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.

我们介绍了Sparrow，这是一个寻求信息的对话代理，与提示的语言模型基线相比，训练有素，更有帮助，正确和无害。我们使用从人类反馈中的强化学习来培训我们的模型，以帮助人类评估者判断代理人的行为。首先，为了使我们的代理人更有帮助和无害，我们将良好对话的要求分解为代理人应遵循的自然语言规则，并分别向评估者询问每个规则。我们证明，这种崩溃使我们能够收集对代理行为的更多针对性的人类判断，并允许更有效的规则条件奖励模型。其次，我们的代理商在收集对模型声明的偏好判决时提供了支持事实主张的来源的证据。对于事实问题，麻雀提供的证据支持了78％的时间。比基线比基线更享受麻雀，同时对人类的对抗性探测更具弹性，在探测时只有8％的时间违反了我们的规则。最后，我们进行了广泛的分析，表明尽管我们的模型学会遵守我们的规则，但它可以表现出分布偏见。

前列腺活检和图像引导的治疗程序通常是在与磁共振图像（MRI）的超声指导下进行的。准确的图像融合依赖于超声图像上前列腺的准确分割。然而，超声图像中降低的信噪比和工件（例如，斑点和阴影）限制了自动前列腺分割技术的性能，并将这些方法推广到新的图像域是本质上很难的。在这项研究中，我们通过引入一种新型的2.5D深神经网络来解决这些挑战，用于超声图像上的前列腺分割。我们的方法通过组合有监督的域适应技术和知识蒸馏损失，解决了转移学习和填充方法的局限性（即，在更新模型权重时，在更新模型权重时的性能下降）。知识蒸馏损失允许保留先前学习的知识，并在新数据集上的模型填充后降低性能下降。此外，我们的方法依赖于注意模块，该模块认为模型特征定位信息以提高分割精度。我们对一个机构的764名受试者进行了培训，并仅使用后续机构中的十个受试者对我们的模型进行了审核。我们分析了方法在三个大型数据集上的性能，其中包括来自三个不同机构的2067名受试者。我们的方法达到了平均骰子相似性系数（骰子）为$ 94.0 \ pm0.03 $，而Hausdorff距离（HD95）为2.28 $ mm $，在第一机构的独立受试者中。此外，我们的模型在其他两个机构的研究中都很好地概括了（骰子：$ 91.0 \ pm0.03 $; hd95：3.7 $ mm $ and Dice：$ 82.0 \ pm0.03 $; hd95 $; hd95：7.1 $ mm $）。

图像注册可用于量化前列腺癌患者纵向MR图像的形态变化。本文描述了改善基于学习的注册算法的发展，对于这种挑战性的临床应用程序通常具有高度可变但有限的培训数据。首先，我们报告说，潜在空间可以聚集到一个比在经过训练的注册网络深层瓶颈特征的瓶颈特征中通常发现的尺寸空间要低得多。基于此观察结果，我们提出了一种层次量化方法，使用具有约束大小的共同训练的词典来离散学习的特征向量，以改善注册网络的概括。此外，在潜在的量化空间中，独立优化了一种新颖的协作词典，以合并其他先验信息，例如对腺体或其他感兴趣的区域的分割。根据来自86名前列腺癌患者的216张真实临床图像，我们显示了这两个组件的功效。从腺体上的骰子和相应地标的目标登记误差方面，获得了统计学意义的提高注册精度，后者的实现了5.46毫米，而没有量化的基线提高了28.7 \％。实验结果还表明，在训练数据和测试数据之间，性能的差异确实被最小化了。

前列腺癌是美国男人的第二致致命癌症。虽然磁共振成像（MRI）越来越多地用于引导前列腺癌诊断的靶向活组织检查，但其效用仍然受到限制，因为假阳性和假否定的高率以及较低的读者协议。机器学习方法在前列腺MRI上检测和定位癌症可以帮助标准化放射科学诠释。然而，现有的机器学习方法不仅在模型架构中不等，而且还可以在用于模型培训的地面真理标签策略中。在这项研究中，我们比较不同的标记策略，即病理证实放射科标签，整个安装组织病理学图像上的病理学家标签，以及病变水平和像素级数字病理学家标签（先前验证了组织病理学图像上的深层学习算法以预测像素 - 整个安装组织病理学图像上的Gleason模式）。我们分析这些标签对训练有素的机器学习模型的性能的影响。我们的实验表明，用它们培训的（1）放射科标签和模型可能会错过癌症，或低估癌症程度，（2）与他们培训的数字病理学家标签和模型与病理学家标签有高度的一致性，而（3）用数字病理学家培训的模型标签在两种不同疾病分布的两种不同群组中达到最佳性能，而不管使用的模型建筑如何。数字病理学家标签可以减少与人类注释相关的挑战，包括劳动力，时间，和读者间变异性，并且可以通过使可靠的机器学习模型进行培训来检测和定位前列腺癌，帮助弥合前列腺放射学和病理学之间的差距在MRI。

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.

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.

The broad usage of mobile devices nowadays, the sensitiveness of the information contained in them, and the shortcomings of current mobile user authentication methods are calling for novel, secure, and unobtrusive solutions to verify the users' identity. In this article, we propose TypeFormer, a novel Transformer architecture to model free-text keystroke dynamics performed on mobile devices for the purpose of user authentication. The proposed model consists in Temporal and Channel Modules enclosing two Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent layers, Gaussian Range Encoding (GRE), a multi-head Self-Attention mechanism, and a Block-Recurrent structure. Experimenting on one of the largest public databases to date, the Aalto mobile keystroke database, TypeFormer outperforms current state-of-the-art systems achieving Equal Error Rate (EER) values of 3.25% using only 5 enrolment sessions of 50 keystrokes each. In such way, we contribute to reducing the traditional performance gap of the challenging mobile free-text scenario with respect to its desktop and fixed-text counterparts. Additionally, we analyse the behaviour of the model with different experimental configurations such as the length of the keystroke sequences and the amount of enrolment sessions, showing margin for improvement with more enrolment data. Finally, a cross-database evaluation is carried out, demonstrating the robustness of the features extracted by TypeFormer in comparison with existing approaches.

Analogical proportions compare pairs of items (a, b) and (c, d) in terms of their differences and similarities. They play a key role in the formalization of analogical inference. The paper first discusses how to improve analogical inference in terms of accuracy and in terms of computational cost. Then it indicates the potential of analogical proportions for explanation. Finally, it highlights the close relationship between analogical proportions and multi-valued dependencies, which reveals an unsuspected aspect of the former.

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.