Nando Hegemann

Urs Hackstein, Jordi Alastruey, Philip Aston et al.

This report is part of the Qumphy project (22HLT01 Qumphy) that is funded by the European Union and is dedicated to the development of measures to quantify the uncertainties associated with Machine Learning algorithms applied to medical problems, in particular the analysis and processing of Photoplethysmography (PPG) signals. In this report, a list of six medical problems that are related to PPG signals and serve as Benchmark Problems is given. Suitable Benchmark datasets and their usage are described also.

Ciaran Bench, Oskar Pfeffer, Vivek Desai et al.

In principle, deep learning models trained on medical time-series, including wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor data, can provide a means to continuously monitor physiological parameters outside of clinical settings. However, there is considerable risk of poor performance when deployed in practical measurement scenarios leading to negative patient outcomes. Reliable uncertainties accompanying predictions can provide guidance to clinicians in their interpretation of the trustworthiness of model outputs. It is therefore of interest to compare the effectiveness of different approaches. Here we implement an unprecedented set of eight uncertainty quantification (UQ) techniques to models trained on two clinically relevant prediction tasks: Atrial Fibrillation (AF) detection (classification), and two variants of blood pressure regression. We formulate a comprehensive evaluation procedure to enable a rigorous comparison of these approaches. We observe a complex picture of uncertainty reliability across the different techniques, where the most optimal for a given task depends on the chosen expression of uncertainty, evaluation metric, and scale of reliability assessed. We find that assessing local calibration and adaptivity provides practically relevant insights about model behaviour that otherwise cannot be acquired using more commonly implemented global reliability metrics. We emphasise that criteria for evaluating UQ techniques should cater to the model's practical use case, where the use of a small number of measurements per patient places a premium on achieving small-scale reliability for the chosen expression of uncertainty, while preserving as much predictive performance as possible.

Mohammad Moulaeifard, Loic Coquelin, Mantas Rinkevičius et al.

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is a widely used non-invasive physiological sensing technique, suitable for various clinical applications. Such clinical applications are increasingly supported by machine learning methods, raising the question of the most appropriate input representation and model choice. Comprehensive comparisons, in particular across different input representations, are scarce. We address this gap in the research landscape by a comprehensive benchmarking study covering three kinds of input representations, interpretable features, image representations and raw waveforms, across prototypical regression and classification use cases: blood pressure and atrial fibrillation prediction. In both cases, the best results are achieved by deep neural networks operating on raw time series as input representations. Within this model class, best results are achieved by modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs). but depending on the task setup, shallow CNNs are often also very competitive. We envision that these results will be insightful for researchers to guide their choice on machine learning tasks for PPG data, even beyond the use cases presented in this work.