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Description
We solve the problem of activity verification in the context of sustainability. Activity verification is the process of proving the user assertions pertaining to a certain activity performed by the user. Our motivation lies in incentivizing the user for engaging in sustainable activities like taking public transport or recycling. Such

We solve the problem of activity verification in the context of sustainability. Activity verification is the process of proving the user assertions pertaining to a certain activity performed by the user. Our motivation lies in incentivizing the user for engaging in sustainable activities like taking public transport or recycling. Such incentivization schemes require the system to verify the claim made by the user. The system verifies these claims by analyzing the supporting evidence captured by the user while performing the activity. The proliferation of portable smart-phones in the past few years has provided us with a ubiquitous and relatively cheap platform, having multiple sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone etc. to capture this evidence data in-situ. In this research, we investigate the supervised and semi-supervised learning techniques for activity verification. Both these techniques make use the data set constructed using the evidence submitted by the user. Supervised learning makes use of annotated evidence data to build a function to predict the class labels of the unlabeled data points. The evidence data captured can be either unimodal or multimodal in nature. We use the accelerometer data as evidence for transportation mode verification and image data as evidence for recycling verification. After training the system, we achieve maximum accuracy of 94% when classifying the transport mode and 81% when detecting recycle activity. In the case of recycle verification, we could improve the classification accuracy by asking the user for more evidence. We present some techniques to ask the user for the next best piece of evidence that maximizes the probability of classification. Using these techniques for detecting recycle activity, the accuracy increases to 93%. The major disadvantage of using supervised models is that it requires extensive annotated training data, which expensive to collect. Due to the limited training data, we look at the graph based inductive semi-supervised learning methods to propagate the labels among the unlabeled samples. In the semi-supervised approach, we represent each instance in the data set as a node in the graph. Since it is a complete graph, edges interconnect these nodes, with each edge having some weight representing the similarity between the points. We propagate the labels in this graph, based on the proximity of the data points to the labeled nodes. We estimate the performance of these algorithms by measuring how close the probability distribution of the data after label propagation is to the probability distribution of the ground truth data. Since labeling has a cost associated with it, in this thesis we propose two algorithms that help us in selecting minimum number of labeled points to propagate the labels accurately. Our proposed algorithm achieves a maximum of 73% increase in performance when compared to the baseline algorithm.
ContributorsDesai, Vaishnav (Author) / Sundaram, Hari (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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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
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality yet largely preventable, but the key to prevention is to identify at-risk individuals before adverse events. For predicting individual CVD risk, carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT), a noninvasive ultrasound method, has proven to be valuable, offering several advantages over CT coronary artery

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality yet largely preventable, but the key to prevention is to identify at-risk individuals before adverse events. For predicting individual CVD risk, carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT), a noninvasive ultrasound method, has proven to be valuable, offering several advantages over CT coronary artery calcium score. However, each CIMT examination includes several ultrasound videos, and interpreting each of these CIMT videos involves three operations: (1) select three enddiastolic ultrasound frames (EUF) in the video, (2) localize a region of interest (ROI) in each selected frame, and (3) trace the lumen-intima interface and the media-adventitia interface in each ROI to measure CIMT. These operations are tedious, laborious, and time consuming, a serious limitation that hinders the widespread utilization of CIMT in clinical practice. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents a new system to automate CIMT video interpretation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the suggested system significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The superior performance is attributable to our unified framework based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) coupled with our informative image representation and effective post-processing of the CNN outputs, which are uniquely designed for each of the above three operations.
ContributorsShin, Jaeyul (Author) / Liang, Jianming (Thesis advisor) / Maciejewski, Ross (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
In species with highly heteromorphic sex chromosomes, the degradation of one of the sex chromosomes can result in unequal gene expression between the sexes (e.g., between XX females and XY males) and between the sex chromosomes and the autosomes. Dosage compensation is a process whereby genes on the sex chromosomes

In species with highly heteromorphic sex chromosomes, the degradation of one of the sex chromosomes can result in unequal gene expression between the sexes (e.g., between XX females and XY males) and between the sex chromosomes and the autosomes. Dosage compensation is a process whereby genes on the sex chromosomes achieve equal gene expression which prevents deleterious side effects from having too much or too little expression of genes on sex chromsomes. The green anole is part of a group of species that recently underwent an adaptive radiation. The green anole has XX/XY sex determination, but the content of the X chromosome and its evolution have not been described. Given its status as a model species, better understanding the green anole genome could reveal insights into other species. Genomic analyses are crucial for a comprehensive picture of sex chromosome differentiation and dosage compensation, in addition to understanding speciation.

In order to address this, multiple comparative genomics and bioinformatics analyses were conducted to elucidate patterns of evolution in the green anole and across multiple anole species. Comparative genomics analyses were used to infer additional X-linked loci in the green anole, RNAseq data from male and female samples were anayzed to quantify patterns of sex-biased gene expression across the genome, and the extent of dosage compensation on the anole X chromosome was characterized, providing evidence that the sex chromosomes in the green anole are dosage compensated.

In addition, X-linked genes have a lower ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous substitution rates than the autosomes when compared to other Anolis species, and pairwise rates of evolution in genes across the anole genome were analyzed. To conduct this analysis a new pipeline was created for filtering alignments and performing batch calculations for whole genome coding sequences. This pipeline has been made publicly available.
ContributorsRupp, Shawn Michael (Author) / Wilson Sayres, Melissa A (Thesis advisor) / Kusumi, Kenro (Committee member) / DeNardo, Dale (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Major Depression, clinically called Major Depressive Disorder, is a mood disorder that affects about one eighth of population in US and is projected to be the second leading cause of disability in the world by the year 2020. Recent advances in biotechnology have enabled us to

Major Depression, clinically called Major Depressive Disorder, is a mood disorder that affects about one eighth of population in US and is projected to be the second leading cause of disability in the world by the year 2020. Recent advances in biotechnology have enabled us to collect a great variety of data which could potentially offer us a deeper understanding of the disorder as well as advancing personalized medicine.

This dissertation focuses on developing methods for three different aspects of predictive analytics related to the disorder: automatic diagnosis, prognosis, and prediction of long-term treatment outcome. The data used for each task have their specific characteristics and demonstrate unique problems. Automatic diagnosis of melancholic depression is made on the basis of metabolic profiles and micro-array gene expression profiles where the presence of missing values and strong empirical correlation between the variables is not unusual. To deal with these problems, a method of generating a representative set of features is proposed. Prognosis is made on data collected from rating scales and questionnaires which consist mainly of categorical and ordinal variables and thus favor decision tree based predictive models. Decision tree models are known for the notorious problem of overfitting. A decision tree pruning method that overcomes the shortcomings of a greedy nature and reliance on heuristics inherent in traditional decision tree pruning approaches is proposed. The method is further extended to prune Gradient Boosting Decision Tree and tested on the task of prognosis of treatment outcome. Follow-up studies evaluating the long-term effect of the treatments on patients usually measure patients' depressive symptom severity monthly, resulting in the actual time of relapse upper bounded by the observed time of relapse. To resolve such uncertainty in response, a general loss function where the hypothesis could take different forms is proposed to predict the risk of relapse in situations where only an interval for time of relapse can be derived from the observed data.
ContributorsNie, Zhi (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / He, Jingrui (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Li, Jing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Imaging genetics is an emerging and promising technique that investigates how genetic variations affect brain development, structure, and function. By exploiting disorder-related neuroimaging phenotypes, this class of studies provides a novel direction to reveal and understand the complex genetic mechanisms. Oftentimes, imaging genetics studies are challenging due to the relatively

Imaging genetics is an emerging and promising technique that investigates how genetic variations affect brain development, structure, and function. By exploiting disorder-related neuroimaging phenotypes, this class of studies provides a novel direction to reveal and understand the complex genetic mechanisms. Oftentimes, imaging genetics studies are challenging due to the relatively small number of subjects but extremely high-dimensionality of both imaging data and genomic data. In this dissertation, I carry on my research on imaging genetics with particular focuses on two tasks---building predictive models between neuroimaging data and genomic data, and identifying disorder-related genetic risk factors through image-based biomarkers. To this end, I consider a suite of structured sparse methods---that can produce interpretable models and are robust to overfitting---for imaging genetics. With carefully-designed sparse-inducing regularizers, different biological priors are incorporated into learning models. More specifically, in the Allen brain image--gene expression study, I adopt an advanced sparse coding approach for image feature extraction and employ a multi-task learning approach for multi-class annotation. Moreover, I propose a label structured-based two-stage learning framework, which utilizes the hierarchical structure among labels, for multi-label annotation. In the Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) imaging genetics study, I employ Lasso together with EDPP (enhanced dual polytope projections) screening rules to fast identify Alzheimer's disease risk SNPs. I also adopt the tree-structured group Lasso with MLFre (multi-layer feature reduction) screening rules to incorporate linkage disequilibrium information into modeling. Moreover, I propose a novel absolute fused Lasso model for ADNI imaging genetics. This method utilizes SNP spatial structure and is robust to the choice of reference alleles of genotype coding. In addition, I propose a two-level structured sparse model that incorporates gene-level networks through a graph penalty into SNP-level model construction. Lastly, I explore a convolutional neural network approach for accurate predicting Alzheimer's disease related imaging phenotypes. Experimental results on real-world imaging genetics applications demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed structured sparse methods.
ContributorsYang, Tao (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Thesis advisor) / He, Jingrui (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Li, Jing (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
Continuous advancements in biomedical research have resulted in the production of vast amounts of scientific data and literature discussing them. The ultimate goal of computational biology is to translate these large amounts of data into actual knowledge of the complex biological processes and accurate life science models. The ability to

Continuous advancements in biomedical research have resulted in the production of vast amounts of scientific data and literature discussing them. The ultimate goal of computational biology is to translate these large amounts of data into actual knowledge of the complex biological processes and accurate life science models. The ability to rapidly and effectively survey the literature is necessary for the creation of large scale models of the relationships among biomedical entities as well as hypothesis generation to guide biomedical research. To reduce the effort and time spent in performing these activities, an intelligent search system is required. Even though many systems aid in navigating through this wide collection of documents, the vastness and depth of this information overload can be overwhelming. An automated extraction system coupled with a cognitive search and navigation service over these document collections would not only save time and effort, but also facilitate discovery of the unknown information implicitly conveyed in the texts. This thesis presents the different approaches used for large scale biomedical named entity recognition, and the challenges faced in each. It also proposes BioEve: an integrative framework to fuse a faceted search with information extraction to provide a search service that addresses the user's desire for "completeness" of the query results, not just the top-ranked ones. This information extraction system enables discovery of important semantic relationships between entities such as genes, diseases, drugs, and cell lines and events from biomedical text on MEDLINE, which is the largest publicly available database of the world's biomedical journal literature. It is an innovative search and discovery service that makes it easier to search
avigate and discover knowledge hidden in life sciences literature. To demonstrate the utility of this system, this thesis also details a prototype enterprise quality search and discovery service that helps researchers with a guided step-by-step query refinement, by suggesting concepts enriched in intermediate results, and thereby facilitating the "discover more as you search" paradigm.
ContributorsKanwar, Pradeep (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Dinu, Valentin (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
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Description
In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely used in not only the computer vision community but also within the medical imaging community. Specifically, the use of pre-trained CNNs on large-scale datasets (e.g., ImageNet) via transfer learning for a variety of medical imaging applications, has become the de

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely used in not only the computer vision community but also within the medical imaging community. Specifically, the use of pre-trained CNNs on large-scale datasets (e.g., ImageNet) via transfer learning for a variety of medical imaging applications, has become the de facto standard within both communities.

However, to fit the current paradigm, 3D imaging tasks have to be reformulated and solved in 2D, losing rich 3D contextual information. Moreover, pre-trained models on natural images never see any biomedical images and do not have knowledge about anatomical structures present in medical images. To overcome the above limitations, this thesis proposes an image out-painting self-supervised proxy task to develop pre-trained models directly from medical images without utilizing systematic annotations. The idea is to randomly mask an image and train the model to predict the missing region. It is demonstrated that by predicting missing anatomical structures when seeing only parts of the image, the model will learn generic representation yielding better performance on various medical imaging applications via transfer learning.

The extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed proxy task outperforms training from scratch in six out of seven medical imaging applications covering 2D and 3D classification and segmentation. Moreover, image out-painting proxy task offers competitive performance to state-of-the-art models pre-trained on ImageNet and other self-supervised baselines such as in-painting. Owing to its outstanding performance, out-painting is utilized as one of the self-supervised proxy tasks to provide generic 3D pre-trained models for medical image analysis.
ContributorsSodha, Vatsal Arvindkumar (Author) / Liang, Jianming (Thesis advisor) / Devarakonda, Murthy (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020