This article focuses on the control center of each human body: the brain. We will point out the pivotal role of the cerebral vasculature and how its complex mechanisms may vary between subjects. We then emphasize a specific acute pathological state, i.e., acute ischemic stroke, and show how medical imaging and its analysis can be used to define the treatment. We show how the core-penumbra concept is used in practice using mismatch criteria and how machine learning can be used to make predictions of the final infarct, either via deconvolution or convolutional neural networks.

The clinical interest is often to measure the volume of a structure, which is typically derived from a segmentation. In order to evaluate and compare segmentation methods, the similarity between a segmentation and a predefined ground truth is measured using popular discrete metrics, such as the Dice score. Recent segmentation methods use a differentiable surrogate metric, such as soft Dice, as part of the loss function during the learning phase. In this work, we first briefly describe how to derive volume estimates from a segmentation that is, potentially, inherently uncertain or ambiguous. This is followed by a theoretical analysis and an experimental validation linking the inherent uncertainty to common loss functions for training CNNs, namely cross-entropy and soft Dice. We find that, even though soft Dice optimization leads to an improved performance with respect to the Dice score and other measures, it may introduce a volume bias for tasks with high inherent uncertainty. These findings indicate some of the method's clinical limitations and suggest doing a closer ad-hoc volume analysis with an optional re-calibration step.

尽管骰子损失是医学图像分割中的主要损失函数之一，但大多数研究都忽略了其导数，即使用梯度下降时优化的真实电动机。在本文中，我们强调了在缺少或空的标签存在下骰子丢失的特殊作用。首先，我们制定一个理论基础，对骰子丢失及其导数进行了一般描述。事实证明，减少尺寸$ \ phi $和平滑项$ \ epsilon $的选择是无处不在的，并且极大地影响了其行为。我们找到并提出了$ \ phi $和$ \ epsilon $的启发式组合，它们在细分设置中使用，带有缺失或空标签。其次，我们使用两个公开可用的数据集在二进制和多类分段设置中验证这些发现。我们确认，$ \ phi $和$ \ epsilon $的选择确实是关键的。选择了$ \ phi $，因此减少的单个元素（和类）元素以及可忽略不计的$ \ epsilon $进行，骰子损失与缺失的标签自然交易，并且与最近缺少标签的最新适应性相似。选择$ \ phi $，以使减少量发生在多个批处理元素上，或以$ \ epsilon $的启发式值进行，骰子损失正确处理空标签。我们认为，这项工作强调了一些基本观点，并希望它鼓励研究人员更好地描述他们对未来工作中骰子损失的确切实施。

机器学习驱动的医学图像分割已成为医学图像分析的标准。然而，深度学习模型易于过度自信预测。这导致了重新关注医学成像和更广泛的机器学习社区中的校准预测。校准预测是标签概率的估计，其对应于置信度的标签的真正预期值。这种校准的预测在一系列医学成像应用中具有效用，包括在不确定性和主动学习系统下的手术规划。同时，它通常是对许多医疗应用的实际重视的准确体积测量。这项工作调查了模型校准和体积估计之间的关系。我们在数学上和经验上展示，如果每个图像校准预测器，我们可以通过期望每像素/图像的体素的概率得分来获得正确的体积。此外，我们表明校准分类器的凸组合保持体积估计，但不保留校准。因此，我们得出结论，具有校准的预测因子是足够但不是必需的来获得体积的无偏估计。我们验证了我们对18种不同（校准的）培训策略的主题验证了我们关于Brats 2018的胶质瘤体积估计的任务的集合，以及Isles 2018数据集的缺血性卒中病变估计。

最近关于Covid-19的研究表明，CT成像提供了评估疾病进展和协助诊断的有用信息，以及帮助理解疾病。有越来越多的研究，建议使用深度学习来使用胸部CT扫描提供快速准确地定量Covid-19。兴趣的主要任务是胸部CT扫描的肺和肺病变的自动分割，确认或疑似Covid-19患者。在这项研究中，我们使用多中心数据集比较12个深度学习算法，包括开源和内部开发的算法。结果表明，合并不同的方法可以提高肺部分割，二元病变分割和多种子病变分割的总体测试集性能，从而分别为0.982,0.724和0.469的平均骰子分别。将得到的二元病变分段为91.3ml的平均绝对体积误差。通常，区分不同病变类型的任务更加困难，分别具有152mL的平均绝对体积差，分别为整合和磨碎玻璃不透明度为0.369和0.523的平均骰子分数。所有方法都以平均体积误差进行二元病变分割，该分段优于人类评估者的视觉评估，表明这些方法足以用于临床实践中使用的大规模评估。

Increasingly taking place in online spaces, modern political conversations are typically perceived to be unproductively affirming -- siloed in so called ``echo chambers'' of exclusively like-minded discussants. Yet, to date we lack sufficient means to measure viewpoint diversity in conversations. To this end, in this paper, we operationalize two viewpoint metrics proposed for recommender systems and adapt them to the context of social media conversations. This is the first study to apply these two metrics (Representation and Fragmentation) to real world data and to consider the implications for online conversations specifically. We apply these measures to two topics -- daylight savings time (DST), which serves as a control, and the more politically polarized topic of immigration. We find that the diversity scores for both Fragmentation and Representation are lower for immigration than for DST. Further, we find that while pro-immigrant views receive consistent pushback on the platform, anti-immigrant views largely operate within echo chambers. We observe less severe yet similar patterns for DST. Taken together, Representation and Fragmentation paint a meaningful and important new picture of viewpoint diversity.

Electricity prices in liberalized markets are determined by the supply and demand for electric power, which are in turn driven by various external influences that vary strongly in time. In perfect competition, the merit order principle describes that dispatchable power plants enter the market in the order of their marginal costs to meet the residual load, i.e. the difference of load and renewable generation. Many market models implement this principle to predict electricity prices but typically require certain assumptions and simplifications. In this article, we present an explainable machine learning model for the prices on the German day-ahead market, which substantially outperforms a benchmark model based on the merit order principle. Our model is designed for the ex-post analysis of prices and thus builds on various external features. Using Shapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) values, we can disentangle the role of the different features and quantify their importance from empiric data. Load, wind and solar generation are most important, as expected, but wind power appears to affect prices stronger than solar power does. Fuel prices also rank highly and show nontrivial dependencies, including strong interactions with other features revealed by a SHAP interaction analysis. Large generation ramps are correlated with high prices, again with strong feature interactions, due to the limited flexibility of nuclear and lignite plants. Our results further contribute to model development by providing quantitative insights directly from data.

Data-driven modeling has become a key building block in computational science and engineering. However, data that are available in science and engineering are typically scarce, often polluted with noise and affected by measurement errors and other perturbations, which makes learning the dynamics of systems challenging. In this work, we propose to combine data-driven modeling via operator inference with the dynamic training via roll outs of neural ordinary differential equations. Operator inference with roll outs inherits interpretability, scalability, and structure preservation of traditional operator inference while leveraging the dynamic training via roll outs over multiple time steps to increase stability and robustness for learning from low-quality and noisy data. Numerical experiments with data describing shallow water waves and surface quasi-geostrophic dynamics demonstrate that operator inference with roll outs provides predictive models from training trajectories even if data are sampled sparsely in time and polluted with noise of up to 10%.

Brain tumor imaging has been part of the clinical routine for many years to perform non-invasive detection and grading of tumors. Tumor segmentation is a crucial step for managing primary brain tumors because it allows a volumetric analysis to have a longitudinal follow-up of tumor growth or shrinkage to monitor disease progression and therapy response. In addition, it facilitates further quantitative analysis such as radiomics. Deep learning models, in particular CNNs, have been a methodology of choice in many applications of medical image analysis including brain tumor segmentation. In this study, we investigated the main design aspects of CNN models for the specific task of MRI-based brain tumor segmentation. Two commonly used CNN architectures (i.e. DeepMedic and U-Net) were used to evaluate the impact of the essential parameters such as learning rate, batch size, loss function, and optimizer. The performance of CNN models using different configurations was assessed with the BraTS 2018 dataset to determine the most performant model. Then, the generalization ability of the model was assessed using our in-house dataset. For all experiments, U-Net achieved a higher DSC compared to the DeepMedic. However, the difference was only statistically significant for whole tumor segmentation using FLAIR sequence data and tumor core segmentation using T1w sequence data. Adam and SGD both with the initial learning rate set to 0.001 provided the highest segmentation DSC when training the CNN model using U-Net and DeepMedic architectures, respectively. No significant difference was observed when using different normalization approaches. In terms of loss functions, a weighted combination of soft Dice and cross-entropy loss with the weighting term set to 0.5 resulted in an improved segmentation performance and training stability for both DeepMedic and U-Net models.

Brain-inspired computing proposes a set of algorithmic principles that hold promise for advancing artificial intelligence. They endow systems with self learning capabilities, efficient energy usage, and high storage capacity. A core concept that lies at the heart of brain computation is sequence learning and prediction. This form of computation is essential for almost all our daily tasks such as movement generation, perception, and language. Understanding how the brain performs such a computation is not only important to advance neuroscience but also to pave the way to new technological brain-inspired applications. A previously developed spiking neural network implementation of sequence prediction and recall learns complex, high-order sequences in an unsupervised manner by local, biologically inspired plasticity rules. An emerging type of hardware that holds promise for efficiently running this type of algorithm is neuromorphic hardware. It emulates the way the brain processes information and maps neurons and synapses directly into a physical substrate. Memristive devices have been identified as potential synaptic elements in neuromorphic hardware. In particular, redox-induced resistive random access memories (ReRAM) devices stand out at many aspects. They permit scalability, are energy efficient and fast, and can implement biological plasticity rules. In this work, we study the feasibility of using ReRAM devices as a replacement of the biological synapses in the sequence learning model. We implement and simulate the model including the ReRAM plasticity using the neural simulator NEST. We investigate the effect of different device properties on the performance characteristics of the sequence learning model, and demonstrate resilience with respect to different on-off ratios, conductance resolutions, device variability, and synaptic failure.