Ricky Hu

Rohit Singla, Ricky Hu, Cailin Ringstrom et al.

Modelling ultrasound speckle has generated considerable interest for its ability to characterize tissue properties. As speckle is dependent on the underlying tissue architecture, modelling it may aid in tasks like segmentation or disease detection. However, for the transplanted kidney where ultrasound is commonly used to investigate dysfunction, it is currently unknown which statistical distribution best characterises such speckle. This is especially true for the regions of the transplanted kidney: the cortex, the medulla and the central echogenic complex. Furthermore, it is unclear how these distributions vary by patient variables such as age, sex, body mass index, primary disease, or donor type. These traits may influence speckle modelling given their influence on kidney anatomy. We are the first to investigate these two aims. N=821 kidney transplant recipient B-mode images were automatically segmented into the cortex, medulla, and central echogenic complex using a neural network. Seven distinct probability distributions were fitted to each region. The Rayleigh and Nakagami distributions had model parameters that differed significantly between the three regions (p <= 0.05). While both had excellent goodness of fit, the Nakagami had higher Kullbeck-Leibler divergence. Recipient age correlated weakly with scale in the cortex (Omega: rho = 0.11, p = 0.004), while body mass index correlated weakly with shape in the medulla (m: rho = 0.08, p = 0.04). Neither sex, primary disease, nor donor type demonstrated any correlation. We propose the Nakagami distribution be used to characterize transplanted kidneys regionally independent of disease etiology and most patient characteristics based on our findings.

John Burge, Matthew Bonanni, Matthias Ihme et al.

As the climate changes, the severity of wildland fires is expected to worsen. Models that accurately capture fire propagation dynamics greatly help efforts for understanding, responding to and mitigating the damages caused by these fires. Machine learning techniques provide a potential approach for developing such models. The objective of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of using a Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM) recurrent neural network to model the dynamics of wildland fire propagation. The machine learning model is trained on simulated wildfire data generated by a mathematical analogue model. Three simulated datasets are analyzed, each with increasing degrees of complexity. The simplest dataset includes a constant wind direction as a single confounding factor, whereas the most complex dataset includes dynamic wind, complex terrain, spatially varying moisture content and heterogenous vegetation density distributions. We examine how effective the ConvLSTM can learn the fire-spread dynamics over consecutive time steps. It is shown that ConvLSTMs can capture local fire transmission events, as well as the overall fire dynamics, such as the rate at which the fire spreads. Finally, we demonstrate that ConvLSTMs outperform other network architectures that have previously been used to model similar wildland fire dynamics.