a 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) and can be potentially fatal if not identified quickly. Previous works on this topic are scarce, and current state-of-the-art evidence suggests both feature-based random forests and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are promising approaches to improve ECG detection of OMI. Methods: While the ResNet architecture has been adapted for use with ECG recordings, it is not ideally suited to capture informative temporal features within each lead and the spatial concordance or discordance across leads. We propose a clinically informed modification of the ResNet-18 architecture. The model first learns temporal features through temporal convolutional layers with 1xk kernels followed by a spatial convolutional layer, after the residual blocks, with 12x1 kernels to learn spatial features. Results: ECG-SMART-NET was benchmarked against the original ResNet-18 and other state-of-the-art models on a multisite real-word clinical dataset that consists of 10,393 ECGs from 7,397 unique patients (rate of OMI =7.2%). ECG-SMART-NET outperformed other models in the classification of OMI with a test AUC of 0.953 [0.921, 0.978]. Conclusion and Significance: ECG-SMART-NET can outperform the state-of-the-art random forest for OMI prediction and is better suited for this task than the original ResNet-18 architecture.

Yassin Khalifa, Danilo Mandic, Ervin Sejdić

Biomedical signals carry signature rhythms of complex physiological processes that control our daily bodily activity. The properties of these rhythms indicate the nature of interaction dynamics among physiological processes that maintain a homeostasis. Abnormalities associated with diseases or disorders usually appear as disruptions in the structure of the rhythms which makes isolating these rhythms and the ability to differentiate between them, indispensable. Computer aided diagnosis systems are ubiquitous nowadays in almost every medical facility and more closely in wearable technology, and rhythm or event detection is the first of many intelligent steps that they perform. How these rhythms are isolated? How to develop a model that can describe the transition between processes in time? Many methods exist in the literature that address these questions and perform the decoding of biomedical signals into separate rhythms. In here, we demystify the most effective methods that are used for detection and isolation of rhythms or events in time series and highlight the way in which they were applied to different biomedical signals and how they contribute to information fusion. The key strengths and limitations of these methods are also discussed as well as the challenges encountered with application in biomedical signals.

Yassin Khalifa, Cara Donohue, James L. Coyle et al.

Upper esophageal sphincter is an important anatomical landmark of the swallowing process commonly observed through the kinematic analysis of radiographic examinations that are vulnerable to subjectivity and clinical feasibility issues. Acting as the doorway of esophagus, upper esophageal sphincter allows the transition of ingested materials from pharyngeal into esophageal stages of swallowing and a reduced duration of opening can lead to penetration/aspiration and/or pharyngeal residue. Therefore, in this study we consider a non-invasive high resolution cervical auscultation-based screening tool to approximate the human ratings of upper esophageal sphincter opening and closure. Swallows were collected from 116 patients and a deep neural network was trained to produce a mask that demarcates the duration of upper esophageal sphincter opening. The proposed method achieved more than 90\% accuracy and similar values of sensitivity and specificity when compared to human ratings even when tested over swallows from an independent clinical experiment. Moreover, the predicted opening and closure moments surprisingly fell within an inter-human comparable error of their human rated counterparts which demonstrates the clinical significance of high resolution cervical auscultation in replacing ionizing radiation-based evaluation of swallowing kinematics.

Yassin Khalifa, Justin Hawks, Ervin Sejdic

Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed many principles about neural processing. In particular, many biological systems were found to reconfigure/recruit single neurons to generate multiple kinds of decisions. Such findings have the potential to advance our understanding of the design and optimization process of artificial neural networks. Previous work demonstrated that dense neural networks are needed to shape complex decision surfaces required for AI-level recognition tasks. We investigate the ability to model high dimensional recognition problems using single or several neurons networks that are relatively easier to train. By employing three datasets, we test the use of a population of single neuron networks in performing multi-class recognition tasks. Surprisingly, we find that sparse networks can be as efficient as dense networks in both binary and multi-class tasks. Moreover, single neuron networks demonstrate superior performance in binary classification scheme and competing results when combined for multi-class recognition.

Zhenwei Zhang, Ervin Sejdic

The application of machine learning to radiological images is an increasingly active research area that is expected to grow in the next five to ten years. Recent advances in machine learning have the potential to recognize and classify complex patterns from different radiological imaging modalities such as x-rays, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography imaging. In many applications, machine learning based systems have shown comparable performance to human decision-making. The applications of machine learning are the key ingredients of future clinical decision making and monitoring systems. This review covers the fundamental concepts behind various machine learning techniques and their applications in several radiological imaging areas, such as medical image segmentation, brain function studies and neurological disease diagnosis, as well as computer-aided systems, image registration, and content-based image retrieval systems. Synchronistically, we will briefly discuss current challenges and future directions regarding the application of machine learning in radiological imaging. By giving insight on how take advantage of machine learning powered applications, we expect that clinicians can prevent and diagnose diseases more accurately and efficiently.