Intelligent digital tools for screening of brain connectivity and dementia risk estimation in people affected by mild cognitive impairment: the AI-Mind clinical study protocol

More than 10 million Europeans show signs of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a transitional stage between normal brain aging and dementia stage memory disorder. The path MCI takes can be divergent; while some maintain stability or even revert to cognitive norms, alarmingly, up to half of the cases progress to dementia within 5 years. Current diagnostic practice lacks the necessary screening tools to identify those at risk of progression. The European patient experience often involves a long journey from the initial signs of MCI to the eventual diagnosis of dementia. The trajectory is far from ideal. Here, we introduce the AI-Mind project, a pioneering initiative with an innovative approach to early risk assessment through the implementation of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) on multimodal data. The cutting-edge AI-based tools developed in the project aim not only to accelerate the diagnostic process but also to deliver highly accurate predictions regarding an individual's risk of developing dementia when prevention and intervention may still be possible. AI-Mind is a European Research and Innovation Action (RIA H2020-SC1-BHC-06-2020, No. 964220) financed between 2021 and 2026. First, the AI-Mind Connector identifies dysfunctional brain networks based on high-density magneto- and electroencephalography (M/EEG) recordings. Second, the AI-Mind Predictor predicts dementia risk using data from the Connector, enriched with computerized cognitive tests, genetic and protein biomarkers, as well as sociodemographic and clinical variables. AI-Mind is integrated within a network of major European initiatives, including The Virtual Brain, The Virtual Epileptic Patient, and EBRAINS AISBL service for sensitive data, HealthDataCloud, where big patient data are generated for advancing digital and virtual twin technology development. AI-Mind's innovation lies not only in its early prediction of dementia risk, but it also enables a virtual laboratory scenario for hypothesis-driven personalized intervention research. This article introduces the background of the AI-Mind project and its clinical study protocol, setting the stage for future scientific contributions.

Building an open-source system test generation tool: lessons learned and empirical analyses with EvoMaster

Research in software testing often involves the development of software prototypes. Like any piece of software, there are challenges in the development, use and verification of such tools. However, some challenges are rather specific to this problem domain. For example, often these tools are developed by PhD students straight out of bachelor/master degrees, possibly lacking any industrial experience in software development. Prototype tools are used to carry out empirical studies, possibly studying different parameters of novel designed algorithms. Software scaffolding is needed to run large sets of experiments efficiently. Furthermore, when using AI-based techniques like evolutionary algorithms, care needs to be taken to deal with their randomness, which further complicates their verification. The aforementioned represent some of the challenges we have identified for this domain. In this paper, we report on our experience in building the open-source EvoMaster tool, which aims at system-level test case generation for enterprise applications. Many of the challenges we faced would be common to any researcher needing to build software testing tool prototypes. Therefore, one goal is that our shared experience here will boost the research community, by providing concrete solutions to many development challenges in the building of such kind of research prototypes. Ultimately, this will lead to increase the impact of scientific research on industrial practice.

Fast and Accurate Framework for Ontology Matching in Web of Things

The Web of Things (WoT) can help with knowledge discovery and interoperability issues in many Internet of Things (IoT) applications. This paper focuses on semantic modeling of the WoT and proposes a new approach called Decomposition for Ontology Matching (DOM) to discover relevant knowledge by exploring correlations between WoT data using decomposition strategies. DOM technique adopts several decomposition techniques to order the highly linked ontologies of WoT data into similar groups. The main idea is to decompose the instances of each ontology into similar groups and then match the instances of the similar groups instead of the entire instances of the two ontologies. Three main algorithms for decomposition have been developed. The first algorithm is based on radar scanning, which determines the distribution of distances between each instance and all other instances to determine the cluster centroid. The second algorithm is based on adaptive grid clustering, where it focuses on the distribution information and the construction of spanning trees. The third algorithm is based on split index clustering, where instances are divided into groups of cells from which noise is removed during the merging process. Several studies were conducted with different ontology databases to illustrate the use of the DOM technique. The results show that DOM outperforms state-of-the-art ontology matching models in terms of computational cost while maintaining the quality of the matching. Moreover, these results demonstrate that DOM is capable of handling various large datasets in WoT contexts.

BIoMT-ISeg: Blockchain internet of medical things for intelligent segmentation

In the quest of training complicated medical data for Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) scenarios, this study develops an end-to-end intelligent framework that incorporates ensemble learning, genetic algorithms, blockchain technology, and various U-Net based architectures. Genetic algorithms are used to optimize the hyper-parameters of the used architectures. The training process was also protected with the help of blockchain technology. Finally, an ensemble learning system based on voting mechanism was developed to combine local outputs of various segmentation models into a global output. Our method shows that strong performance in a condensed number of epochs may be achieved with a high learning rate and a small batch size. As a result, we are able to perform better than standard solutions for well-known medical databases. In fact, the proposed solution reaches 95% of intersection over the union, compared to the baseline solutions where they are below 80%. Moreover, with the proposed blockchain strategy, the detected attacks reached 76%.

A Secure Parallel Pattern Mining System for Medical Internet of Things

In this paper, a new generic parallel pattern mining framework called multi-objective Decomposition for Parallel Pattern-Mining (MD-PPM) is developed to solve the challenges of the Internet of Medical Things through big data exploration. MD-PPM discovers important patterns by using decomposition and parallel mining methods to explore the connectivity between medical data. First, a new technique, the multi-objective k-means algorithm, is used to aggregate medical data. A parallel pattern mining approach based on GPU and MapReduce architectures is also used to create useful patterns. To ensure complete privacy and security of the medical data, blockchain technology has been integrated throughout the system. Several tests were conducted to demonstrate the high performance of two sequential and graph pattern mining problems on large medical data and to evaluate the developed MD-PPM framework. From our results, our proposed MD-PPM has achieved good results in terms of memory usage and computation time in terms of efficiency. Moreover, MD-PPM performs well in terms of accuracy and feasibility compared to existing models.

Deep Learning Versus Traditional Solutions for Group Trajectory Outliers

This article introduces a new model to identify a group of trajectory outliers from a large trajectory database and proposes several algorithms. These can be split into three categories: 1) algorithms based on data mining and knowledge discovery, which study the different correlations among the trajectory data and identify the group of abnormal trajectories from the knowledge extracted; 2) algorithms based on machine learning and computational intelligence methods, which use the ensemble learning and metaheuristics to find the group of trajectory outliers; and 3) an algorithm exploring the convolution deep neural network that learns the different features of historical data to determine the group of trajectory outliers. Experiments on different trajectory databases have been carried out to investigate the proposed algorithms. The results show that the deep learning solution outperforms data mining, machine learning, and computational intelligence solutions, as well as state-of-the-art solutions in terms of runtime and accuracy performance.

Secure Collaborative Augmented Reality Framework for Biomedical Informatics

Augmented reality is currently a great interest in biomedical health informatics. At the same time, several challenges have been appeared, in particular with the rapid progress of smart sensors technologies, and medical artificial intelligence. This yields the necessity of new needs in biomedical health informatics. Collaborative learning and privacy are some of the challenges of augmented reality technology in biomedical health informatics. This paper introduces a novel secure collaborative augmented reality framework for biomedical health informatics-based applications. Distributed deep learning is first performed across a multi-agent system platform. The privacy strategy is developed for ensuring better communications of the different intelligent agents in the system. In this research work, a system of multiple agents is created for the simulation of the collective behaviours of the smart components of biomedical health informatics. Augmented reality is also incorporated for better visualization of the resulted medical patterns. A novel privacy strategy based on blockchain is investigated for ensuring the confidentiality of the learning process. Experiments are conducted on the real use case of the biomedical segmentation process. Our strong experimental analysis reveals the strength of the proposed framework when directly compared to state-of-the-art biomedical health informatics solutions.

Machine Learning for Identifying Group Trajectory Outliers

Prior works on the trajectory outlier detection problem solely consider individual outliers. However, in real-world scenarios, trajectory outliers can often appear in groups, e.g., a group of bikes that deviates to the usual trajectory due to the maintenance of streets in the context of intelligent transportation. The current paper considers the Group Trajectory Outlier (GTO) problem and proposes three algorithms. The first and the second algorithms are extensions of the well-known DBSCAN and k NN algorithms, while the third one models the GTO problem as a feature selection problem. Furthermore, two different enhancements for the proposed algorithms are proposed. The first one is based on ensemble learning and computational intelligence, which allows for merging algorithms’ outputs to possibly improve the final result. The second is a general high-performance computing framework that deals with big trajectory databases, which we used for a GPU-based implementation. Experimental results on different real trajectory databases show the scalability of the proposed approaches.

Cluster-based information retrieval using pattern mining

This paper addresses the problem of responding to user queries by fetching the most relevant object from a clustered set of objects. It addresses the common drawbacks of cluster-based approaches and targets fast, high-quality information retrieval. For this purpose, a novel cluster-based information retrieval approach is proposed, named Cluster-based Retrieval using Pattern Mining (CRPM). This approach integrates various clustering and pattern mining algorithms. First, it generates clusters of objects that contain similar objects. Three clustering algorithms based on k-means, DBSCAN (Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise), and Spectral are suggested to minimize the number of shared terms among the clusters of objects. Second, frequent and high-utility pattern mining algorithms are performed on each cluster to extract the pattern bases. Third, the clusters of objects are ranked for every query. In this context, two ranking strategies are proposed: i) Score Pattern Computing (SPC), which calculates a score representing the similarity between a user query and a cluster; and ii) Weighted Terms in Clusters (WTC), which calculates a weight for every term and uses the relevant terms to compute the score between a user query and each cluster. Irrelevant information derived from the pattern bases is also used to deal with unexpected user queries. To evaluate the proposed approach, extensive experiments were carried out on two use cases: the documents and tweets corpus. The results showed that the designed approach outperformed traditional and cluster-based information retrieval approaches in terms of the quality of the returned objects while being very competitive in terms of runtime.

Trajectory Outlier Detection

Detecting abnormal trajectories is an important task in research and industrial applications, which has attracted considerable attention in recent decades. This work studies the existing trajectory outlier detection algorithms in different industrial domains and applications, including maritime, smart urban transportation, video surveillance, and climate change domains. First, we review several algorithms for trajectory outlier detection. Second, different taxonomies are proposed regarding application-, output-, and algorithm-based levels. Third, evaluation of 10 trajectory outlier detection algorithms is performed on small, large, and big trajectory databases. Finally, future challenges and open issues with regard to trajectory outliers are derived and discussed. This survey offers a general overview of existing trajectory outlier detection algorithms in industrial informatics applications. As a result, mature solutions may be further developed by data mining and machine learning communities.

A general-purpose distributed pattern mining system

This paper explores five pattern mining problems and proposes a new distributed framework called DT-DPM: Decomposition Transaction for Distributed Pattern Mining. DT-DPM addresses the limitations of the existing pattern mining problems by reducing the enumeration search space. Thus, it derives the relevant patterns by studying the different correlation among the transactions. It first decomposes the set of transactions into several clusters of different sizes, and then explores heterogeneous architectures, including MapReduce, single CPU, and multi CPU, based on the densities of each subset of transactions. To evaluate the DT-DPM framework, extensive experiments were carried out by solving five pattern mining problems (FIM: Frequent Itemset Mining, WIM: Weighted Itemset Mining, UIM: Uncertain Itemset Mining, HUIM: High Utility Itemset Mining, and SPM: Sequential Pattern Mining). Experimental results reveal that by using DT-DPM, the scalability of the pattern mining algorithms was improved on large databases. Results also reveal that DT-DPM outperforms the baseline parallel pattern mining algorithms on big databases.