No abstract

The proportion of counts of different types of white blood cells in the bone marrow, called differential counts, provides invaluable information to doctors for diagnosis. Due to the tedious nature of the differential white blood cell counting process, an automatic system is preferable. In this paper, we investigate whether information about the nucleus alone is adequate to classify white blood cells. This is important because segmentation of nucleus is much easier than the segmentation of the entire cell, especially in the bone marrow where the white blood cell density is very high. In the experiments, a set of manually segmented images of the nucleus are used to decouple segmentation errors. We analyze a set of white-blood-cell-nucleus-based features using mathematical morphology. Fivefold cross validation is used in the experiments in which Bayes' classifiers and artificial neural networks are applied as classifiers. The classification performances are evaluated by two evaluation measures: traditional and classwise classification rates. Furthermore, we compare our results with other classifiers and previously proposed nucleus-based features. The results show that the features using nucleus alone can be utilized to achieve a classification rate of 77% on the test sets. Moreover, the classification performance is better in the classwise sense when the a priori information is suppressed in both the classifiers.

Smoking-induced noncommunicable diseases (SiNCDs) have become a significant threat to public health and cause of death globally. In the last decade, numerous studies have been proposed using artificial intelligence techniques to predict the risk of developing SiNCDs. However, determining the most significant features and developing interpretable models are rather challenging in such systems. In this study, we propose an efficient extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) based framework incorporated with the hybrid feature selection (HFS) method for SiNCDs prediction among the general population in South Korea and the United States. Initially, HFS is performed in three stages: (I) significant features are selected by t-test and chi-square test; (II) multicollinearity analysis serves to obtain dissimilar features; (III) final selection of best representative features is done based on least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO). Then, selected features are fed into the XGBoost predictive model. The experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms several existing baseline models. In addition, the proposed model also provides important features in order to enhance the interpretability of the SiNCDs prediction model. Consequently, the XGBoost based framework is expected to contribute for early diagnosis and prevention of the SiNCDs in public health concerns.

Finding the correct boundary in noisy images is still a difficult task. This paper introduces a new edge following technique for boundary detection in noisy images. Utilization of the proposed technique is exhibited via its application to various types of medical images. Our proposed technique can detect the boundaries of objects in noisy images using the information from the intensity gradient via the vector image model and the texture gradient via the edge map. The performance and robustness of the technique have been tested to segment objects in synthetic noisy images and medical images including prostates in ultrasound images, left ventricles in cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images, aortas in cardiovascular MR images, and knee joints in computerized tomography images. We compare the proposed segmentation technique with the active contour models (ACM), geodesic active contour models, active contours without edges, gradient vector flow snake models, and ACMs based on vector field convolution, by using the skilled doctors' opinions as the ground truths. The results show that our technique performs very well and yields better performance than the classical contour models. The proposed method is robust and applicable on various kinds of noisy images without prior knowledge of noise properties.

Automatic anomaly detection for time-series is critical in a variety of real-world domains such as fraud detection, fault diagnosis, and patient monitoring. Current anomaly detection methods detect the remarkably low proportion of the actual abnormalities correctly. Furthermore, most of the datasets do not provide data labels, and require unsupervised approaches. By focusing on these problems, we propose a novel deep learning-based unsupervised anomaly detection approach (RE-ADTS) for time-series data, which can be applicable to batch and real-time anomaly detections. RE-ADTS consists of two modules including the time-series reconstructor and anomaly detector. The time-series reconstructor module uses the autoregressive (AR) model to find an optimal window width and prepares the subsequences for further analysis according to the width. Then, it uses a deep autoencoder (AE) model to learn the data distribution, which is then used to reconstruct a time-series close to the normal. For anomalies, their reconstruction error (RE) was higher than that of the normal data. As a result of this module, RE and compressed representation of the subsequences were estimated. Later, the anomaly detector module defines the corresponding time-series as normal or an anomaly using a RE based anomaly threshold. For batch anomaly detection, the combination of the density-based clustering technique and anomaly threshold is employed. In the case of real-time anomaly detection, only the anomaly threshold is used without the clustering process. We conducted two types of experiments on a total of 52 publicly available time-series benchmark datasets for the batch and real-time anomaly detections. Experimental results show that the proposed RE-ADTS outperformed the state-of-the-art publicly available anomaly detection methods in most cases.