Hamid Abrishami Moghaddam

Niloufar Delfan, Hamid Abrishami Moghaddam, Mohammadreza Modaresi et al.

Segmentation of lung tissue in computed tomography (CT) images is a precursor to most pulmonary image analysis applications. Semantic segmentation methods using deep learning have exhibited top-tier performance in recent years, however designing accurate and robust segmentation models for lung tissue is challenging due to the variations in shape, size, and orientation. Additionally, medical image artifacts and noise can affect lung tissue segmentation and degrade the accuracy of downstream analysis. The practicality of current deep learning methods for lung tissue segmentation is limited as they require significant computational resources and may not be easily deployable in clinical settings. This paper presents a fully automatic method that identifies the lungs in three-dimensional (3D) pulmonary CT images using deep networks and transfer learning. We introduce (1) a novel 2.5-dimensional image representation from consecutive CT slices that succinctly represents volumetric information and (2) a U-Net architecture equipped with pre-trained InceptionV3 blocks to segment 3D CT scans while maintaining the number of learnable parameters as low as possible. Our method was quantitatively assessed using one public dataset, LUNA16, for training and testing and two public datasets, namely, VESSEL12 and CRPF, only for testing. Due to the low number of learnable parameters, our method achieved high generalizability to the unseen VESSEL12 and CRPF datasets while obtaining superior performance over Luna16 compared to existing methods (Dice coefficients of 99.7, 99.1, and 98.8 over LUNA16, VESSEL12, and CRPF datasets, respectively). We made our method publicly accessible via a graphical user interface at medvispy.ee.kntu.ac.ir.

Bijan Roudini, Boshra Khajehpiri, Hamid Abrishami Moghaddam et al.

Precise estimation of cardiac patients' current and future comorbidities is an important factor in prioritizing continuous physiological monitoring and new therapies. ML models have shown satisfactory performance in short-term mortality prediction of patients with heart disease, while their utility in long-term predictions is limited. This study aims to investigate the performance of tree-based ML models on long-term mortality prediction and the effect of two recently introduced biomarkers on long-term mortality. This study utilized publicly available data from CCHIA at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Taiwan, China. Medical records were used to gather demographic and clinical data, including age, gender, BMI, percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) status, and comorbidities such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), and non-STEMI. Using medical and demographic records as well as two recently introduced biomarkers, brachial pre-ejection period (bPEP) and brachial ejection time (bET), collected from 139 patients with acute myocardial infarction, we investigated the performance of advanced ensemble tree-based ML algorithms (random forest, AdaBoost, and XGBoost) to predict all-cause mortality within 14 years. The developed ML models achieved significantly better performance compared to the baseline LR (C-Statistic, 0.80 for random forest, 0.79 for AdaBoost, and 0.78 for XGBoost, vs 0.77 for LR) (P-RF<0.001, PAdaBoost<0.001, PXGBoost<0.05). Adding bPEP and bET to our feature set significantly improved the algorithms' performance, leading to an absolute increase in C-Statistic of up to 0.03 (C-Statistic, 0.83 for random forest, 0.82 for AdaBoost, and 0.80 for XGBoost, vs 0.74 for LR) (P-RF<0.001, PAdaBoost<0.001, PXGBoost<0.05). This advancement may enable better treatment prioritization for high-risk individuals.

Hamid Abrishami Moghaddam, Elaheh Raisi

In this paper, a new online method based on nonparametric weighted feature extraction (NWFE) is proposed. NWFE was introduced to enjoy optimum characteristics of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and nonparametric discriminant analysis (NDA) while rectifying their drawbacks. It emphasizes the points near decision boundary by putting greater weights on them and deemphasizes other points. Incremental nonparametric weighted feature extraction (INWFE) is the online version of NWFE. INWFE has advantages of NWFE method such as extracting more than L-1 features in contrast to LDA. It is independent of the class distribution and performs well in complex distributed data. The effects of outliers are reduced due to the nature of its nonparametric scatter matrix. Furthermore, it is possible to add new samples asynchronously, i.e. whenever a new sample becomes available at any given time, it can be added to the algorithm. This is useful for many real world applications since all data cannot be available in advance. This method is implemented on Gaussian and non-Gaussian multidimensional data, a number of UCI datasets and Indian Pine dataset. Results are compared with NWFE in terms of classification accuracy and execution time. For nearest neighbour classifier it shows that this technique converges to NWFE at the end of learning process. In addition, the computational complexity is reduced in comparison with NWFE in terms of execution time.