Self organizing motor maps for color-mapped image re-indexing

Three-Dimensional Deep Noninvasive Radiomics for the Prediction of Disease Control in Patients With Metastatic Urothelial Carcinoma treated With Immunotherapy

INTRODUCTION

Immunotherapy is effective in a small percentage of patients with cancer and no reliable predictive biomarkers are currently available. Artificial Intelligence algorithms may automatically quantify radiologic characteristics associated with disease response to medical treatments.

METHODS

We investigated an innovative approach based on a 3-dimensional (3D) deep radiomics pipeline to classify visual features of chest-abdomen computed tomography (CT) scans with the aim of distinguishing disease control from progressive disease to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). Forty-two consecutive patients with metastatic urothelial cancer had progressed on first-line platinum-based chemotherapy and had baseline CT scans at immunotherapy initiation. The 3D-pipeline included self-learned visual features and a deep self-attention mechanism. According to the outcome to the ICIs, a 3D deep classifier semiautomatically categorized the most discriminative region of interest on the CT scans.

RESULTS

With a median follow-up of 13.3 months (95% CI, 11.1-15.6), the median overall survival was 8.5 months (95% CI, 3.1-13.8). According to disease response to immunotherapy, the median overall survival was 3.6 months (95% CI, 2.0-5.2) for patients with progressive disease; it was not yet reached for those with disease control. The predictive accuracy of the 3D-pipeline was 82.5% (sensitivity 96%; specificity, 60%). The addition of baseline clinical factors increased the accuracy to 92.5% by improving specificity to 87%; the accuracy of other architectures ranged from 72.5% to 90%.

CONCLUSION

Artificial Intelligence by 3D deep radiomics is a potential noninvasive biomarker for the prediction of disease control to ICIs in metastatic urothelial cancer and deserves validation in larger series.

Deep LSTM with Reinforcement Learning Layer for Financial Trend Prediction in FX High Frequency Trading Systems

High-frequency trading is a method of intervention on the financial markets that uses sophisticated software tools, and sometimes also hardware, with which to implement high-frequency negotiations, guided by mathematical algorithms, that act on markets for shares, options, bonds, derivative instruments, commodities, and so on. HFT strategies have reached considerable volumes of commercial traffic, so much so that it is estimated that they are responsible for most of the transaction traffic of some stock exchanges, with percentages that, in some cases, exceed 70% of the total. One of the main issues of the HFT systems is the prediction of the medium-short term trend. For this reason, many algorithms have been proposed in literature. The author proposes in this work the use of an algorithm based both on supervised Deep Learning and on a Reinforcement Learning algorithm for forecasting the short-term trend in the currency FOREX (FOReign EXchange) market to maximize the return on investment in an HFT algorithm. With an average accuracy of about 85%, the proposed algorithm is able to predict the medium-short term trend of a currency cross based on the historical trend of this and by means of correlation data with other currency crosses using techniques known in the financial field with the term arbitrage. The final part of the proposed pipeline includes a grid trading engine which, based on the aforementioned trend predictions, will perform high frequency operations in order to maximize profit and minimize drawdown. The trading system has been validated over several financial years and on the EUR/USD cross confirming the high performance in terms of Return of Investment (98.23%) in addition to a reduced drawdown (15.97 %) which confirms its financial sustainability.

Advanced Bio-Inspired System for Noninvasive Cuff-Less Blood Pressure Estimation from Physiological Signal Analysis

Blood Pressure (BP) is one of the most important physiological indicators that provides useful information in the field of health-care monitoring. Blood pressure may be measured by both invasive and non-invasive methods. A novel algorithmic approach is presented to estimate systolic and diastolic blood pressure accurately in a way that does not require any explicit user calibration, i.e., it is non-invasive and cuff-less. The approach herein described can be applied in a medical device, as well as in commercial mobile smartphones by an ad hoc developed software based on the proposed algorithm. The authors propose a system suitable for blood pressure estimation based on the PhotoPlethysmoGraphy (PPG) physiological signal sampling time-series. Photoplethysmography is a simple optical technique that can be used to detect blood volume changes in the microvascular bed of tissue. It is non-invasive since it takes measurements at the skin surface. In this paper, the authors present an easy and smart method to measure BP through careful neural and mathematical analysis of the PPG signals. The PPG data are processed with an ad hoc bio-inspired mathematical model that estimates systolic and diastolic pressure values through an innovative analysis of the collected physiological data. We compared our results with those measured using a classical cuff-based blood pressure measuring device with encouraging results of about 97% accuracy.