Ling Tong

Hosein Barzekar, Yash Patel, Ling Tong et al.

Cancer is a leading cause of death in many countries. An early diagnosis of cancer based on biomedical imaging ensures effective treatment and a better prognosis. However, biomedical imaging presents challenges to both clinical institutions and researchers. Physiological anomalies are often characterized by slight abnormalities in individual cells or tissues, making them difficult to detect visually. Traditionally, anomalies are diagnosed by radiologists and pathologists with extensive training. This procedure, however, demands the participation of professionals and incurs a substantial cost. The cost makes large-scale biological image classification impractical. In this study, we provide unique deep neural network designs for multiclass classification of medical images, in particular cancer images. We incorporated transformers into a multiclass framework to take advantage of data-gathering capability and perform more accurate classifications. We evaluated models on publicly accessible datasets using various measures to ensure the reliability of the models. Extensive assessment metrics suggest this method can be used for a multitude of classification tasks.

D M Anisuzzaman, Hosein Barzekar, Ling Tong et al.

In the U.S, 5-10\% of new pediatric cases of cancer are primary bone tumors. The most common type of primary malignant bone tumor is osteosarcoma. The intention of the present work is to improve the detection and diagnosis of osteosarcoma using computer-aided detection (CAD) and diagnosis (CADx). Such tools as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can significantly decrease the surgeon's workload and make a better prognosis of patient conditions. CNNs need to be trained on a large amount of data in order to achieve a more trustworthy performance. In this study, transfer learning techniques, pre-trained CNNs, are adapted to a public dataset on osteosarcoma histological images to detect necrotic images from non-necrotic and healthy tissues. First, the dataset was preprocessed, and different classifications are applied. Then, Transfer learning models including VGG19 and Inception V3 are used and trained on Whole Slide Images (WSI) with no patches, to improve the accuracy of the outputs. Finally, the models are applied to different classification problems, including binary and multi-class classifiers. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the VGG19 has the highest, 96\%, performance amongst all binary classes and multiclass classification. Our fine-tuned model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on detecting malignancy of Osteosarcoma based on histologic images.

Amin Vahedian, Xun Zhou, Ling Tong et al.

Urban dispersal events are processes where an unusually large number of people leave the same area in a short period. Early prediction of dispersal events is important in mitigating congestion and safety risks and making better dispatching decisions for taxi and ride-sharing fleets. Existing work mostly focuses on predicting taxi demand in the near future by learning patterns from historical data. However, they fail in case of abnormality because dispersal events with abnormally high demand are non-repetitive and violate common assumptions such as smoothness in demand change over time. Instead, in this paper we argue that dispersal events follow a complex pattern of trips and other related features in the past, which can be used to predict such events. Therefore, we formulate the dispersal event prediction problem as a survival analysis problem. We propose a two-stage framework (DILSA), where a deep learning model combined with survival analysis is developed to predict the probability of a dispersal event and its demand volume. We conduct extensive case studies and experiments on the NYC Yellow taxi dataset from 2014-2016. Results show that DILSA can predict events in the next 5 hours with F1-score of 0.7 and with average time error of 18 minutes. It is orders of magnitude better than the state-ofthe-art deep learning approaches for taxi demand prediction.

Stephen Baek, Yusen He, Bryan G. Allen et al.

Non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) represents approximately 80-85% of lung cancer diagnoses and is the leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Recent studies indicate that image-based radiomics features from positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET/CT) images have predictive power on NSCLC outcomes. To this end, easily calculated functional features such as the maximum and the mean of standard uptake value (SUV) and total lesion glycolysis (TLG) are most commonly used for NSCLC prognostication, but their prognostic value remains controversial. Meanwhile, convolutional neural networks (CNN) are rapidly emerging as a new premise for cancer image analysis, with significantly enhanced predictive power compared to other hand-crafted radiomics features. Here we show that CNN trained to perform the tumor segmentation task, with no other information than physician contours, identify a rich set of survival-related image features with remarkable prognostic value. In a retrospective study on 96 NSCLC patients before stereotactic-body radiotherapy (SBRT), we found that the CNN segmentation algorithm (U-Net) trained for tumor segmentation in PET/CT images, contained features having strong correlation with 2- and 5-year overall and disease-specific survivals. The U-net algorithm has not seen any other clinical information (e.g. survival, age, smoking history) than the images and the corresponding tumor contours provided by physicians. Furthermore, through visualization of the U-Net, we also found convincing evidence that the regions of progression appear to match with the regions where the U-Net features identified patterns that predicted higher likelihood of death. We anticipate our findings will be a starting point for more sophisticated non-intrusive patient specific cancer prognosis determination.