Brain shift makes the pre-operative MRI navigation highly inaccurate hence the intraoperative modalities are adopted in surgical theatre. Due to the excellent economic and portability merits, the Ultrasound imaging is used at our collaborating hospital, Charing Cross Hospital, Imperial College London, UK. However, it is found that intraoperative diagnosis on Ultrasound images is not straightforward and consistent, even for very experienced clinical experts. Hence, there is a demand to design a Computer-aided-diagnosis system to provide a robust second opinion to help the surgeons. The proposed CAD system based on "Mixed-Attention Res-U-net with asymmetric loss function" achieves the state-of-the-art results comparing to the ground truth by classification at pixel-level directly, it also outperforms all the current main stream pixel-level classification methods (e.g. U-net, FCN) in all the evaluation metrices.
One of the most celebrated achievements of modern machine learning technology is automatic classification of images. However, success is typically achieved only with major computational costs. Here we introduce TDAsweep, a machine learning tool aimed at improving the efficiency of automatic classification of images.
Federated learning has allowed the training of statistical models over remote devices without the transfer of raw client data. In practice, training in heterogeneous and large networks introduce novel challenges in various aspects like network load, quality of client data, security and privacy. Recent works in FL have worked on improving communication efficiency and addressing uneven client data distribution independently, but none have provided a unified solution for both challenges. We introduce a new family of Federated Learning algorithms called CatFedAvg which not only improves the communication efficiency but improves the quality of learning using a category coverage maximization strategy. We use the FedAvg framework and introduce a simple and efficient step every epoch to collect meta-data about the client's training data structure which the central server uses to request a subset of weight updates. We explore two distinct variations which allow us to further explore the tradeoffs between communication efficiency and model accuracy. Our experiments based on a vision classification task have shown that an increase of 10% absolute points in accuracy using the MNIST dataset with 70% absolute points lower network transfer over FedAvg. We also run similar experiments with Fashion MNIST, KMNIST-10, KMNIST-49 and EMNIST-47. Further, under extreme data imbalance experiments for both globally and individual clients, we see the model performing better than FedAvg. The ablation study further explores its behaviour under varying data and client parameter conditions showcasing the robustness of the proposed approach.
This work proposes a novel method based on a pseudo-parabolic diffusion process to be employed for texture recognition. The proposed operator is applied over a range of time scales giving rise to a family of images transformed by nonlinear filters. Therefore each of those images are encoded by a local descriptor (we use local binary patterns for that purpose) and they are summarized by a simple histogram, yielding in this way the image feature vector. The proposed approach is tested on the classification of well established benchmark texture databases and on a practical task of plant species recognition. In both cases, it is compared with several state-of-the-art methodologies employed for texture recognition. Our proposal outperforms those methods in terms of classification accuracy, confirming its competitiveness. The good performance can be justified to a large extent by the ability of the pseudo-parabolic operator to smooth possibly noisy details inside homogeneous regions of the image at the same time that it preserves discontinuities that convey critical information for the object description. Such results also confirm that model-based approaches like the proposed one can still be competitive with the omnipresent learning-based approaches, especially when the user does not have access to a powerful computational structure and a large amount of labeled data for training.
Nearest neighbor (NN) search is an essential operation in many applications, such as one/few-shot learning and image classification. As such, fast and low-energy hardware support for accurate NN search is highly desirable. Ternary content-addressable memories (TCAMs) have been proposed to accelerate NN search for few-shot learning tasks by implementing $L_\infty$ and Hamming distance metrics, but they cannot achieve software-comparable accuracies. This paper proposes a novel distance function that can be natively evaluated with multi-bit content-addressable memories (MCAMs) based on ferroelectric FETs (FeFETs) to perform a single-step, in-memory NN search. Moreover, this approach achieves accuracies comparable to floating-point precision implementations in software for NN classification and one/few-shot learning tasks. As an example, the proposed method achieves a 98.34% accuracy for a 5-way, 5-shot classification task for the Omniglot dataset (only 0.8% lower than software-based implementations) with a 3-bit MCAM. This represents a 13% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art TCAM-based implementations at iso-energy and iso-delay. The presented distance function is resilient to the effects of FeFET device-to-device variations. Furthermore, this work experimentally demonstrates a 2-bit implementation of FeFET MCAM using AND arrays from GLOBALFOUNDRIES to further validate proof of concept.
The classification of imbalanced data has presented a significant challenge for most well-known classification algorithms that were often designed for data with relatively balanced class distributions. Nevertheless skewed class distribution is a common feature in real world problems. It is especially prevalent in certain application domains with great need for machine learning and better predictive analysis such as disease diagnosis, fraud detection, bankruptcy prediction, and suspect identification. In this paper, we propose a novel tree-based algorithm based on the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) for variable selection in the classification context. Our algorithm, named as the "Precision-Recall Curve classification tree", or simply the "PRC classification tree" modifies two crucial stages in tree building. The first stage is to maximize the area under the precision-recall curve in node variable selection. The second stage is to maximize the harmonic mean of recall and precision (F-measure) for threshold selection. We found the proposed PRC classification tree, and its subsequent extension, the PRC random forest, work well especially for class-imbalanced data sets. We have demonstrated that our methods outperform their classic counterparts, the usual CART and random forest for both synthetic and real data. Furthermore, the ROC classification tree proposed by our group previously has shown good performance in imbalanced data. The combination of them, the PRC-ROC tree, also shows great promise in identifying the minority class.
Recently deep learning methods, in particular, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), have led to a massive breakthrough in the range of computer vision. Also, the large-scale annotated dataset is the essential key to a successful training procedure. However, it is a huge challenge to get such datasets in the medical domain. Towards this, we present a data augmentation method for generating synthetic medical images using cycle-consistency Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We add semi-supervised attention modules to generate images with convincing details. We treat tumor images and normal images as two domains. The proposed GANs-based model can generate a tumor image from a normal image, and in turn, it can also generate a normal image from a tumor image. Furthermore, we show that generated medical images can be used for improving the performance of ResNet18 for medical image classification. Our model is applied to three limited datasets of tumor MRI images. We first generate MRI images on limited datasets, then we trained three popular classification models to get the best model for tumor classification. Finally, we train the classification model using real images with classic data augmentation methods and classification models using synthetic images. The classification results between those trained models showed that the proposed SAG-GAN data augmentation method can boost Accuracy and AUC compare with classic data augmentation methods. We believe the proposed data augmentation method can apply to other medical image domains, and improve the accuracy of computer-assisted diagnosis.
In this paper, we present a model that can directly predict emotion intensity score from video inputs, instead of deriving from action units. Using a 3d DNN incorporated with dynamic emotion information, we train a model using videos of different people smiling that outputs an intensity score from 0-10. Each video is labeled framewise using a normalized action-unit based intensity score. Our model then employs an adaptive learning technique to improve performance when dealing with new subjects. Compared to other models, our model excels in generalization between different people as well as provides a new framework to directly classify emotional intensity.
Pollen grain micrograph classification has multiple applications in medicine and biology. Automatic pollen grain image classification can alleviate the problems of manual categorisation such as subjectivity and time constraints. While a number of computer-based methods have been introduced in the literature to perform this task, classification performance needs to be improved for these methods to be useful in practice. In this paper, we present an ensemble approach for pollen grain microscopic image classification into four categories: Corylus Avellana well-developed pollen grain, Corylus Avellana anomalous pollen grain, Alnus well-developed pollen grain, and non-pollen (debris) instances. In our approach, we develop a classification strategy that is based on fusion of four state-of-the-art fine-tuned convolutional neural networks, namely EfficientNetB0, EfficientNetB1, EfficientNetB2 and SeResNeXt-50 deep models. These models are trained with images of three fixed sizes (224x224, 240x240, and 260x260 pixels) and their prediction probability vectors are then fused in an ensemble method to form a final classification vector for a given pollen grain image. Our proposed method is shown to yield excellent classification performance, obtaining an accuracy of of 94.48% and a weighted F1-score of 94.54% on the ICPR 2020 Pollen Grain Classification Challenge training dataset based on five-fold cross-validation. Evaluated on the test set of the challenge, our approach achieved a very competitive performance in comparison to the top ranked approaches with an accuracy and a weighted F1-score of 96.28% and 96.30%, respectively.
We propose answer-set programs that specify and compute counterfactual interventions on entities that are input on a classification model. In relation to the outcome of the model, the resulting counterfactual entities serve as a basis for the definition and computation of causality-based explanation scores for the feature values in the entity under classification, namely "responsibility scores". The approach and the programs can be applied with black-box models, and also with models that can be specified as logic programs, such as rule-based classifiers. The main focus of this work is on the specification and computation of "best" counterfactual entities, i.e. those that lead to maximum responsibility scores. From them one can read off the explanations as maximum responsibility feature values in the original entity. We also extend the programs to bring into the picture semantic or domain knowledge. We show how the approach could be extended by means of probabilistic methods, and how the underlying probability distributions could be modified through the use of constraints. Several examples of programs written in the syntax of the DLV ASP-solver, and run with it, are shown.
Score-based algorithms for tuberculosis (TB) verbal screening perform poorly, causing misclassification that leads to missed cases and unnecessary costly laboratory tests for false positives. We compared score-based classification defined by clinicians to machine learning classification such as SVM-RBF, logistic regression, and XGBoost. We restricted our analyses to data from adults, the population most affected by TB, and investigated the difference between untuned and unweighted classifiers to the cost-sensitive ones. Predictions were compared with the corresponding GeneXpert MTB/Rif results. After adjusting the weight of the positive class to 40 for XGBoost, we achieved 96.64% sensitivity and 35.06% specificity. As such, the sensitivity of our identifier increased by 1.26% while specificity increased by 13.19% in absolute value compared to the traditional score-based method defined by our clinicians. Our approach further demonstrated that only 2000 data points were sufficient to enable the model to converge. The results indicate that even with limited data we can actually devise a better method to identify TB suspects from verbal screening.
We develop and evaluate a deep learning algorithm to classify multiple catheters on neonatal chest and abdominal radiographs. A convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained using a dataset of 777 neonatal chest and abdominal radiographs, with a split of 81%-9%-10% for training-validation-testing, respectively. We employed ResNet-50 (a CNN), pre-trained on ImageNet. Ground truth labelling was limited to tagging each image to indicate the presence or absence of endotracheal tubes (ETTs), nasogastric tubes (NGTs), and umbilical arterial and venous catheters (UACs, UVCs). The data set included 561 images containing 2 or more catheters, 167 images with only one, and 49 with none. Performance was measured with average precision (AP), calculated from the area under the precision-recall curve. On our test data, the algorithm achieved an overall AP (95% confidence interval) of 0.977 (0.679-0.999) for NGTs, 0.989 (0.751-1.000) for ETTs, 0.979 (0.873-0.997) for UACs, and 0.937 (0.785-0.984) for UVCs. Performance was similar for the set of 58 test images consisting of 2 or more catheters, with an AP of 0.975 (0.255-1.000) for NGTs, 0.997 (0.009-1.000) for ETTs, 0.981 (0.797-0.998) for UACs, and 0.937 (0.689-0.990) for UVCs. Our network thus achieves strong performance in the simultaneous detection of these four catheter types. Radiologists may use such an algorithm as a time-saving mechanism to automate reporting of catheters on radiographs.
Chest x-ray imaging is widely used for the diagnosis of pneumothorax and there has been significant interest in developing automated methods to assist in image interpretation. We present an image classification pipeline which detects pneumothorax as well as the various types of chest tubes that are commonly used to treat pneumothorax. Our multi-stage algorithm is based on lung segmentation followed by pneumothorax classification, including classification of patches that are most likely to contain pneumothorax. This algorithm achieves state of the art performance for pneumothorax classification on an open-source benchmark dataset. Unlike previous work, this algorithm shows comparable performance on data with and without chest tubes and thus has an improved clinical utility. To evaluate these algorithms in a realistic clinical scenario, we demonstrate the ability to identify real cases of missed pneumothorax in a large dataset of chest x-ray studies.
UML Class diagram is very important to visualize the whole software we are working on and helps understand the whole system in the easiest way possible by showing the system classes, its attributes, methods, and relations with other objects. In the real world, there are two types of Class diagram engineers work with namely 1) Forward Engineered Class Diagram (FwCD) which are hand-made as part of the forward-looking development process, and 2). Reverse Engineered Class Diagram (RECD) which are those diagrams that are reverse engineered from the source code. In the software industry while working with new open software projects it is important to know which type of class diagram it is. Which UML diagram was used in a particular project is an important factor to be known? To solve this problem, we propose to build a classifier that can classify a UML diagram into FwCD or RECD. We propose to solve this problem by using a supervised Machine Learning technique. The approach in this involves analyzing the features that are useful in classifying class diagrams. Different Machine Learning models are used in this process and the Random Forest algorithm has proved to be the best out of all. Performance testing was done on 999 Class diagrams.
Machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can often cause misclassification by introducing small but well designed perturbations. In this paper, we explore, in the setting of classical composite hypothesis testing, a defense strategy based on the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), which jointly estimates the class of interest and the adversarial perturbation. We evaluate the GLRT approach for the special case of binary hypothesis testing in white Gaussian noise under $\ell_{\infty}$ norm-bounded adversarial perturbations, a setting for which a minimax strategy optimizing for the worst-case attack is known. We show that the GLRT approach yields performance competitive with that of the minimax approach under the worst-case attack, and observe that it yields a better robustness-accuracy trade-off under weaker attacks, depending on the values of signal components relative to the attack budget. We also observe that the GLRT defense generalizes naturally to more complex models for which optimal minimax classifiers are not known.
Contemporary machine learning applications often involve classification tasks with many classes. Despite their extensive use, a precise understanding of the statistical properties and behavior of classification algorithms is still missing, especially in modern regimes where the number of classes is rather large. In this paper, we take a step in this direction by providing the first asymptotically precise analysis of linear multiclass classification. Our theoretical analysis allows us to precisely characterize how the test error varies over different training algorithms, data distributions, problem dimensions as well as number of classes, inter/intra class correlations and class priors. Specifically, our analysis reveals that the classification accuracy is highly distribution-dependent with different algorithms achieving optimal performance for different data distributions and/or training/features sizes. Unlike linear regression/binary classification, the test error in multiclass classification relies on intricate functions of the trained model (e.g., correlation between some of the trained weights) whose asymptotic behavior is difficult to characterize. This challenge is already present in simple classifiers, such as those minimizing a square loss. Our novel theoretical techniques allow us to overcome some of these challenges. The insights gained may pave the way for a precise understanding of other classification algorithms beyond those studied in this paper.
This paper presents the 'hyper-sinh', a variation of the m-arcsinh activation function suitable for Deep Learning (DL)-based algorithms for supervised learning, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). hyper-sinh, developed in the open source Python libraries TensorFlow and Keras, is thus described and validated as an accurate and reliable activation function for both shallow and deep neural networks. Improvements in accuracy and reliability in image and text classification tasks on five (N = 5) benchmark data sets available from Keras are discussed. Experimental results demonstrate the overall competitive classification performance of both shallow and deep neural networks, obtained via this novel function. This function is evaluated with respect to gold standard activation functions, demonstrating its overall competitive accuracy and reliability for both image and text classification.
Book covers are usually the very first impression to its readers and they often convey important information about the content of the book. Book genre classification based on its cover would be utterly beneficial to many modern retrieval systems, considering that the complete digitization of books is an extremely expensive task. At the same time, it is also an extremely challenging task due to the following reasons: First, there exists a wide variety of book genres, many of which are not concretely defined. Second, book covers, as graphic designs, vary in many different ways such as colors, styles, textual information, etc, even for books of the same genre. Third, book cover designs may vary due to many external factors such as country, culture, target reader populations, etc. With the growing competitiveness in the book industry, the book cover designers and typographers push the cover designs to its limit in the hope of attracting sales. The cover-based book classification systems become a particularly exciting research topic in recent years. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal deep learning framework to solve this problem. The contribution of this paper is four-fold. First, our method adds an extra modality by extracting texts automatically from the book covers. Second, image-based and text-based, state-of-the-art models are evaluated thoroughly for the task of book cover classification. Third, we develop an efficient and salable multi-modal framework based on the images and texts shown on the covers only. Fourth, a thorough analysis of the experimental results is given and future works to improve the performance is suggested. The results show that the multi-modal framework significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art image-based models. However, more efforts and resources are needed for this classification task in order to reach a satisfactory level.
Various evaluation measures have been developed for multi-label classification, including Hamming Loss (HL), Subset Accuracy (SA) and Ranking Loss (RL). However, there is a gap between empirical results and the existing theories: 1) an algorithm often empirically performs well on some measure(s) while poorly on others, while a formal theoretical analysis is lacking; and 2) in small label space cases, the algorithms optimizing HL often have comparable or even better performance on the SA measure than those optimizing SA directly, while existing theoretical results show that SA and HL are conflicting measures. This paper provides an attempt to fill up this gap by analyzing the learning guarantees of the corresponding learning algorithms on both SA and HL measures. We show that when a learning algorithm optimizes HL with its surrogate loss, it enjoys an error bound for the HL measure independent of $c$ (the number of labels), while the bound for the SA measure depends on at most $O(c)$. On the other hand, when directly optimizing SA with its surrogate loss, it has learning guarantees that depend on $O(\sqrt{c})$ for both HL and SA measures. This explains the observation that when the label space is not large, optimizing HL with its surrogate loss can have promising performance for SA. We further show that our techniques are applicable to analyze the learning guarantees of algorithms on other measures, such as RL. Finally, the theoretical analyses are supported by experimental results.
Weakly-supervised learning (WSL) has recently triggered substantial interest as it mitigates the lack of pixel-wise annotations. Given global image labels, WSL methods yield pixel-level predictions (segmentations), which enable to interpret class predictions. Despite their recent success, mostly with natural images, such methods can face important challenges when the foreground and background regions have similar visual cues, yielding high false-positive rates in segmentations, as is the case in challenging histology images. WSL training is commonly driven by standard classification losses, which implicitly maximize model confidence, and locate the discriminative regions linked to classification decisions. Therefore, they lack mechanisms for modeling explicitly non-discriminative regions and reducing false-positive rates. We propose novel regularization terms, which enable the model to seek both non-discriminative and discriminative regions, while discouraging unbalanced segmentations. We introduce high uncertainty as a criterion to localize non-discriminative regions that do not affect classifier decision, and describe it with original Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence losses evaluating the deviation of posterior predictions from the uniform distribution. Our KL terms encourage high uncertainty of the model when the latter inputs the latent non-discriminative regions. Our loss integrates: (i) a cross-entropy seeking a foreground, where model confidence about class prediction is high; (ii) a KL regularizer seeking a background, where model uncertainty is high; and (iii) log-barrier terms discouraging unbalanced segmentations. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies over the public GlaS colon cancer data and a Camelyon16 patch-based benchmark for breast cancer show substantial improvements over state-of-the-art WSL methods, and confirm the effect of our new regularizers.