Mingli Zhang

Ahmad Chaddad, Paul Daniel Mingli Zhang, Saima Rathore et al.

Imaging biomarkers offer a non-invasive way to predict the response of immunotherapy prior to treatment. In this work, we propose a novel type of deep radiomic features (DRFs) computed from a convolutional neural network (CNN), which capture tumor characteristics related to immune cell markers and overall survival. Our study uses four MRI sequences (T1-weighted, T1-weighted post-contrast, T2-weighted and FLAIR) with corresponding immune cell markers of 151 patients with brain tumor. The proposed method extracts a total of 180 DRFs by aggregating the activation maps of a pre-trained 3D-CNN within labeled tumor regions of MRI scans. These features offer a compact, yet powerful representation of regional texture encoding tissue heterogeneity. A comprehensive set of experiments is performed to assess the relationship between the proposed DRFs and immune cell markers, and measure their association with overall survival. Results show a high correlation between DRFs and various markers, as well as significant differences between patients grouped based on these markers. Moreover, combining DRFs, clinical features and immune cell markers as input to a random forest classifier helps discriminate between short and long survival outcomes, with AUC of 72\% and p=2.36$\times$10$^{-5}$. These results demonstrate the usefulness of proposed DRFs as non-invasive biomarker for predicting treatment response in patients with brain tumors.

Ahmad Chaddad, Mingli Zhang, Lama Hassan et al.

Radiomics has shown a capability for different types of cancers such as glioma to predict the clinical outcome. It can have a non-invasive means of evaluating the immunotherapy response prior to treatment. However, the use of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based radiomics requires large training image sets. To avoid this problem, we investigate a new imaging features that model distribution with a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) of learned 3D CNN features. Using these deep radiomic features (DRFs), we aim to predict the immune marker status (low versus high) and overall survival for glioma patients. We extract the DRFs by aggregating the activation maps of a pre-trained 3D-CNN within labeled tumor regions of MRI scans that corresponded immune markers of 151 patients. Our experiments are performed to assess the relationship between the proposed DRFs, three immune cell markers (Macrophage M1, Neutrophils and T Cells Follicular Helper), and measure their association with overall survival. Using the random forest (RF) model, DRFs was able to predict the immune marker status with area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 78.67, 83.93 and 75.67\% for Macrophage M1, Neutrophils and T Cells Follicular Helper, respectively. Combined the immune markers with DRFs and clinical variables, Kaplan-Meier estimator and Log-rank test achieved the most significant difference between predicted groups of patients (short-term versus long-term survival) with p\,=\,4.31$\times$10$^{-7}$ compared to p\,=\,0.03 for Immune cell markers, p\,=\,0.07 for clinical variables , and p\,=\,1.45$\times$10$^{-5}$ for DRFs. Our findings indicate that the proposed features (DRFs) used in RF models may significantly consider prognosticating patients with brain tumour prior to surgery through regularly acquired imaging data.

Xin Huang, Xuejiao Tang, Wenbin Zhang et al.

In this paper, we design and implement a generic medical knowledge based system (MKBS) for identifying diseases from several symptoms. In this system, some important aspects like knowledge bases system, knowledge representation, inference engine have been addressed. The system asks users different questions and inference engines will use the certainty factor to prune out low possible solutions. The proposed disease diagnosis system also uses a graphical user interface (GUI) to facilitate users to interact with the expert system. Our expert system is generic and flexible, which can be integrated with any rule bases system in disease diagnosis.

Xuejiao Tang, Jiong Qiu, Ruijun Chen et al.

An ideal safe workplace is described as a place where staffs fulfill responsibilities in a well-organized order, potential hazardous events are being monitored in real-time, as well as the number of accidents and relevant damages are minimized. However, occupational-related death and injury are still increasing and have been highly attended in the last decades due to the lack of comprehensive safety management. A smart safety management system is therefore urgently needed, in which the staffs are instructed to fulfill responsibilities as well as automating risk evaluations and alerting staffs and departments when needed. In this paper, a smart system for safety management in the workplace based on responsibility big data analysis and the internet of things (IoT) are proposed. The real world implementation and assessment demonstrate that the proposed systems have superior accountability performance and improve the responsibility fulfillment through real-time supervision and self-reminder.

Xuejiao Tang, Liuhua Zhang, Wenbin Zhang et al.

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related death after lung cancer in women. Early detection of breast cancer in X-ray mammography is believed to have effectively reduced the mortality rate. However, a relatively high false positive rate and a low specificity in mammography technology still exist. In this work, a computer-aided automatic mammogram analysis system is proposed to process the mammogram images and automatically discriminate them as either normal or cancerous, consisting of three consecutive image processing, feature selection, and image classification stages. In designing the system, the discrete wavelet transforms (Daubechies 2, Daubechies 4, and Biorthogonal 6.8) and the Fourier cosine transform were first used to parse the mammogram images and extract statistical features. Then, an entropy-based feature selection method was implemented to reduce the number of features. Finally, different pattern recognition methods (including the Back-propagation Network, the Linear Discriminant Analysis, and the Naive Bayes Classifier) and a voting classification scheme were employed. The performance of each classification strategy was evaluated for sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy and for general performance using the Receiver Operating Curve. Our method is validated on the dataset from the Eastern Health in Newfoundland and Labrador of Canada. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed automatic mammogram analysis system could effectively improve the classification performances.

Ahmad Chaddad, Saima Rathore, Mingli Zhang et al.

This paper proposes to use deep radiomic features (DRFs) from a convolutional neural network (CNN) to model fine-grained texture signatures in the radiomic analysis of recurrent glioblastoma (rGBM). We use DRFs to predict survival of rGBM patients with preoperative T1-weighted post-contrast MR images (n=100). DRFs are extracted from regions of interest labelled by a radiation oncologist and used to compare between short-term and long-term survival patient groups. Random forest (RF) classification is employed to predict survival outcome (i.e., short or long survival), as well as to identify highly group-informative descriptors. Classification using DRFs results in an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 89.15% (p<0.01) in predicting rGBM patient survival, compared to 78.07% (p<0.01) when using standard radiomic features (SRF). These results indicate the potential of DRFs as a prognostic marker for patients with rGBM.