Private Facial Prediagnosis as an Edge Service for Parkinson's DBS Treatment Valuation

Auto Diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease Via a Deep Learning Model Based on Mixed Emotional Facial Expressions

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common degenerative disease of the nervous system in the elderly. The early diagnosis of PD is very important for potential patients to receive prompt treatment and avoid the aggravation of the disease. Recent studies have found that PD patients always suffer from emotional expression disorder, thus forming the characteristics of "masked faces". Based on this, we thus propose an auto PD diagnosis method based on mixed emotional facial expressions in the paper. Specifically, the proposed method is cast into four steps: Firstly, we synthesize virtual face images containing six basic expressions (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) via generative adversarial learning, in order to approximate the premorbid expressions of PD patients; Secondly, we design an effective screening scheme to assess the quality of the above synthesized facial expression images and then shortlist the high-quality ones; Thirdly, we train a deep feature extractor accompanied with a facial expression classifier based on the mixture of the original facial expression images of the PD patients, the high-quality synthesized facial expression images of PD patients, and the normal facial expression images from other public face datasets; Finally, with the well-trained deep feature extractor, we thus adopt it to extract the latent expression features for six facial expression images of a potential PD patient to conduct PD/non-PD prediction. To show real-world impacts, we also collected a new facial expression dataset of PD patients in collaboration with a hospital. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for PD diagnosis and facial expression recognition.

Robust and Fair Undersea Target Detection with Automated Underwater Vehicles for Biodiversity Data Collection

Undersea/subsea data collection via automated underwater vehicles (AUVs) plays an important role for marine biodiversity research, while it is often much more challenging than the data collection above ground via satellites or AUVs. To enable the automated undersea/subsea data collection system, the AUVs are expected to be able to automatically track the objects of interest through what they can “see” from their mounted underwater cameras, where videos or images could be drastically blurred and degraded in underwater lighting conditions. To solve this challenge, in this work, we propose a cascaded framework by combining a DCGAN (deep convolutional generative adversarial network) with an object detector, i.e., single-shot detector (SSD), named DCGAN+SSD, for the detection of various underwater targets from the mounted camera of an automated underwater vehicle. In our framework, our assumption is that DCGAN can be leveraged to alleviate the impact of underwater conditions and provide the object detector with a better performance for automated AUVs. To optimize the hyperparameters of our models, we applied a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based strategy to improve the performance of our proposed model. In our experiments, we successfully verified our assumption that the DCGAN+SSD architecture can help improve the object detection toward the undersea conditions and achieve apparently better detection rates over the original SSD detector. Further experiments showed that the PSO-based optimization of our models could further improve the model in object detection toward a more robust and fair performance, making our work a promising solution for tackling the challenges in AUVs.

Stacked Model-Based Classification of Parkinson’s Disease Patients Using Imaging Biomarker Data

Parkinson’s disease (PSD) is a neurological disorder of the brain where nigrostriatal integrity functions lead to motor and non-motor-based symptoms. Doctors can assess the patient based on the patient’s history and symptoms; however, the symptoms are similar in various neurodegenerative diseases, such as progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), multiple system atrophy—parkinsonian type (MSA), essential tremor, and Parkinson’s tremor. Thus, sometimes it is difficult to identify a patient’s disease based on his or her symptoms. To address the issue, we have used neuroimaging biomarkers to analyze dopamine deficiency in the brains of subjects. We generated the different patterns of dopamine levels inside the brain, which identified the severity of the disease and helped us to measure the disease progression of the patients. For the classification of the subjects, we used machine learning (ML) algorithms for a multivariate classification of the subjects using neuroimaging biomarkers data. In this paper, we propose a stacked machine learning (ML)-based classification model to identify the HC and PSD subjects. In this stacked model, meta learners can learn and combine the predictions from various ML algorithms, such as K-nearest neighbor (KNN), random forest algorithm (RFA), and Gaussian naive Bayes (GANB) to achieve a high performance model. The proposed model showed 92.5% accuracy, outperforming traditional schemes.

Robust Brain Age Estimation based on sMRI via Nonlinear Age-Adaptive Ensemble Learning

Precise prediction on brain age is urgently needed by many biomedical areas including mental rehabilitation prognosis as well as various medicine or treatment trials. People began to realize that contrasting physical (real) age and predicted brain age can help to highlight brain issues and evaluate if patients' brains are healthy or not. Such age prediction is often challenging for single model-based prediction, while the conditions of brains vary drastically over age. In this work, we present an age-adaptive ensemble model that is based on the combination of four different machine learning algorithms, including a support vector machine (SVR), a convolutional neural network (CNN) model, and the popular GoogLeNet and ResNet deep networks. The ensemble model proposed here is nonlinearly adaptive, where age is taken as a key factor in the nonlinear combination of various single-algorithm-based independent models. In our age-adaptive ensemble method, the weights of each model are learned automatically as nonlinear functions over age instead of fixed values, while brain age estimation is based on such an age-adaptive integration of various single models. The quality of the model is quantified by the mean absolute errors (MAE) and spearman correlation between the predicted age and the actual age, with the least MAE and the highest Spearman correlation representing the highest accuracy in age prediction. By testing on the Predictive Analysis Challenge 2019 (PAC 2019) dataset, our novel ensemble model has achieved a MAE down to 3.19, which is a significantly increased accuracy in this brain age competition. If deployed in the real world, our novel ensemble model having an improved accuracy could potentially help doctors to identify the risk of brain diseases more accurately and quickly, thus helping pharmaceutical companies develop drugs or treatments precisely, and potential offer a new powerful tool for researchers in the field of brain science.