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Description
Surgery as a profession requires significant training to improve both clinical decision making and psychomotor proficiency. In the medical knowledge domain, tools have been developed, validated, and accepted for evaluation of surgeons' competencies. However, assessment of the psychomotor skills still relies on the Halstedian model of apprenticeship, wherein surgeons are

Surgery as a profession requires significant training to improve both clinical decision making and psychomotor proficiency. In the medical knowledge domain, tools have been developed, validated, and accepted for evaluation of surgeons' competencies. However, assessment of the psychomotor skills still relies on the Halstedian model of apprenticeship, wherein surgeons are observed during residency for judgment of their skills. Although the value of this method of skills assessment cannot be ignored, novel methodologies of objective skills assessment need to be designed, developed, and evaluated that augment the traditional approach. Several sensor-based systems have been developed to measure a user's skill quantitatively, but use of sensors could interfere with skill execution and thus limit the potential for evaluating real-life surgery. However, having a method to judge skills automatically in real-life conditions should be the ultimate goal, since only with such features that a system would be widely adopted. This research proposes a novel video-based approach for observing surgeons' hand and surgical tool movements in minimally invasive surgical training exercises as well as during laparoscopic surgery. Because our system does not require surgeons to wear special sensors, it has the distinct advantage over alternatives of offering skills assessment in both learning and real-life environments. The system automatically detects major skill-measuring features from surgical task videos using a computing system composed of a series of computer vision algorithms and provides on-screen real-time performance feedback for more efficient skill learning. Finally, the machine-learning approach is used to develop an observer-independent composite scoring model through objective and quantitative measurement of surgical skills. To increase effectiveness and usability of the developed system, it is integrated with a cloud-based tool, which automatically assesses surgical videos upload to the cloud.
ContributorsIslam, Gazi (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Liang, Jianming (Thesis advisor) / Dinu, Valentin (Committee member) / Greenes, Robert (Committee member) / Smith, Marshall (Committee member) / Kahol, Kanav (Committee member) / Patel, Vimla L. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
In many fields one needs to build predictive models for a set of related machine learning tasks, such as information retrieval, computer vision and biomedical informatics. Traditionally these tasks are treated independently and the inference is done separately for each task, which ignores important connections among the tasks. Multi-task learning

In many fields one needs to build predictive models for a set of related machine learning tasks, such as information retrieval, computer vision and biomedical informatics. Traditionally these tasks are treated independently and the inference is done separately for each task, which ignores important connections among the tasks. Multi-task learning aims at simultaneously building models for all tasks in order to improve the generalization performance, leveraging inherent relatedness of these tasks. In this thesis, I firstly propose a clustered multi-task learning (CMTL) formulation, which simultaneously learns task models and performs task clustering. I provide theoretical analysis to establish the equivalence between the CMTL formulation and the alternating structure optimization, which learns a shared low-dimensional hypothesis space for different tasks. Then I present two real-world biomedical informatics applications which can benefit from multi-task learning. In the first application, I study the disease progression problem and present multi-task learning formulations for disease progression. In the formulations, the prediction at each point is a regression task and multiple tasks at different time points are learned simultaneously, leveraging the temporal smoothness among the tasks. The proposed formulations have been tested extensively on predicting the progression of the Alzheimer's disease, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models. In the second application, I present a novel data-driven framework for densifying the electronic medical records (EMR) to overcome the sparsity problem in predictive modeling using EMR. The densification of each patient is a learning task, and the proposed algorithm simultaneously densify all patients. As such, the densification of one patient leverages useful information from other patients.
ContributorsZhou, Jiayu (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Mittelmann, Hans (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Many learning models have been proposed for various tasks in visual computing. Popular examples include hidden Markov models and support vector machines. Recently, sparse-representation-based learning methods have attracted a lot of attention in the computer vision field, largely because of their impressive performance in many applications. In the literature, many

Many learning models have been proposed for various tasks in visual computing. Popular examples include hidden Markov models and support vector machines. Recently, sparse-representation-based learning methods have attracted a lot of attention in the computer vision field, largely because of their impressive performance in many applications. In the literature, many of such sparse learning methods focus on designing or application of some learning techniques for certain feature space without much explicit consideration on possible interaction between the underlying semantics of the visual data and the employed learning technique. Rich semantic information in most visual data, if properly incorporated into algorithm design, should help achieving improved performance while delivering intuitive interpretation of the algorithmic outcomes. My study addresses the problem of how to explicitly consider the semantic information of the visual data in the sparse learning algorithms. In this work, we identify four problems which are of great importance and broad interest to the community. Specifically, a novel approach is proposed to incorporate label information to learn a dictionary which is not only reconstructive but also discriminative; considering the formation process of face images, a novel image decomposition approach for an ensemble of correlated images is proposed, where a subspace is built from the decomposition and applied to face recognition; based on the observation that, the foreground (or salient) objects are sparse in input domain and the background is sparse in frequency domain, a novel and efficient spatio-temporal saliency detection algorithm is proposed to identify the salient regions in video; and a novel hidden Markov model learning approach is proposed by utilizing a sparse set of pairwise comparisons among the data, which is easier to obtain and more meaningful, consistent than tradition labels, in many scenarios, e.g., evaluating motion skills in surgical simulations. In those four problems, different types of semantic information are modeled and incorporated in designing sparse learning algorithms for the corresponding visual computing tasks. Several real world applications are selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, including, face recognition, spatio-temporal saliency detection, abnormality detection, spatio-temporal interest point detection, motion analysis and emotion recognition. In those applications, data of different modalities are involved, ranging from audio signal, image to video. Experiments on large scale real world data with comparisons to state-of-art methods confirm the proposed approaches deliver salient advantages, showing adding those semantic information dramatically improve the performances of the general sparse learning methods.
ContributorsZhang, Qiang (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
As a promising solution to the problem of acquiring and storing large amounts of image and video data, spatial-multiplexing camera architectures have received lot of attention in the recent past. Such architectures have the attractive feature of combining a two-step process of acquisition and compression of pixel measurements in a

As a promising solution to the problem of acquiring and storing large amounts of image and video data, spatial-multiplexing camera architectures have received lot of attention in the recent past. Such architectures have the attractive feature of combining a two-step process of acquisition and compression of pixel measurements in a conventional camera, into a single step. A popular variant is the single-pixel camera that obtains measurements of the scene using a pseudo-random measurement matrix. Advances in compressive sensing (CS) theory in the past decade have supplied the tools that, in theory, allow near-perfect reconstruction of an image from these measurements even for sub-Nyquist sampling rates. However, current state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms suffer from two drawbacks -- They are (1) computationally very expensive and (2) incapable of yielding high fidelity reconstructions for high compression ratios. In computer vision, the final goal is usually to perform an inference task using the images acquired and not signal recovery. With this motivation, this thesis considers the possibility of inference directly from compressed measurements, thereby obviating the need to use expensive reconstruction algorithms. It is often the case that non-linear features are used for inference tasks in computer vision. However, currently, it is unclear how to extract such features from compressed measurements. Instead, using the theoretical basis provided by the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, discriminative features using smashed correlation filters are derived and it is shown that it is indeed possible to perform reconstruction-free inference at high compression ratios with only a marginal loss in accuracy. As a specific inference problem in computer vision, face recognition is considered, mainly beyond the visible spectrum such as in the short wave infra-red region (SWIR), where sensors are expensive.
ContributorsLohit, Suhas Anand (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Gallium-based liquid metals are of interest for a variety of applications including flexible electronics, soft robotics, and biomedical devices. Still, nano- to microscale device fabrication with these materials is challenging because of their strong adhesion to a majority of substrates. This unusual high adhesion is attributed to the formation of

Gallium-based liquid metals are of interest for a variety of applications including flexible electronics, soft robotics, and biomedical devices. Still, nano- to microscale device fabrication with these materials is challenging because of their strong adhesion to a majority of substrates. This unusual high adhesion is attributed to the formation of a thin oxide shell; however, its role in the adhesion process has not yet been established. In the first part of the thesis, we described a multiscale study aiming at understanding the fundamental mechanisms governing wetting and adhesion of gallium-based liquid metals. In particular, macroscale dynamic contact angle measurements were coupled with Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) imaging to relate macroscopic drop adhesion to morphology of the liquid metal-surface interface. In addition, room temperature liquid-metal microfluidic devices are also attractive systems for hyperelastic strain sensing. Currently two types of liquid metal-based strain sensors exist for inplane measurements: single-microchannel resistive and two-microchannel capacitive devices. However, with a winding serpentine channel geometry, these sensors typically have a footprint of about a square centimeter, limiting the number of sensors that can be embedded into. In the second part of the thesis, firstly, simulations and an experimental setup consisting of two GaInSn filled tubes submerged within a dielectric liquid bath are used to quantify the effects of the cylindrical electrode geometry including diameter, spacing, and meniscus shape as well as dielectric constant of the insulating liquid and the presence of tubing on the overall system's capacitance. Furthermore, a procedure for fabricating the two-liquid capacitor within a single straight polydiemethylsiloxane channel is developed. Lastly, capacitance and response of this compact device to strain and operational issues arising from complex hydrodynamics near liquid-liquid and liquid-elastomer interfaces are described.
ContributorsLiu, Shanliangzi (Author) / Rykaczewski, Konrad (Thesis advisor) / Alford, Terry (Committee member) / Herrmann, Marcus (Committee member) / Hildreth, Owen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Nanostructured materials show signicant enhancement in the thermoelectric g-

ure of merit (zT) due to quantum connement eects. Improving the eciency of

thermoelectric devices allows for the development of better, more economical waste

heat recovery systems. Such systems may be used as bottoming or co-generation

cycles in conjunction with conventional power cycles to recover

Nanostructured materials show signicant enhancement in the thermoelectric g-

ure of merit (zT) due to quantum connement eects. Improving the eciency of

thermoelectric devices allows for the development of better, more economical waste

heat recovery systems. Such systems may be used as bottoming or co-generation

cycles in conjunction with conventional power cycles to recover some of the wasted

heat. Thermal conductivity measurement systems are an important part of the char-

acterization processes of thermoelectric materials. These systems must possess the

capability of accurately measuring the thermal conductivity of both bulk and thin-lm

samples at dierent ambient temperatures.

This paper discusses the construction, validation, and improvement of a thermal

conductivity measurement platform based on the 3-Omega technique. Room temperature

measurements of thermal conductivity done on control samples with known properties

such as undoped bulk silicon (Si), bulk gallium arsenide (GaAs), and silicon dioxide

(SiO2) thin lms yielded 150 W=m􀀀K, 50 W=m􀀀K, and 1:46 W=m􀀀K respectively.

These quantities were all within 8% of literature values. In addition, the thermal

conductivity of bulk SiO2 was measured as a function of temperature in a Helium-

4 cryostat from 75K to 250K. The results showed good agreement with literature

values that all fell within the error range of each measurement. The uncertainty in

the measurements ranged from 19% at 75K to 30% at 250K. Finally, the system

was used to measure the room temperature thermal conductivity of a nanocomposite

composed of cadmium selenide, CdSe, nanocrystals in an indium selenide, In2Se3,

matrix as a function of the concentration of In2Se3. The observed trend was in

qualitative agreement with the expected behavior.

i
ContributorsJaber, Abbas (Author) / Wang, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Liping (Committee member) / Rykaczewski, Konrad (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Multi-label learning, which deals with data associated with multiple labels simultaneously, is ubiquitous in real-world applications. To overcome the curse of dimensionality in multi-label learning, in this thesis I study multi-label dimensionality reduction, which extracts a small number of features by removing the irrelevant, redundant, and noisy information while considering

Multi-label learning, which deals with data associated with multiple labels simultaneously, is ubiquitous in real-world applications. To overcome the curse of dimensionality in multi-label learning, in this thesis I study multi-label dimensionality reduction, which extracts a small number of features by removing the irrelevant, redundant, and noisy information while considering the correlation among different labels in multi-label learning. Specifically, I propose Hypergraph Spectral Learning (HSL) to perform dimensionality reduction for multi-label data by exploiting correlations among different labels using a hypergraph. The regularization effect on the classical dimensionality reduction algorithm known as Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is elucidated in this thesis. The relationship between CCA and Orthonormalized Partial Least Squares (OPLS) is also investigated. To perform dimensionality reduction efficiently for large-scale problems, two efficient implementations are proposed for a class of dimensionality reduction algorithms, including canonical correlation analysis, orthonormalized partial least squares, linear discriminant analysis, and hypergraph spectral learning. The first approach is a direct least squares approach which allows the use of different regularization penalties, but is applicable under a certain assumption; the second one is a two-stage approach which can be applied in the regularization setting without any assumption. Furthermore, an online implementation for the same class of dimensionality reduction algorithms is proposed when the data comes sequentially. A Matlab toolbox for multi-label dimensionality reduction has been developed and released. The proposed algorithms have been applied successfully in the Drosophila gene expression pattern image annotation. The experimental results on some benchmark data sets in multi-label learning also demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.
ContributorsSun, Liang (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Mittelmann, Hans D. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
In many classication problems data samples cannot be collected easily, example in drug trials, biological experiments and study on cancer patients. In many situations the data set size is small and there are many outliers. When classifying such data, example cancer vs normal patients the consequences of mis-classication are probably

In many classication problems data samples cannot be collected easily, example in drug trials, biological experiments and study on cancer patients. In many situations the data set size is small and there are many outliers. When classifying such data, example cancer vs normal patients the consequences of mis-classication are probably more important than any other data type, because the data point could be a cancer patient or the classication decision could help determine what gene might be over expressed and perhaps a cause of cancer. These mis-classications are typically higher in the presence of outlier data points. The aim of this thesis is to develop a maximum margin classier that is suited to address the lack of robustness of discriminant based classiers (like the Support Vector Machine (SVM)) to noise and outliers. The underlying notion is to adopt and develop a natural loss function that is more robust to outliers and more representative of the true loss function of the data. It is demonstrated experimentally that SVM's are indeed susceptible to outliers and that the new classier developed, here coined as Robust-SVM (RSVM), is superior to all studied classier on the synthetic datasets. It is superior to the SVM in both the synthetic and experimental data from biomedical studies and is competent to a classier derived on similar lines when real life data examples are considered.
ContributorsGupta, Sidharth (Author) / Kim, Seungchan (Thesis advisor) / Welfert, Bruno (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Real-world environments are characterized by non-stationary and continuously evolving data. Learning a classification model on this data would require a framework that is able to adapt itself to newer circumstances. Under such circumstances, transfer learning has come to be a dependable methodology for improving classification performance with reduced training costs

Real-world environments are characterized by non-stationary and continuously evolving data. Learning a classification model on this data would require a framework that is able to adapt itself to newer circumstances. Under such circumstances, transfer learning has come to be a dependable methodology for improving classification performance with reduced training costs and without the need for explicit relearning from scratch. In this thesis, a novel instance transfer technique that adapts a "Cost-sensitive" variation of AdaBoost is presented. The method capitalizes on the theoretical and functional properties of AdaBoost to selectively reuse outdated training instances obtained from a "source" domain to effectively classify unseen instances occurring in a different, but related "target" domain. The algorithm is evaluated on real-world classification problems namely accelerometer based 3D gesture recognition, smart home activity recognition and text categorization. The performance on these datasets is analyzed and evaluated against popular boosting-based instance transfer techniques. In addition, supporting empirical studies, that investigate some of the less explored bottlenecks of boosting based instance transfer methods, are presented, to understand the suitability and effectiveness of this form of knowledge transfer.
ContributorsVenkatesan, Ashok (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
With the advent of Internet, the data being added online is increasing at enormous rate. Though search engines are using IR techniques to facilitate the search requests from users, the results are not effective towards the search query of the user. The search engine user has to go through certain

With the advent of Internet, the data being added online is increasing at enormous rate. Though search engines are using IR techniques to facilitate the search requests from users, the results are not effective towards the search query of the user. The search engine user has to go through certain webpages before getting at the webpage he/she wanted. This problem of Information Overload can be solved using Automatic Text Summarization. Summarization is a process of obtaining at abridged version of documents so that user can have a quick view to understand what exactly the document is about. Email threads from W3C are used in this system. Apart from common IR features like Term Frequency, Inverse Document Frequency, Term Rank, a variation of page rank based on graph model, which can cluster the words with respective to word ambiguity, is implemented. Term Rank also considers the possibility of co-occurrence of words with the corpus and evaluates the rank of the word accordingly. Sentences of email threads are ranked as per features and summaries are generated. System implemented the concept of pyramid evaluation in content selection. The system can be considered as a framework for Unsupervised Learning in text summarization.
ContributorsNadella, Sravan (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Sen, Arunabha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015