A Non-Monotone Preconditioned Trust-Region Method for Neural Network Training

Training deep neural networks at scale can benefit from domain decomposition, where the network is split into subdomains trained in parallel and coupled by a global trust-region mechanism. Building on the Additively Preconditioned Trust-Region Strategy (APTS), we propose a non-monotone variant with a nonlinear additive Schwarz preconditioner that combines parallel subdomain corrections with global coarse-space directions. A windowed acceptance criterion allows controlled objective increases, avoiding needless rejection of effective coarse steps. The resulting non-monotone APTS (NAPTS) preserves accuracy while reducing CPU time by 30\% and cutting rejected steps to one third of those in APTS.

Protect the Brain When Treating the Heart: A Convolutional Neural Network for Detecting Emboli

Gaseous microemboli (GME) represent a common complication of cardiac structural interventions across both surgical and transcatheter approaches. Transthoracic cardiac ultrasound imaging represents a convenient methodology to visualize the presence of circulating GME. However, their detection and quantification are far from trivial due to operator-dependent view, high velocity, and objects with similar structure in the background. Here, we propose an approach based on a 2.5D U-Net architecture to segment GME in space-time connected data. Such an approach yields robust detection against the background and high segmentation accuracy while retaining real-time execution speed. These properties facilitated the integration of the proposed pipeline into patient-monitoring surgical protocols, providing the quantification of GME area over time.