We tackle the problem of tracking the human lower body as an initial step toward an automatic motion assessment system for clinical mobility evaluation, using a multimodal system that combines Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data, RGB images, and point cloud depth measurements. This system applies the factor graph representation to an optimization problem that provides 3-D skeleton joint estimations. In this paper, we focus on improving the temporal consistency of the estimated human trajectories to greatly extend the range of operability of the depth sensor. More specifically, we introduce a new factor graph factor based on Koopman theory that embeds the nonlinear dynamics of several lower-limb movement activities. This factor performs a two-step process: first, a custom activity recognition module based on spatial temporal graph convolutional networks recognizes the walking activity; then, a Koopman pose prediction of the subsequent skeleton is used as an a priori estimation to drive the optimization problem toward more consistent results. We tested the performance of this module on datasets composed of multiple clinical lowerlimb mobility tests, and we show that our approach reduces outliers on the skeleton form by almost 1 m, while preserving natural walking trajectories at depths up to more than 10 m.

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

Variational autoencoders model high-dimensional data by positing low-dimensional latent variables that are mapped through a flexible distribution parametrized by a neural network. Unfortunately, variational autoencoders often suffer from posterior collapse: the posterior of the latent variables is equal to its prior, rendering the variational autoencoder useless as a means to produce meaningful representations. Existing approaches to posterior collapse often attribute it to the use of neural networks or optimization issues due to variational approximation. In this paper, we consider posterior collapse as a problem of latent variable non-identifiability. We prove that the posterior collapses if and only if the latent variables are non-identifiable in the generative model. This fact implies that posterior collapse is not a phenomenon specific to the use of flexible distributions or approximate inference. Rather, it can occur in classical probabilistic models even with exact inference, which we also demonstrate. Based on these results, we propose a class of latent-identifiable variational autoencoders, deep generative models which enforce identifiability without sacrificing flexibility. This model class resolves the problem of latent variable non-identifiability by leveraging bijective Brenier maps and parameterizing them with input convex neural networks, without special variational inference objectives or optimization tricks. Across synthetic and real datasets, latent-identifiable variational autoencoders outperform existing methods in mitigating posterior collapse and providing meaningful representations of the data.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become commonplace to solve routine everyday tasks. Because of the exponential growth in medical imaging data volume and complexity, the workload on radiologists is steadily increasing. We project that the gap between the number of imaging exams and the number of expert radiologist readers required to cover this increase will continue to expand, consequently introducing a demand for AI-based tools that improve the efficiency with which radiologists can comfortably interpret these exams. AI has been shown to improve efficiency in medical-image generation, processing, and interpretation, and a variety of such AI models have been developed across research labs worldwide. However, very few of these, if any, find their way into routine clinical use, a discrepancy that reflects the divide between AI research and successful AI translation. To address the barrier to clinical deployment, we have formed MONAI Consortium, an open-source community which is building standards for AI deployment in healthcare institutions, and developing tools and infrastructure to facilitate their implementation. This report represents several years of weekly discussions and hands-on problem solving experience by groups of industry experts and clinicians in the MONAI Consortium. We identify barriers between AI-model development in research labs and subsequent clinical deployment and propose solutions. Our report provides guidance on processes which take an imaging AI model from development to clinical implementation in a healthcare institution. We discuss various AI integration points in a clinical Radiology workflow. We also present a taxonomy of Radiology AI use-cases. Through this report, we intend to educate the stakeholders in healthcare and AI (AI researchers, radiologists, imaging informaticists, and regulators) about cross-disciplinary challenges and possible solutions.

Wearable sensors for measuring head kinematics can be noisy due to imperfect interfaces with the body. Mouthguards are used to measure head kinematics during impacts in traumatic brain injury (TBI) studies, but deviations from reference kinematics can still occur due to potential looseness. In this study, deep learning is used to compensate for the imperfect interface and improve measurement accuracy. A set of one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) models was developed to denoise mouthguard kinematics measurements along three spatial axes of linear acceleration and angular velocity. The denoised kinematics had significantly reduced errors compared to reference kinematics, and reduced errors in brain injury criteria and tissue strain and strain rate calculated via finite element modeling. The 1D-CNN models were also tested on an on-field dataset of college football impacts and a post-mortem human subject dataset, with similar denoising effects observed. The models can be used to improve detection of head impacts and TBI risk evaluation, and potentially extended to other sensors measuring kinematics.

The BLOOM model is a large open-source multilingual language model capable of zero-shot learning, but its pretraining was limited to 46 languages. To improve its zero-shot performance on unseen languages, it is desirable to adapt BLOOM, but previous works have only explored adapting small language models. In this work, we apply existing language adaptation strategies to BLOOM and benchmark its zero-shot prompting performance on eight new languages. We find language adaptation to be effective at improving zero-shot performance in new languages. Surprisingly, adapter-based finetuning is more effective than continued pretraining for large models. In addition, we discover that prompting performance is not significantly affected by language specifics, such as the writing system. It is primarily determined by the size of the language adaptation data. We also add new languages to BLOOMZ, which is a multitask finetuned version of BLOOM capable of following task instructions zero-shot. We find including a new language in the multitask fine-tuning mixture to be the most effective method to teach BLOOMZ a new language. We conclude that with sufficient training data language adaptation can generalize well to diverse languages. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/multilingual-modeling/}.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

The promise of Mobile Health (mHealth) is the ability to use wearable sensors to monitor participant physiology at high frequencies during daily life to enable temporally-precise health interventions. However, a major challenge is frequent missing data. Despite a rich imputation literature, existing techniques are ineffective for the pulsative signals which comprise many mHealth applications, and a lack of available datasets has stymied progress. We address this gap with PulseImpute, the first large-scale pulsative signal imputation challenge which includes realistic mHealth missingness models, an extensive set of baselines, and clinically-relevant downstream tasks. Our baseline models include a novel transformer-based architecture designed to exploit the structure of pulsative signals. We hope that PulseImpute will enable the ML community to tackle this significant and challenging task.

In off-policy reinforcement learning, a behaviour policy performs exploratory interactions with the environment to obtain state-action-reward samples which are then used to learn a target policy that optimises the expected return. This leads to a problem of off-policy evaluation, where one needs to evaluate the target policy from samples collected by the often unrelated behaviour policy. Importance sampling is a traditional statistical technique that is often applied to off-policy evaluation. While importance sampling estimators are unbiased, their variance increases exponentially with the horizon of the decision process due to computing the importance weight as a product of action probability ratios, yielding estimates with low accuracy for domains involving long-term planning. This paper proposes state-based importance sampling (SIS), which drops the action probability ratios of sub-trajectories with "neglible states" -- roughly speaking, those for which the chosen actions have no impact on the return estimate -- from the computation of the importance weight. Theoretical results show that this results in a reduction of the exponent in the variance upper bound as well as improving the mean squared error. An automated search algorithm based on covariance testing is proposed to identify a negligible state set which has minimal MSE when performing state-based importance sampling. Experiments are conducted on a lift domain, which include "lift states" where the action has no impact on the following state and reward. The results demonstrate that using the search algorithm, SIS yields reduced variance and improved accuracy compared to traditional importance sampling, per-decision importance sampling, and incremental importance sampling.

With the progress of sensor technology in wearables, the collection and analysis of PPG signals are gaining more interest. Using Machine Learning, the cardiac rhythm corresponding to PPG signals can be used to predict different tasks such as activity recognition, sleep stage detection, or more general health status. However, supervised learning is often limited by the amount of available labeled data, which is typically expensive to obtain. To address this problem, we propose a Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) method with a pretext task of signal reconstruction to learn an informative generalized PPG representation. The performance of the proposed SSL framework is compared with two fully supervised baselines. The results show that in a very limited label data setting (10 samples per class or less), using SSL is beneficial, and a simple classifier trained on SSL-learned representations outperforms fully supervised deep neural networks. However, the results reveal that the SSL-learned representations are too focused on encoding the subjects. Unfortunately, there is high inter-subject variability in the SSL-learned representations, which makes working with this data more challenging when labeled data is scarce. The high inter-subject variability suggests that there is still room for improvements in learning representations. In general, the results suggest that SSL may pave the way for the broader use of machine learning models on PPG data in label-scarce regimes.