To analyze this characteristic of vulnerability, we developed an automated deep learning method for detecting microvessels in intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) images. A total of 8,403 IVOCT image frames from 85 lesions and 37 normal segments were analyzed. Manual annotation was done using a dedicated software (OCTOPUS) previously developed by our group. Data augmentation in the polar (r,{\theta}) domain was applied to raw IVOCT images to ensure that microvessels appear at all possible angles. Pre-processing methods included guidewire/shadow detection, lumen segmentation, pixel shifting, and noise reduction. DeepLab v3+ was used to segment microvessel candidates. A bounding box on each candidate was classified as either microvessel or non-microvessel using a shallow convolutional neural network. For better classification, we used data augmentation (i.e., angle rotation) on bounding boxes with a microvessel during network training. Data augmentation and pre-processing steps improved microvessel segmentation performance significantly, yielding a method with Dice of 0.71+/-0.10 and pixel-wise sensitivity/specificity of 87.7+/-6.6%/99.8+/-0.1%. The network for classifying microvessels from candidates performed exceptionally well, with sensitivity of 99.5+/-0.3%, specificity of 98.8+/-1.0%, and accuracy of 99.1+/-0.5%. The classification step eliminated the majority of residual false positives, and the Dice coefficient increased from 0.71 to 0.73. In addition, our method produced 698 image frames with microvessels present, compared to 730 from manual analysis, representing a 4.4% difference. When compared to the manual method, the automated method improved microvessel continuity, implying improved segmentation performance. The method will be useful for research purposes as well as potential future treatment planning.

Thin-cap fibroatheroma (TCFA) and plaque rupture have been recognized as the most frequent risk factor for thrombosis and acute coronary syndrome. Intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) can identify TCFA and assess cap thickness, which provides an opportunity to assess plaque vulnerability. We developed an automated method that can detect lipidous plaque and assess fibrous cap thickness in IVOCT images. This study analyzed a total of 4,360 IVOCT image frames of 77 lesions among 41 patients. To improve segmentation performance, preprocessing included lumen segmentation, pixel-shifting, and noise filtering on the raw polar (r, theta) IVOCT images. We used the DeepLab-v3 plus deep learning model to classify lipidous plaque pixels. After lipid detection, we automatically detected the outer border of the fibrous cap using a special dynamic programming algorithm and assessed the cap thickness. Our method provided excellent discriminability of lipid plaque with a sensitivity of 85.8% and A-line Dice coefficient of 0.837. By comparing lipid angle measurements between two analysts following editing of our automated software, we found good agreement by Bland-Altman analysis (difference 6.7+/-17 degree; mean 196 degree). Our method accurately detected the fibrous cap from the detected lipid plaque. Automated analysis required a significant modification for only 5.5% frames. Furthermore, our method showed a good agreement of fibrous cap thickness between two analysts with Bland-Altman analysis (4.2+/-14.6 micron; mean 175 micron), indicating little bias between users and good reproducibility of the measurement. We developed a fully automated method for fibrous cap quantification in IVOCT images, resulting in good agreement with determinations by analysts. The method has great potential to enable highly automated, repeatable, and comprehensive evaluations of TCFAs.

我们分享了我们最近的发现，以试图培训通用分割网络的各种细胞类型和成像方式。我们的方法建立在广义的U-NET体系结构上，该体系结构允许单独评估每个组件。我们修改了传统的二进制培训目标，以包括三个类以进行直接实例细分。进行了有关培训方案，培训设置，网络骨架和各个模块的详细实验。我们提出的培训方案依次从每个数据集中吸取小匹配，并且在优化步骤之前积累了梯度。我们发现，培训通用网络的关键是所有数据集上的历史监督，并且有必要以公正的方式对每个数据集进行采样。我们的实验还表明，可能存在共同的特征来定义细胞类型和成像方式的细胞边界，这可以允许应用训练有素的模型完全看不见的数据集。一些培训技巧可以进一步提高细分性能，包括交叉渗透损失功能中的班级权重，精心设计的学习率调度程序，较大的图像作物以进行上下文信息以及不平衡类别的其他损失条款。我们还发现，由于它们更可靠的统计估计和更高的语义理解，分割性能可以受益于组规范化层和缺陷的空间金字塔池模块。我们参与了在IEEE国际生物医学成像研讨会（ISBI）2021举行的第六个细胞跟踪挑战（CTC）。我们的方法被评估为在主要曲目的初始提交期间，作为最佳亚军，并在额外的竞争中获得了第三名，以准备摘要出版物。

制定了具有机器学习模拟（骆驼）项目的宇宙学和天体物理学，通过数千名宇宙的流体动力模拟和机器学习将宇宙学与天体物理学结合起来。骆驼包含4,233个宇宙学仿真，2,049个n-body和2,184个最先进的流体动力模拟，在参数空间中采样巨大的体积。在本文中，我们介绍了骆驼公共数据发布，描述了骆驼模拟的特性和由它们产生的各种数据产品，包括光环，次麦，银河系和空隙目录，功率谱，Bispectra，Lyman - $ \ Alpha $光谱，概率分布函数，光环径向轮廓和X射线光子列表。我们还释放了超过骆驼 - 山姆的数十亿个星系的目录：与Santa Cruz半分析模型相结合的大量N身体模拟。我们释放包含350多个Terabytes的所有数据，并包含143,922个快照，数百万光环，星系和摘要统计数据。我们提供有关如何访问，下载，读取和处理数据AT \ URL {https://camels.readthedocs.io}的进一步技术详细信息。

Ithaca is a Fuzzy Logic (FL) plugin for developing artificial intelligence systems within the Unity game engine. Its goal is to provide an intuitive and natural way to build advanced artificial intelligence systems, making the implementation of such a system faster and more affordable. The software is made up by a C\# framework and an Application Programming Interface (API) for writing inference systems, as well as a set of tools for graphic development and debugging. Additionally, a Fuzzy Control Language (FCL) parser is provided in order to import systems previously defined using this standard.

Learning efficient and interpretable policies has been a challenging task in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in the visual RL setting with complex scenes. While neural networks have achieved competitive performance, the resulting policies are often over-parameterized black boxes that are difficult to interpret and deploy efficiently. More recent symbolic RL frameworks have shown that high-level domain-specific programming logic can be designed to handle both policy learning and symbolic planning. However, these approaches rely on coded primitives with little feature learning, and when applied to high-dimensional visual scenes, they can suffer from scalability issues and perform poorly when images have complex object interactions. To address these challenges, we propose \textit{Differentiable Symbolic Expression Search} (DiffSES), a novel symbolic learning approach that discovers discrete symbolic policies using partially differentiable optimization. By using object-level abstractions instead of raw pixel-level inputs, DiffSES is able to leverage the simplicity and scalability advantages of symbolic expressions, while also incorporating the strengths of neural networks for feature learning and optimization. Our experiments demonstrate that DiffSES is able to generate symbolic policies that are simpler and more and scalable than state-of-the-art symbolic RL methods, with a reduced amount of symbolic prior knowledge.

Rigorous guarantees about the performance of predictive algorithms are necessary in order to ensure their responsible use. Previous work has largely focused on bounding the expected loss of a predictor, but this is not sufficient in many risk-sensitive applications where the distribution of errors is important. In this work, we propose a flexible framework to produce a family of bounds on quantiles of the loss distribution incurred by a predictor. Our method takes advantage of the order statistics of the observed loss values rather than relying on the sample mean alone. We show that a quantile is an informative way of quantifying predictive performance, and that our framework applies to a variety of quantile-based metrics, each targeting important subsets of the data distribution. We analyze the theoretical properties of our proposed method and demonstrate its ability to rigorously control loss quantiles on several real-world datasets.

Biometrics is the science of identifying an individual based on their intrinsic anatomical or behavioural characteristics, such as fingerprints, face, iris, gait, and voice. Iris recognition is one of the most successful methods because it exploits the rich texture of the human iris, which is unique even for twins and does not degrade with age. Modern approaches to iris recognition utilize deep learning to segment the valid portion of the iris from the rest of the eye, so it can then be encoded, stored and compared. This paper aims to improve the accuracy of iris semantic segmentation systems by introducing a novel data augmentation technique. Our method can transform an iris image with a certain dilation level into any desired dilation level, thus augmenting the variability and number of training examples from a small dataset. The proposed method is fast and does not require training. The results indicate that our data augmentation method can improve segmentation accuracy up to 15% for images with high pupil dilation, which creates a more reliable iris recognition pipeline, even under extreme dilation.

In 2019 Kerdels and Peters proposed a grid cell model (GCM) based on a Differential Growing Neural Gas (DGNG) network architecture as a computationally efficient way to model an Autoassociative Memory Cell (AMC) \cite{Kerdels_Peters_2019}. An important feature of the DGNG architecture with respect to possible applications in the field of computational neuroscience is its \textit{capacity} refering to its capability to process and uniquely distinguish input signals and therefore obtain a valid representation of the input space. This study evaluates the capacity of a two layered DGNG grid cell model on the Fashion-MNIST dataset. The focus on the study lies on the variation of layer sizes to improve the understanding of capacity properties in relation to network parameters as well as its scaling properties. Additionally, parameter discussions and a plausability check with a pixel/segment variation method are provided. It is concluded, that the DGNG model is able to obtain a meaningful and plausible representation of the input space and to cope with the complexity of the Fashion-MNIST dataset even at moderate layer sizes.

Data deprivation, or the lack of easily available and actionable information on the well-being of individuals, is a significant challenge for the developing world and an impediment to the design and operationalization of policies intended to alleviate poverty. In this paper we explore the suitability of data derived from OpenStreetMap to proxy for the location of two crucial public services: schools and health clinics. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of digital humanitarians, online mapping repositories such as OpenStreetMap contain millions of records on buildings and other structures, delineating both their location and often their use. Unfortunately much of this data is locked in complex, unstructured text rendering it seemingly unsuitable for classifying schools or clinics. We apply a scalable, unsupervised learning method to unlabeled OpenStreetMap building data to extract the location of schools and health clinics in ten countries in Africa. We find the topic modeling approach greatly improves performance versus reliance on structured keys alone. We validate our results by comparing schools and clinics identified by our OSM method versus those identified by the WHO, and describe OSM coverage gaps more broadly.