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The healthcare system in this country is currently unacceptable. New technologies may contribute to reducing cost and improving outcomes. Early diagnosis and treatment represents the least risky option for addressing this issue. Such a technology needs to be inexpensive, highly sensitive, highly specific, and amenable to adoption in a clinic.

The healthcare system in this country is currently unacceptable. New technologies may contribute to reducing cost and improving outcomes. Early diagnosis and treatment represents the least risky option for addressing this issue. Such a technology needs to be inexpensive, highly sensitive, highly specific, and amenable to adoption in a clinic. This thesis explores an immunodiagnostic technology based on highly scalable, non-natural sequence peptide microarrays designed to profile the humoral immune response and address the healthcare problem. The primary aim of this thesis is to explore the ability of these arrays to map continuous (linear) epitopes. I discovered that using a technique termed subsequence analysis where epitopes could be decisively mapped to an eliciting protein with high success rate. This led to the discovery of novel linear epitopes from Plasmodium falciparum (Malaria) and Treponema palladium (Syphilis), as well as validation of previously discovered epitopes in Dengue and monoclonal antibodies. Next, I developed and tested a classification scheme based on Support Vector Machines for development of a Dengue Fever diagnostic, achieving higher sensitivity and specificity than current FDA approved techniques. The software underlying this method is available for download under the BSD license. Following this, I developed a kinetic model for immunosignatures and tested it against existing data driven by previously unexplained phenomena. This model provides a framework and informs ways to optimize the platform for maximum stability and efficiency. I also explored the role of sequence composition in explaining an immunosignature binding profile, determining a strong role for charged residues that seems to have some predictive ability for disease. Finally, I developed a database, software and indexing strategy based on Apache Lucene for searching motif patterns (regular expressions) in large biological databases. These projects as a whole have advanced knowledge of how to approach high throughput immunodiagnostics and provide an example of how technology can be fused with biology in order to affect scientific and health outcomes.
ContributorsRicher, Joshua Amos (Author) / Johnston, Stephen A. (Thesis advisor) / Woodbury, Neal (Committee member) / Stafford, Phillip (Committee member) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
The performance of most of the visual computing tasks depends on the quality of the features extracted from the raw data. Insightful feature representation increases the performance of many learning algorithms by exposing the underlying explanatory factors of the output for the unobserved input. A good representation should also handle

The performance of most of the visual computing tasks depends on the quality of the features extracted from the raw data. Insightful feature representation increases the performance of many learning algorithms by exposing the underlying explanatory factors of the output for the unobserved input. A good representation should also handle anomalies in the data such as missing samples and noisy input caused by the undesired, external factors of variation. It should also reduce the data redundancy. Over the years, many feature extraction processes have been invented to produce good representations of raw images and videos.

The feature extraction processes can be categorized into three groups. The first group contains processes that are hand-crafted for a specific task. Hand-engineering features requires the knowledge of domain experts and manual labor. However, the feature extraction process is interpretable and explainable. Next group contains the latent-feature extraction processes. While the original feature lies in a high-dimensional space, the relevant factors for a task often lie on a lower dimensional manifold. The latent-feature extraction employs hidden variables to expose the underlying data properties that cannot be directly measured from the input. Latent features seek a specific structure such as sparsity or low-rank into the derived representation through sophisticated optimization techniques. The last category is that of deep features. These are obtained by passing raw input data with minimal pre-processing through a deep network. Its parameters are computed by iteratively minimizing a task-based loss.

In this dissertation, I present four pieces of work where I create and learn suitable data representations. The first task employs hand-crafted features to perform clinically-relevant retrieval of diabetic retinopathy images. The second task uses latent features to perform content-adaptive image enhancement. The third task ranks a pair of images based on their aestheticism. The goal of the last task is to capture localized image artifacts in small datasets with patch-level labels. For both these tasks, I propose novel deep architectures and show significant improvement over the previous state-of-art approaches. A suitable combination of feature representations augmented with an appropriate learning approach can increase performance for most visual computing tasks.
ContributorsChandakkar, Parag Shridhar (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Handwritten documents have gained popularity in various domains including education and business. A key task in analyzing a complex document is to distinguish between various content types such as text, math, graphics, tables and so on. For example, one such aspect could be a region on the document with a

Handwritten documents have gained popularity in various domains including education and business. A key task in analyzing a complex document is to distinguish between various content types such as text, math, graphics, tables and so on. For example, one such aspect could be a region on the document with a mathematical expression; in this case, the label would be math. This differentiation facilitates the performance of specific recognition tasks depending on the content type. We hypothesize that the recognition accuracy of the subsequent tasks such as textual, math, and shape recognition will increase, further leading to a better analysis of the document.

Content detection on handwritten documents assigns a particular class to a homogeneous portion of the document. To complete this task, a set of handwritten solutions was digitally collected from middle school students located in two different geographical regions in 2017 and 2018. This research discusses the methods to collect, pre-process and detect content type in the collected handwritten documents. A total of 4049 documents were extracted in the form of image, and json format; and were labelled using an object labelling software with tags being text, math, diagram, cross out, table, graph, tick mark, arrow, and doodle. The labelled images were fed to the Tensorflow’s object detection API to learn a neural network model. We show our results from two neural networks models, Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN) and Single Shot detection model (SSD).
ContributorsFaizaan, Shaik Mohammed (Author) / VanLehn, Kurt (Thesis advisor) / Cheema, Salman Shaukat (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful methodology for teaching autonomous agents complex behaviors and skills. A critical component in most RL algorithms is the reward function -- a mathematical function that provides numerical estimates for desirable and undesirable states. Typically, the reward function must be hand-designed by a human expert

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful methodology for teaching autonomous agents complex behaviors and skills. A critical component in most RL algorithms is the reward function -- a mathematical function that provides numerical estimates for desirable and undesirable states. Typically, the reward function must be hand-designed by a human expert and, as a result, the scope of a robot's autonomy and ability to safely explore and learn in new and unforeseen environments is constrained by the specifics of the designed reward function. In this thesis, I design and implement a stateful collision anticipation model with powerful predictive capability based upon my research of sequential data modeling and modern recurrent neural networks. I also develop deep reinforcement learning methods whose rewards are generated by self-supervised training and intrinsic signals. The main objective is to work towards the development of resilient robots that can learn to anticipate and avoid damaging interactions by combining visual and proprioceptive cues from internal sensors. The introduced solutions are inspired by pain pathways in humans and animals, because such pathways are known to guide decision-making processes and promote self-preservation. A new "robot dodge ball' benchmark is introduced in order to test the validity of the developed algorithms in dynamic environments.
ContributorsRichardson, Trevor W (Author) / Ben Amor, Heni (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
This dissertation presents the development of structural health monitoring and prognostic health management methodologies for complex structures and systems in the field of mechanical engineering. To overcome various challenges historically associated with complex structures and systems such as complicated sensing mechanisms, noisy information, and large-size datasets, a hybrid monitoring framework

This dissertation presents the development of structural health monitoring and prognostic health management methodologies for complex structures and systems in the field of mechanical engineering. To overcome various challenges historically associated with complex structures and systems such as complicated sensing mechanisms, noisy information, and large-size datasets, a hybrid monitoring framework comprising of solid mechanics concepts and data mining technologies is developed. In such a framework, the solid mechanics simulations provide additional intuitions to data mining techniques reducing the dependence of accuracy on the training set, while the data mining approaches fuse and interpret information from the targeted system enabling the capability for real-time monitoring with efficient computation.

In the case of structural health monitoring, ultrasonic guided waves are utilized for damage identification and localization in complex composite structures. Signal processing and data mining techniques are integrated into the damage localization framework, and the converted wave modes, which are induced by the thickness variation due to the presence of delamination, are used as damage indicators. This framework has been validated through experiments and has shown sufficient accuracy in locating delamination in X-COR sandwich composites without the need of baseline information. Besides the localization of internal damage, the Gaussian process machine learning technique is integrated with finite element method as an online-offline prediction model to predict crack propagation with overloads under biaxial loading conditions; such a probabilistic prognosis model, with limited number of training examples, has shown increased accuracy over state-of-the-art techniques in predicting crack retardation behaviors induced by overloads. In the case of system level management, a monitoring framework built using a multivariate Gaussian model as basis is developed to evaluate the anomalous condition of commercial aircrafts. This method has been validated using commercial airline data and has shown high sensitivity to variations in aircraft dynamics and pilot operations. Moreover, this framework was also tested on simulated aircraft faults and its feasibility for real-time monitoring was demonstrated with sufficient computation efficiency.

This research is expected to serve as a practical addition to the existing literature while possessing the potential to be adopted in realistic engineering applications.
ContributorsLi, Guoyi (Ph.D.) (Author) / Chattopadhyay, Aditi (Thesis advisor) / Mignolet, Marc (Committee member) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Yekani Fard, Masoud (Committee member) / Jiang, Hanqing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
In the field of machine learning, reinforcement learning stands out for its ability to explore approaches to complex, high dimensional problems that outperform even expert humans. For robotic locomotion tasks reinforcement learning provides an approach to solving them without the need for unique controllers. In this thesis, two reinforcement learning

In the field of machine learning, reinforcement learning stands out for its ability to explore approaches to complex, high dimensional problems that outperform even expert humans. For robotic locomotion tasks reinforcement learning provides an approach to solving them without the need for unique controllers. In this thesis, two reinforcement learning algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient and Group Factor Policy Search are compared based upon their performance in the bipedal walking environment provided by OpenAI gym. These algorithms are evaluated on their performance in the environment and their sample efficiency.
ContributorsMcDonald, Dax (Author) / Ben Amor, Heni (Thesis director) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2018-12
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Description
Biological and biomedical measurements, when adequately analyzed and processed, can be used to impart quantitative diagnosis during primary health care consultation to improve patient adherence to recommended treatments. For example, analyzing neural recordings from neurostimulators implanted in patients with neurological disorders can be used by a physician to adjust detrimental

Biological and biomedical measurements, when adequately analyzed and processed, can be used to impart quantitative diagnosis during primary health care consultation to improve patient adherence to recommended treatments. For example, analyzing neural recordings from neurostimulators implanted in patients with neurological disorders can be used by a physician to adjust detrimental stimulation parameters to improve treatment. As another example, biosequences, such as sequences from peptide microarrays obtained from a biological sample, can potentially provide pre-symptomatic diagnosis for infectious diseases when processed to associate antibodies to specific pathogens or infectious agents. This work proposes advanced statistical signal processing and machine learning methodologies to assess neurostimulation from neural recordings and to extract diagnostic information from biosequences.

For locating specific cognitive and behavioral information in different regions of the brain, neural recordings are processed using sequential Bayesian filtering methods to detect and estimate both the number of neural sources and their corresponding parameters. Time-frequency based feature selection algorithms are combined with adaptive machine learning approaches to suppress physiological and non-physiological artifacts present in neural recordings. Adaptive processing and unsupervised clustering methods applied to neural recordings are also used to suppress neurostimulation artifacts and classify between various behavior tasks to assess the level of neurostimulation in patients.

For pathogen detection and identification, random peptide sequences and their properties are first uniquely mapped to highly-localized signals and their corresponding parameters in the time-frequency plane. Time-frequency signal processing methods are then applied to estimate antigenic determinants or epitope candidates for detecting and identifying potential pathogens.
ContributorsMaurer, Alexander Joseph (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
In the last 15 years, there has been a significant increase in the number of motor neural prostheses used for restoring limb function lost due to neurological disorders or accidents. The aim of this technology is to enable patients to control a motor prosthesis using their residual neural pathways (central

In the last 15 years, there has been a significant increase in the number of motor neural prostheses used for restoring limb function lost due to neurological disorders or accidents. The aim of this technology is to enable patients to control a motor prosthesis using their residual neural pathways (central or peripheral). Recent studies in non-human primates and humans have shown the possibility of controlling a prosthesis for accomplishing varied tasks such as self-feeding, typing, reaching, grasping, and performing fine dexterous movements. A neural decoding system comprises mainly of three components: (i) sensors to record neural signals, (ii) an algorithm to map neural recordings to upper limb kinematics and (iii) a prosthetic arm actuated by control signals generated by the algorithm. Machine learning algorithms that map input neural activity to the output kinematics (like finger trajectory) form the core of the neural decoding system. The choice of the algorithm is thus, mainly imposed by the neural signal of interest and the output parameter being decoded. The various parts of a neural decoding system are neural data, feature extraction, feature selection, and machine learning algorithm. There have been significant advances in the field of neural prosthetic applications. But there are challenges for translating a neural prosthesis from a laboratory setting to a clinical environment. To achieve a fully functional prosthetic device with maximum user compliance and acceptance, these factors need to be addressed and taken into consideration. Three challenges in developing robust neural decoding systems were addressed by exploring neural variability in the peripheral nervous system for dexterous finger movements, feature selection methods based on clinically relevant metrics and a novel method for decoding dexterous finger movements based on ensemble methods.
ContributorsPadmanaban, Subash (Author) / Greger, Bradley (Thesis advisor) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Helms Tillery, Stephen (Committee member) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Crook, Sharon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
The radar performance of detecting a target and estimating its parameters can deteriorate rapidly in the presence of high clutter. This is because radar measurements due to clutter returns can be falsely detected as if originating from the actual target. Various data association methods and multiple hypothesis filtering

The radar performance of detecting a target and estimating its parameters can deteriorate rapidly in the presence of high clutter. This is because radar measurements due to clutter returns can be falsely detected as if originating from the actual target. Various data association methods and multiple hypothesis filtering approaches have been considered to solve this problem. Such methods, however, can be computationally intensive for real time radar processing. This work proposes a new approach that is based on the unsupervised clustering of target and clutter detections before target tracking using particle filtering. In particular, Gaussian mixture modeling is first used to separate detections into two Gaussian distinct mixtures. Using eigenvector analysis, the eccentricity of the covariance matrices of the Gaussian mixtures are computed and compared to threshold values that are obtained a priori. The thresholding allows only target detections to be used for target tracking. Simulations demonstrate the performance of the new algorithm and compare it with using k-means for clustering instead of Gaussian mixture modeling.
ContributorsFreeman, Matthew Gregory (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Bliss, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Graph matching is a fundamental but notoriously difficult problem due to its NP-hard nature, and serves as a cornerstone for a series of applications in machine learning and computer vision, such as image matching, dynamic routing, drug design, to name a few. Although there has been massive previous investigation on

Graph matching is a fundamental but notoriously difficult problem due to its NP-hard nature, and serves as a cornerstone for a series of applications in machine learning and computer vision, such as image matching, dynamic routing, drug design, to name a few. Although there has been massive previous investigation on high-performance graph matching solvers, it still remains a challenging task to tackle the matching problem under real-world scenarios with severe graph uncertainty (e.g., noise, outlier, misleading or ambiguous link).In this dissertation, a main focus is to investigate the essence and propose solutions to graph matching with higher reliability under such uncertainty. To this end, the proposed research was conducted taking into account three perspectives related to reliable graph matching: modeling, optimization and learning. For modeling, graph matching is extended from typical quadratic assignment problem to a more generic mathematical model by introducing a specific family of separable function, achieving higher capacity and reliability. In terms of optimization, a novel high gradient-efficient determinant-based regularization technique is proposed in this research, showing high robustness against outliers. Then learning paradigm for graph matching under intrinsic combinatorial characteristics is explored. First, a study is conducted on the way of filling the gap between discrete problem and its continuous approximation under a deep learning framework. Then this dissertation continues to investigate the necessity of more reliable latent topology of graphs for matching, and propose an effective and flexible framework to obtain it. Coherent findings in this dissertation include theoretical study and several novel algorithms, with rich experiments demonstrating the effectiveness.
ContributorsYu, Tianshu (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Yang, Yingzhen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021