Automatic image annotation methods are extremely beneficial for image search, retrieval, and organization systems. The lack of strict correlation between semantic concepts and visual features, referred to as the semantic gap, is a huge challenge for annotation systems. In this paper, we propose an image annotation model that incorporates contextual cues collected from sources both intrinsic and extrinsic to images, to bridge the semantic gap. The main focus of this paper is a large real-world data set of news images that we collected. Unlike standard image annotation benchmark data sets, our data set does not require human annotators to generate artificial ground truth descriptions after data collection, since our images already include contextually meaningful and real-world captions written by journalists. We thoroughly study the nature of image descriptions in this real-world data set. News image captions describe both visual contents and the contexts of images. Auxiliary information sources are also available with such images in the form of news article and metadata (e.g., keywords and categories). The proposed framework extracts contextual-cues from available sources of different data modalities and transforms them into a common representation space, i.e., the probability space. Predicted annotations are later transformed into sentence-like captions through an extractive framework applied over news articles. Our context-driven framework outperforms the state of the art on the collected data set of approximately 20 000 items, as well as on a previously available smaller news images data set.

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Image search and retrieval systems depend heavily on availability of descriptive textual annotations with images, to match them with textual queries of users. In most cases, such systems have to rely on users to provide tags or keywords with images. Users may add insufficient or noisy tags. A system to automatically generate descriptive tags for images can be extremely helpful for search and retrieval systems. Automatic image annotation has been explored widely in both image and text processing research communities. In this paper, we present a novel approach to tackle this problem by incorporating contextual information provided by scene analysis of image. Image can be represented by features which indicate type of scene shown in the image, instead of representing individual objects or local characteristics of that image. We have used such features to provide context in the process of predicting tags for images.

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The strain on healthcare resources brought forth by the recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for efficient resource planning and allocation through the prediction of future consumption. Machine learning can predict resource utilization such as the need for hospitalization based on past medical data stored in electronic medical records (EMR). We conducted this study on 3194 patients (46% male with mean age 56.7 (±16.8), 56% African American, 7% Hispanic) flagged as COVID-19 positive cases in 12 centers under Emory Healthcare network from February 2020 to September 2020, to assess whether a COVID-19 positive patient’s need for hospitalization can be predicted at the time of RT-PCR test using the EMR data prior to the test. Five main modalities of EMR, i.e., demographics, medication, past medical procedures, comorbidities, and laboratory results, were used as features for predictive modeling, both individually and fused together using late, middle, and early fusion. Models were evaluated in terms of precision, recall, F1-score (within 95% confidence interval). The early fusion model is the most effective predictor with 84% overall F1-score [CI 82.1–86.1]. The predictive performance of the model drops by 6 % when using recent clinical data while omitting the long-term medical history. Feature importance analysis indicates that history of cardiovascular disease, emergency room visits in the past year prior to testing, and demographic factors are predictive of the disease trajectory. We conclude that fusion modeling using medical history and current treatment data can forecast the need for hospitalization for patients infected with COVID-19 at the time of the RT-PCR test.

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