Using Convolutional Variational Autoencoders to Predict Post-Trauma Health Outcomes from Actigraphy Data

Depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are psychiatric conditions commonly associated with experiencing a traumatic event. Estimating mental health status through non-invasive techniques such as activity-based algorithms can help to identify successful early interventions. In this work, we used locomotor activity captured from 1113 individuals who wore a research grade smartwatch post-trauma. A convolutional variational autoencoder (VAE) architecture was used for unsupervised feature extraction from four weeks of actigraphy data. By using VAE latent variables and the participant's pre-trauma physical health status as features, a logistic regression classifier achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.64 to estimate mental health outcomes. The results indicate that the VAE model is a promising approach for actigraphy data analysis for mental health outcomes in long-term studies.

Addressing Class Imbalance in Classification Problems of Noisy Signals by using Fourier Transform Surrogates

Randomizing the Fourier-transform (FT) phases of temporal-spatial data generates surrogates that approximate examples from the data-generating distribution. We propose such FT surrogates as a novel tool to augment and analyze training of neural networks and explore the approach in the example of sleep-stage classification. By computing FT surrogates of raw EEG, EOG, and EMG signals of under-represented sleep stages, we balanced the CAPSLPDB sleep database. We then trained and tested a convolutional neural network for sleep stage classification, and found that our surrogate-based augmentation improved the mean F1-score by 7%. As another application of FT surrogates, we formulated an approach to compute saliency maps for individual sleep epochs. The visualization is based on the response of inferred class probabilities under replacement of short data segments by partial surrogates. To quantify how well the distributions of the surrogates and the original data match, we evaluated a trained classifier on surrogates of correctly classified examples, and summarized these conditional predictions in a confusion matrix. We show how such conditional confusion matrices can qualitatively explain the performance of surrogates in class balancing. The FT-surrogate augmentation approach may improve classification on noisy signals if carefully adapted to the data distribution under analysis.

Detection of Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation using Attention-based Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks

Detection of atrial fibrillation (AF), a type of cardiac arrhythmia, is difficult since many cases of AF are usually clinically silent and undiagnosed. In particular paroxysmal AF is a form of AF that occurs occasionally, and has a higher probability of being undetected. In this work, we present an attention based deep learning framework for detection of paroxysmal AF episodes from a sequence of windows. Time-frequency representation of 30 seconds recording windows, over a 10 minute data segment, are fed sequentially into a deep convolutional neural network for image-based feature extraction, which are then presented to a bidirectional recurrent neural network with an attention layer for AF detection. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for transient AF detection, we use a database of 24 hour Holter Electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings acquired from 2850 patients at the University of Virginia heart station. The algorithm achieves an AUC of 0.94 on the testing set, which exceeds the performance of baseline models. We also demonstrate the cross-domain generalizablity of the approach by adapting the learned model parameters from one recording modality (ECG) to another (photoplethysmogram) with improved AF detection performance. The proposed high accuracy, low false alarm algorithm for detecting paroxysmal AF has potential applications in long-term monitoring using wearable sensors.

Fusing Continuous-valued Medical Labels using a Bayesian Model

With the rapid increase in volume of time series medical data available through wearable devices, there is a need to employ automated algorithms to label data. Examples of labels include interventions, changes in activity (e.g. sleep) and changes in physiology (e.g. arrhythmias). However, automated algorithms tend to be unreliable resulting in lower quality care. Expert annotations are scarce, expensive, and prone to significant inter- and intra-observer variance. To address these problems, a Bayesian Continuous-valued Label Aggregator(BCLA) is proposed to provide a reliable estimation of label aggregation while accurately infer the precision and bias of each algorithm. The BCLA was applied to QT interval (pro-arrhythmic indicator) estimation from the electrocardiogram using labels from the 2006 PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge database. It was compared to the mean, median, and a previously proposed Expectation Maximization (EM) label aggregation approaches. While accurately predicting each labelling algorithm's bias and precision, the root-mean-square error of the BCLA was 11.78$\pm$0.63ms, significantly outperforming the best Challenge entry (15.37$\pm$2.13ms) as well as the EM, mean, and median voting strategies (14.76$\pm$0.52ms, 17.61$\pm$0.55ms, and 14.43$\pm$0.57ms respectively with $p<0.0001$).