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Cardiology Cardiology

Left Atrial Wall Stress and the Long-Term Outcome of Catheter Ablation of Atrial Fibrillation: An Artificial Intelligence-Based Prediction of Atrial Wall Stress.

In Frontiers in physiology

Atrial stretch may contribute to the mechanism of atrial fibrillation (AF) recurrence after atrial fibrillation catheter ablation (AFCA). We tested whether the left atrial (LA) wall stress (LAW-stress[measured]) could be predicted by artificial intelligence (AI) using non-invasive parameters (LAW-stress[AI]) and whether rhythm outcome after AFCA could be predicted by LAW-stress[AI] in an independent cohort. Cohort 1 included 2223 patients, and cohort 2 included 658 patients who underwent AFCA. LAW-stress[measured] was calculated using the Law of Laplace using LA diameter by echocardiography, peak LA pressure measured during procedure, and LA wall thickness measured by customized software (AMBER) using computed tomography. The highest quartile (Q4) LAW-stress[measured] was predicted and validated by AI using non-invasive clinical parameters, including non-paroxysmal type of AF, age, presence of hypertension, diabetes, vascular disease, and heart failure, left ventricular ejection fraction, and the ratio of the peak mitral flow velocity of the early rapid filling to the early diastolic velocity of the mitral annulus (E/Em). We tested the AF/atrial tachycardia recurrence 3 months after the blanking period after AFCA using the LAW-stress[measured] and LAW-stress[AI] in cohort 1 and LAW-stress[AI] in cohort 2. LAW-stress[measured] was independently associated with non-paroxysmal AF (p < 0.001), diabetes (p = 0.012), vascular disease (p = 0.002), body mass index (p < 0.001), E/Em (p < 0.001), and mean LA voltage measured by electrogram voltage mapping (p < 0.001). The best-performing AI model had acceptable prediction power for predicting Q4-LAW-stress[measured] (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve 0.734). During 26.0 (12.0-52.0) months of follow-up, AF recurrence was significantly higher in the Q4-LAW-stress[measured] group [log-rank p = 0.001, hazard ratio 2.43 (1.21-4.90), p = 0.013] and Q4-LAW-stress[AI] group (log-rank p = 0.039) in cohort 1. In cohort 2, the Q4-LAW-stress[AI] group consistently showed worse rhythm outcomes (log-rank p < 0.001). A higher LAW-stress was associated with poorer rhythm outcomes after AFCA. AI was able to predict this complex but useful prognostic parameter using non-invasive parameters with moderate accuracy.

Lee Jae-Hyuk, Kwon Oh-Seok, Shim Jaemin, Lee Jisu, Han Hee-Jin, Yu Hee Tae, Kim Tae-Hoon, Uhm Jae-Sun, Joung Boyoung, Lee Moon-Hyoung, Kim Young-Hoon, Pak Hui-Nam

2021

artificial intelliegnce, atrial fibrillation, atrial wall stress, catheter ablation, rhythm outcome

Pathology Pathology

Deep Shape Features for Predicting Future Intracranial Aneurysm Growth.

In Frontiers in physiology

Introduction: Intracranial aneurysms (IAs) are a common vascular pathology and are associated with a risk of rupture, which is often fatal. Aneurysm growth is considered a surrogate of rupture risk; therefore, the study aimed to develop and evaluate prediction models of future artificial intelligence (AI) growth based on baseline aneurysm morphology as a computer-aided treatment decision support. Materials and methods: Follow-up CT angiography (CTA) and magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) angiograms of 39 patients with 44 IAs were classified by an expert as growing and stable (25/19). From the angiograms vascular surface meshes were extracted and the aneurysm shape was characterized by established morphologic features and novel deep shape features. The features corresponding to the baseline aneurysms were used to predict future aneurysm growth using univariate thresholding, multivariate random forest and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) learning, and deep shape learning based on the PointNet++ model. Results: The proposed deep shape feature learning method achieved an accuracy of 0.82 (sensitivity = 0.96, specificity = 0.63), while the multivariate learning and univariate thresholding methods were inferior with an accuracy of up to 0.68 and 0.63, respectively. Conclusion: High-performing classification of future growing IAs renders the proposed deep shape features learning approach as the key enabling tool to manage rupture risk in the "no treatment" paradigm of patient follow-up imaging.

Bizjak Žiga, Pernuš Franjo, Špiclin Žiga

2021

classification, deep learning, growth prediction, intracranial aneurysm, morphologic features, vascular disease

General General

Learning Then, Learning Now, and Every Second in Between: Lifelong Learning With a Simulated Humanoid Robot.

In Frontiers in neurorobotics

Long-term human-robot interaction requires the continuous acquisition of knowledge. This ability is referred to as lifelong learning (LL). LL is a long-standing challenge in machine learning due to catastrophic forgetting, which states that continuously learning from novel experiences leads to a decrease in the performance of previously acquired knowledge. Two recently published LL approaches are the Growing Dual-Memory (GDM) and the Self-organizing Incremental Neural Network+ (SOINN+). Both are growing neural networks that create new neurons in response to novel sensory experiences. The latter approach shows state-of-the-art clustering performance on sequentially available data with low memory requirements regarding the number of nodes. However, classification capabilities are not investigated. Two novel contributions are made in our research paper: (I) An extended SOINN+ approach, called associative SOINN+ (A-SOINN+), is proposed. It adopts two main properties of the GDM model to facilitate classification. (II) A new LL object recognition dataset (v-NICO-World-LL) is presented. It is recorded in a nearly photorealistic virtual environment, where a virtual humanoid robot manipulates 100 different objects belonging to 10 classes. Real-world and artificially created background images, grouped into four different complexity levels, are utilized. The A-SOINN+ reaches similar state-of-the-art classification accuracy results as the best GDM architecture of this work and consists of 30 to 350 times fewer neurons, evaluated on two LL object recognition datasets, the novel v-NICO-World-LL and the well-known CORe50. Furthermore, we observe an approximately 268 times lower training time. These reduced numbers result in lower memory and computational requirements, indicating higher suitability for autonomous social robots with low computational resources to facilitate a more efficient LL during long-term human-robot interactions.

Logacjov Aleksej, Kerzel Matthias, Wermter Stefan

2021

growing dual-memory, lifelong learning, lifelong learning dataset, long-term human-robot interaction, self-organizing incremental neural network, simulated humanoid robot

General General

Revisiting Persistent Neuronal Activity During Covert Spatial Attention.

In Frontiers in neural circuits

Persistent activity has been observed in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), in particular during the delay periods of visual attention tasks. Classical approaches based on the average activity over multiple trials have revealed that such an activity encodes the information about the attentional instruction provided in such tasks. However, single-trial approaches have shown that activity in this area is rather sparse than persistent and highly heterogeneous not only within the trials but also between the different trials. Thus, this observation raised the question of how persistent the actually persistent attention-related prefrontal activity is and how it contributes to spatial attention. In this paper, we review recent evidence of precisely deconstructing the persistence of the neural activity in the PFC in the context of attention orienting. The inclusion of machine-learning methods for decoding the information reveals that attention orienting is a highly dynamic process, possessing intrinsic oscillatory dynamics working at multiple timescales spanning from milliseconds to minutes. Dimensionality reduction methods further show that this persistent activity dynamically incorporates multiple sources of information. This novel framework reflects a high complexity in the neural representation of the attention-related information in the PFC, and how its computational organization predicts behavior.

Amengual Julian L, Ben Hamed Suliann

2021

alpha oscillations, decoding, mixed-selectivity, neurophysiology, persistent activity, population activity, prefrontal cortex, spatial attention

General General

Possibilistic Clustering-Promoting Semi-Supervised Learning for EEG-Based Emotion Recognition.

In Frontiers in neuroscience ; h5-index 72.0

The purpose of the latest brain computer interface is to perform accurate emotion recognition through the customization of their recognizers to each subject. In the field of machine learning, graph-based semi-supervised learning (GSSL) has attracted more and more attention due to its intuitive and good learning performance for emotion recognition. However, the existing GSSL methods are sensitive or not robust enough to noise or outlier electroencephalogram (EEG)-based data since each individual subject may present noise or outlier EEG patterns in the same scenario. To address the problem, in this paper, we invent a Possibilistic Clustering-Promoting semi-supervised learning method for EEG-based Emotion Recognition. Specifically, it constrains each instance to have the same label membership value with its local weighted mean to improve the reliability of the recognition method. In addition, a regularization term about fuzzy entropy is introduced into the objective function, and the generalization ability of membership function is enhanced by increasing the amount of sample discrimination information, which improves the robustness of the method to noise and the outlier. A large number of experimental results on the three real datasets (i.e., DEAP, SEED, and SEED-IV) show that the proposed method improves the reliability and robustness of the EEG-based emotion recognition.

Dan Yufang, Tao Jianwen, Fu Jianjing, Zhou Di

2021

electroencephalogram, emotion recognition, fuzzy entropy, membership function, semi-supervised classification

Public Health Public Health

Serverless Workflows for Containerised Applications in the Cloud Continuum.

In Journal of grid computing

This paper introduces an open-source platform to support serverless computing for scientific data-processing workflow-based applications across the Cloud continuum (i.e. simultaneously involving both on-premises and public Cloud platforms to process data captured at the edge). This is achieved via dynamic resource provisioning for FaaS platforms compatible with scale-to-zero approaches that minimise resource usage and cost for dynamic workloads with different elasticity requirements. The platform combines the usage of dynamically deployed auto-scaled Kubernetes clusters on on-premises Clouds and automated Cloud bursting into AWS Lambda to achieve higher levels of elasticity. A use case in public health for smart cities is used to assess the platform, in charge of detecting people not wearing face masks from captured videos. Faces are blurred for enhanced anonymity in the on-premises Cloud and detection via Deep Learning models is performed in AWS Lambda for this data-driven containerised workflow. The results indicate that hybrid workflows across the Cloud continuum can efficiently perform local data processing for enhanced regulations compliance and perform Cloud bursting for increased levels of elasticity.

Risco Sebastián, Moltó Germán, Naranjo Diana M, Blanquer Ignacio

2021

Cloud computing, Containers, Serverless computing, Workflow