M. N. S. Swamy

Parastoo Sotoudeh Sharifi, M. Omair Ahmad, M. N. S. Swamy

Recent advancements in deep learning (DL) have significantly advanced medical image analysis. In the field of medical image processing, particularly in histopathology image analysis, the variation in staining protocols and differences in scanners present significant domain shift challenges, undermine the generalization capabilities of models to the data from unseen domains, prompting the need for effective domain generalization (DG) strategies to improve the consistency and reliability of automated cancer detection tools in diagnostic decision-making. In this paper, we introduce Pathology Weight Averaging (PathoWAve), a multi-source DG strategy for addressing domain shift phenomenon of DL models in histopathology image analysis. Integrating specific weight averaging technique with parallel training trajectories and a strategically combination of regular augmentations with histopathology-specific data augmentation methods, PathoWAve enables a comprehensive exploration and precise convergence within the loss landscape. This method significantly enhanced generalization capabilities of DL models across new, unseen histopathology domains. To the best of our knowledge, PathoWAve is the first proposed weight averaging method for DG in histopathology image analysis. Our quantitative results on Camelyon17 WILDS dataset demonstrate PathoWAve's superiority over previous proposed methods to tackle the domain shift phenomenon in histopathology image processing. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ParastooSotoudeh/PathoWAve}.

Nastaran Mansourian, Arash Mohammadi, M. Omair Ahmad et al.

Driver emotion recognition plays a crucial role in driver monitoring systems, enhancing human-autonomy interactions and the trustworthiness of Autonomous Driving (AD). Various physiological and behavioural modalities have been explored for this purpose, with Electrocardiogram (ECG) emerging as a standout choice for real-time emotion monitoring, particularly in dynamic and unpredictable driving conditions. Existing methods, however, often rely on multi-channel ECG signals recorded under static conditions, limiting their applicability in real-world dynamic driving scenarios. To address this limitation, the paper introduces ECG-EmotionNet, a novel architecture designed specifically for emotion recognition in dynamic driving environments. ECG-EmotionNet is constructed by adapting a recently introduced ECG Foundation Model (FM) and uniquely employs single-channel ECG signals, ensuring both robust generalizability and computational efficiency. Unlike conventional adaptation methods such as full fine-tuning, linear probing, or low-rank adaptation, we propose an intuitively pleasing alternative, referred to as the nested Mixture of Experts (MoE) adaptation. More precisely, each transformer layer of the underlying FM is treated as a separate expert, with embeddings extracted from these experts fused using trainable weights within a gating mechanism. This approach enhances the representation of both global and local ECG features, leading to a 6% improvement in accuracy and a 7% increase in the F1 score, all while maintaining computational efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed ECG-EmotionNet architecture is evaluated using a recently introduced and challenging driver emotion monitoring dataset.