Deepak Kumar Sharma

Shreya Srivastava, Durgesh Kumar, Ram Jiwari et al.

The variability in ECG readings influenced by individual patient characteristics has posed a considerable challenge to adopting automated ECG analysis in clinical settings. A novel feature fusion technique termed SACC (Self Attentive Canonical Correlation) was proposed to address this. This technique is combined with DPN (Dual Pathway Network) and depth-wise separable convolution to create a robust, interpretable, and fast end-to-end arrhythmia classification model named rECGnition_v2.0 (robust ECG abnormality detection). This study uses MIT-BIH, INCARTDB and EDB dataset to evaluate the efficiency of rECGnition_v2.0 for various classes of arrhythmias. To investigate the influence of constituting model components, various ablation studies were performed, i.e. simple concatenation, CCA and proposed SACC were compared, while the importance of global and local ECG features were tested using DPN rECGnition_v2.0 model and vice versa. It was also benchmarked with state-of-the-art CNN models for overall accuracy vs model parameters, FLOPs, memory requirements, and prediction time. Furthermore, the inner working of the model was interpreted by comparing the activation locations in ECG before and after the SACC layer. rECGnition_v2.0 showed a remarkable accuracy of 98.07% and an F1-score of 98.05% for classifying ten distinct classes of arrhythmia with just 82.7M FLOPs per sample, thereby going beyond the performance metrics of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models by utilizing MIT-BIH Arrhythmia dataset. Similarly, on INCARTDB and EDB datasets, excellent F1-scores of 98.01% and 96.21% respectively was achieved for AAMI classification. The compact architectural footprint of the rECGnition_v2.0, characterized by its lesser trainable parameters and diminished computational demands, unfurled several advantages including interpretability and scalability.

Deepak Sharma, Audrey Durand, Marc-André Legault et al.

Genome-Wide Association Studies are typically conducted using linear models to find genetic variants associated with common diseases. In these studies, association testing is done on a variant-by-variant basis, possibly missing out on non-linear interaction effects between variants. Deep networks can be used to model these interactions, but they are difficult to train and interpret on large genetic datasets. We propose a method that uses the gradient based deep interpretability technique named DeepLIFT to show that known diabetes genetic risk factors can be identified using deep models along with possibly novel associations.

Shefali Srivastava, Abhimanyu Chopra, Arun CS Kumar et al.

An end-to-end trainable ConvNet architecture, that learns to harness the power of shape representation for matching disparate image pairs, is proposed. Disparate image pairs are deemed those that exhibit strong affine variations in scale, viewpoint and projection parameters accompanied by the presence of partial or complete occlusion of objects and extreme variations in ambient illumination. Under these challenging conditions, neither local nor global feature-based image matching methods, when used in isolation, have been observed to be effective. The proposed correspondence determination scheme for matching disparate images exploits high-level shape cues that are derived from low-level local feature descriptors, thus combining the best of both worlds. A graph-based representation for the disparate image pair is generated by constructing an affinity matrix that embeds the distances between feature points in two images, thus modeling the correspondence determination problem as one of graph matching. The eigenspectrum of the affinity matrix, i.e., the learned global shape representation, is then used to further regress the transformation or homography that defines the correspondence between the source image and target image. The proposed scheme is shown to yield state-of-the-art results for both, coarse-level shape matching as well as fine point-wise correspondence determination.