Group-specific discriminant analysis reveals statistically validated sex differences in lateralization of brain functional network

Lateralization is a fundamental feature of the human brain, where sex differences have been observed. Conventional studies in neuroscience on sex-specific lateralization are typically conducted on univariate statistical comparisons between male and female groups. However, these analyses often lack effective validation of group specificity. Here, we formulate modeling sex differences in lateralization of functional networks as a dual-classification problem, consisting of first-order classification for left vs. right functional networks and second-order classification for male vs. female models. To capture sex-specific patterns, we develop the Group-Specific Discriminant Analysis (GSDA) for first-order classification. The evaluation on two public neuroimaging datasets demonstrates the efficacy of GSDA in learning sex-specific models from functional networks, achieving a significant improvement in group specificity over baseline methods. The major sex differences are in the strength of lateralization and the interactions within and between lobes. The GSDA-based method is generic in nature and can be adapted to other group-specific analyses such as handedness-specific or disease-specific analyses.

Interpretable Multimodal Learning for Cardiovascular Hemodynamics Assessment

Pulmonary Arterial Wedge Pressure (PAWP) is an essential cardiovascular hemodynamics marker to detect heart failure. In clinical practice, Right Heart Catheterization is considered a gold standard for assessing cardiac hemodynamics while non-invasive methods are often needed to screen high-risk patients from a large population. In this paper, we propose a multimodal learning pipeline to predict PAWP marker. We utilize complementary information from Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CMR) scans (short-axis and four-chamber) and Electronic Health Records (EHRs). We extract spatio-temporal features from CMR scans using tensor-based learning. We propose a graph attention network to select important EHR features for prediction, where we model subjects as graph nodes and feature relationships as graph edges using the attention mechanism. We design four feature fusion strategies: early, intermediate, late, and hybrid fusion. With a linear classifier and linear fusion strategies, our pipeline is interpretable. We validate our pipeline on a large dataset of $2,641$ subjects from our ASPIRE registry. The comparative study against state-of-the-art methods confirms the superiority of our pipeline. The decision curve analysis further validates that our pipeline can be applied to screen a large population. The code is available at https://github.com/prasunc/hemodynamics.

Multimodal Variational Autoencoder for Low-cost Cardiac Hemodynamics Instability Detection

Recent advancements in non-invasive detection of cardiac hemodynamic instability (CHDI) primarily focus on applying machine learning techniques to a single data modality, e.g. cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Despite their potential, these approaches often fall short especially when the size of labeled patient data is limited, a common challenge in the medical domain. Furthermore, only a few studies have explored multimodal methods to study CHDI, which mostly rely on costly modalities such as cardiac MRI and echocardiogram. In response to these limitations, we propose a novel multimodal variational autoencoder ($\text{CardioVAE}_\text{X,G}$) to integrate low-cost chest X-ray (CXR) and electrocardiogram (ECG) modalities with pre-training on a large unlabeled dataset. Specifically, $\text{CardioVAE}_\text{X,G}$ introduces a novel tri-stream pre-training strategy to learn both shared and modality-specific features, thus enabling fine-tuning with both unimodal and multimodal datasets. We pre-train $\text{CardioVAE}_\text{X,G}$ on a large, unlabeled dataset of $50,982$ subjects from a subset of MIMIC database and then fine-tune the pre-trained model on a labeled dataset of $795$ subjects from the ASPIRE registry. Comprehensive evaluations against existing methods show that $\text{CardioVAE}_\text{X,G}$ offers promising performance (AUROC $=0.79$ and Accuracy $=0.77$), representing a significant step forward in non-invasive prediction of CHDI. Our model also excels in producing fine interpretations of predictions directly associated with clinical features, thereby supporting clinical decision-making.

MeDSLIP: Medical Dual-Stream Language-Image Pre-training for Fine-grained Alignment

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) models have shown significant advancements in the medical domain. Yet, most VLP models align raw reports to images at a very coarse level, without modeling fine-grained relationships between anatomical and pathological concepts outlined in reports and the corresponding semantic counterparts in images. To address this problem, we propose a Medical Dual-Stream Language-Image Pre-training (MeDSLIP) framework. Specifically, MeDSLIP establishes vision-language fine-grained alignments via disentangling visual and textual representations into anatomy-relevant and pathology-relevant streams. Moreover, a novel vision-language Prototypical Contr-astive Learning (ProtoCL) method is adopted in MeDSLIP to enhance the alignment within the anatomical and pathological streams. MeDSLIP further employs cross-stream Intra-image Contrastive Learning (ICL) to ensure the consistent coexistence of paired anatomical and pathological concepts within the same image. Such a cross-stream regularization encourages the model to exploit the synchrony between two streams for a more comprehensive representation learning. MeDSLIP is evaluated under zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning settings on three public datasets: NIH CXR14, RSNA Pneumonia, and SIIM-ACR Pneumothorax. Under these settings, MeDSLIP outperforms six leading CNN-based models on classification, grounding, and segmentation tasks.

Tensor-based Multimodal Learning for Prediction of Pulmonary Arterial Wedge Pressure from Cardiac MRI

Heart failure is a serious and life-threatening condition that can lead to elevated pressure in the left ventricle. Pulmonary Arterial Wedge Pressure (PAWP) is an important surrogate marker indicating high pressure in the left ventricle. PAWP is determined by Right Heart Catheterization (RHC) but it is an invasive procedure. A non-invasive method is useful in quickly identifying high-risk patients from a large population. In this work, we develop a tensor learning-based pipeline for identifying PAWP from multimodal cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). This pipeline extracts spatial and temporal features from high-dimensional scans. For quality control, we incorporate an epistemic uncertainty-based binning strategy to identify poor-quality training samples. To improve the performance, we learn complementary information by integrating features from multimodal data: cardiac MRI with short-axis and four-chamber views, and Electronic Health Records. The experimental analysis on a large cohort of $1346$ subjects who underwent the RHC procedure for PAWP estimation indicates that the proposed pipeline has a diagnostic value and can produce promising performance with significant improvement over the baseline in clinical practice (i.e., $\Delta$AUC $=0.10$, $\Delta$Accuracy $=0.06$, and $\Delta$MCC $=0.39$). The decision curve analysis further confirms the clinical utility of our method.

A Machine Learning Method for Material Property Prediction: Example Polymer Compatibility

Prediction of material property is a key problem because of its significance to material design and screening. We present a brand-new and general machine learning method for material property prediction. As a representative example, polymer compatibility is chosen to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, we mine data from related literature to build a specific database and give a prediction based on the basic molecular structures of blending polymers and, as auxiliary, the blending composition. Our model obtains at least 75% accuracy on the dataset consisting of thousands of entries. We demonstrate that the relationship between structure and properties can be learned and simulated by machine learning method.

Channel-Temporal Attention for First-Person Video Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can transfer knowledge from labeled source data to unlabeled target data of the same categories. However, UDA for first-person action recognition is an under-explored problem, with lack of datasets and limited consideration of first-person video characteristics. This paper focuses on addressing this problem. Firstly, we propose two small-scale first-person video domain adaptation datasets: ADL$_{small}$ and GTEA-KITCHEN. Secondly, we introduce channel-temporal attention blocks to capture the channel-wise and temporal-wise relationships and model their inter-dependencies important to first-person vision. Finally, we propose a Channel-Temporal Attention Network (CTAN) to integrate these blocks into existing architectures. CTAN outperforms baselines on the two proposed datasets and one existing dataset EPIC$_{cvpr20}$.

A Behavior-aware Graph Convolution Network Model for Video Recommendation

Interactions between users and videos are the major data source of performing video recommendation. Despite lots of existing recommendation methods, user behaviors on videos, which imply the complex relations between users and videos, are still far from being fully explored. In the paper, we present a model named Sagittarius. Sagittarius adopts a graph convolutional neural network to capture the influence between users and videos. In particular, Sagittarius differentiates between different user behaviors by weighting and fuses the semantics of user behaviors into the embeddings of users and videos. Moreover, Sagittarius combines multiple optimization objectives to learn user and video embeddings and then achieves the video recommendation by the learned user and video embeddings. The experimental results on multiple datasets show that Sagittarius outperforms several state-of-the-art models in terms of recall, unique recall and NDCG.

Team PyKale (xy9) Submission to the EPIC-Kitchens 2021 Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Challenge for Action Recognition

This report describes the technical details of our submission to the EPIC-Kitchens 2021 Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Challenge for Action Recognition. The EPIC-Kitchens dataset is more difficult than other video domain adaptation datasets due to multi-tasks with more modalities. Firstly, to participate in the challenge, we employ a transformer to capture the spatial information from each modality. Secondly, we employ a temporal attention module to model temporal-wise inter-dependency. Thirdly, we employ the adversarial domain adaptation network to learn the general features between labeled source and unlabeled target domain. Finally, we incorporate multiple modalities to improve the performance by a three-stream network with late fusion. Our network achieves the comparable performance with the state-of-the-art baseline T$A^3$N and outperforms the baseline on top-1 accuracy for verb class and top-5 accuracies for all three tasks which are verb, noun and action. Under the team name xy9, our submission achieved 5th place in terms of top-1 accuracy for verb class and all top-5 accuracies.

PyKale: Knowledge-Aware Machine Learning from Multiple Sources in Python

Machine learning is a general-purpose technology holding promises for many interdisciplinary research problems. However, significant barriers exist in crossing disciplinary boundaries when most machine learning tools are developed in different areas separately. We present Pykale - a Python library for knowledge-aware machine learning on graphs, images, texts, and videos to enable and accelerate interdisciplinary research. We formulate new green machine learning guidelines based on standard software engineering practices and propose a novel pipeline-based application programming interface (API). PyKale focuses on leveraging knowledge from multiple sources for accurate and interpretable prediction, thus supporting multimodal learning and transfer learning (particularly domain adaptation) with latest deep learning and dimensionality reduction models. We build PyKale on PyTorch and leverage the rich PyTorch ecosystem. Our pipeline-based API design enforces standardization and minimalism, embracing green machine learning concepts via reducing repetitions and redundancy, reusing existing resources, and recycling learning models across areas. We demonstrate its interdisciplinary nature via examples in bioinformatics, knowledge graph, image/video recognition, and medical imaging.