An article published on Medical News Today in June 2022 presented a fundamental question in its title: Can an earlobe crease predict heart attacks? The author explained that end arteries supply the heart and ears. In other words, if they lose blood supply, no other arteries can take over, resulting in tissue damage. Consequently, some earlobes have a diagonal crease, line, or deep fold that resembles a wrinkle. In this paper, we take a step toward detecting this specific marker, commonly known as DELC or Frank's Sign. For this reason, we have made the first DELC dataset available to the public. In addition, we have investigated the performance of numerous cutting-edge backbones on annotated photos. Experimentally, we demonstrate that it is possible to solve this challenge by combining pre-trained encoders with a customized classifier to achieve 97.7% accuracy. Moreover, we have analyzed the backbone trade-off between performance and size, estimating MobileNet as the most promising encoder.

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.

通用数据模型解决了标准化电子健康记录（EHR）数据的许多挑战，但无法将其集成深度表型所需的资源。开放的生物学和生物医学本体论（OBO）铸造本体论提供了可用于生物学知识的语义计算表示，并能够整合多种生物医学数据。但是，将EHR数据映射到OBO Foundry本体论需要大量的手动策展和域专业知识。我们介绍了一个框架，用于将观察性医学成果合作伙伴关系（OMOP）标准词汇介绍给OBO铸造本体。使用此框架，我们制作了92,367条条件，8,615种药物成分和10,673个测量结果的映射。域专家验证了映射准确性，并且在24家医院进行检查时，映射覆盖了99％的条件和药物成分和68％的测量结果。最后，我们证明OMOP2OBO映射可以帮助系统地识别可能受益于基因检测的未诊断罕见病患者。

在双胞胎输血综合征（TTTS）中，单座管胎盘中的异常血管吻合可能会在两个胎儿之间产生不均匀的流量。在当前的实践中，通过使用激光消融闭合异常吻合来对TTT进行手术治疗。该手术在最小的侵入性中依赖于胎儿镜检查。有限的视野使吻合术识别成为外科医生的具有挑战性的任务。为了应对这一挑战，我们提出了一个基于学习的框架，用于视野扩展的体内胎儿镜框架注册。该框架的新颖性依赖于基于学习的关键点提案网络以及基于胎儿镜图像细分和（ii）不一致的同符的编码策略（i）无关的关键点。我们在来自6个不同女性的6个TTT手术的6个术中序列的数据集中验证了我们的框架，这是根据最新的最新算法状态，该算法依赖于胎盘血管的分割。与艺术的状态相比，提出的框架的性能更高，为稳健的马赛克在TTTS手术期间提供背景意识铺平了道路。

胎儿镜检查激光​​光凝是一种广泛采用的方法，用于治疗双胞胎输血综合征（TTTS）。该过程涉及光凝病理吻合术以调节双胞胎之间的血液交换。由于观点有限，胎儿镜的可操作性差，可见性差和照明的可变性，因此该程序尤其具有挑战性。这些挑战可能导致手术时间增加和消融不完全。计算机辅助干预措施（CAI）可以通过识别场景中的关键结构并通过视频马赛克来扩展胎儿镜观景领域，从而为外科医生提供决策支持和背景意识。由于缺乏设计，开发和测试CAI算法的高质量数据，该领域的研究受到了阻碍。通过作为MICCAI2021内窥镜视觉挑战组织的胎儿镜胎盘胎盘分割和注册（FETREG2021）挑战，我们发布了第一个Largescale Multencentre TTTS数据集，用于开发广义和可靠的语义分割和视频摩擦质量algorithms。对于这一挑战，我们发布了一个2060张图像的数据集，该数据集是从18个体内TTTS胎儿镜检查程序和18个简短视频剪辑的船只，工具，胎儿和背景类别的像素通道。七个团队参与了这一挑战，他们的模型性能在一个看不见的测试数据集中评估了658个从6个胎儿镜程序和6个短剪辑的图像的图像。这项挑战为创建通用解决方案提供了用于胎儿镜面场景的理解和摩西式解决方案的机会。在本文中，我们介绍了FETREG2021挑战的发现，以及报告TTTS胎儿镜检查中CAI的详细文献综述。通过这一挑战，它的分析和多中心胎儿镜数据的发布，我们为该领域的未来研究提供了基准。

While the brain connectivity network can inform the understanding and diagnosis of developmental dyslexia, its cause-effect relationships have not yet enough been examined. Employing electroencephalography signals and band-limited white noise stimulus at 4.8 Hz (prosodic-syllabic frequency), we measure the phase Granger causalities among channels to identify differences between dyslexic learners and controls, thereby proposing a method to calculate directional connectivity. As causal relationships run in both directions, we explore three scenarios, namely channels' activity as sources, as sinks, and in total. Our proposed method can be used for both classification and exploratory analysis. In all scenarios, we find confirmation of the established right-lateralized Theta sampling network anomaly, in line with the temporal sampling framework's assumption of oscillatory differences in the Theta and Gamma bands. Further, we show that this anomaly primarily occurs in the causal relationships of channels acting as sinks, where it is significantly more pronounced than when only total activity is observed. In the sink scenario, our classifier obtains 0.84 and 0.88 accuracy and 0.87 and 0.93 AUC for the Theta and Gamma bands, respectively.

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but the quality bar for medical and clinical applications is high. Today, attempts to assess models' clinical knowledge typically rely on automated evaluations on limited benchmarks. There is no standard to evaluate model predictions and reasoning across a breadth of tasks. To address this, we present MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online. We propose a framework for human evaluation of model answers along multiple axes including factuality, precision, possible harm, and bias. In addition, we evaluate PaLM (a 540-billion parameter LLM) and its instruction-tuned variant, Flan-PaLM, on MultiMedQA. Using a combination of prompting strategies, Flan-PaLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on every MultiMedQA multiple-choice dataset (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU clinical topics), including 67.6% accuracy on MedQA (US Medical License Exam questions), surpassing prior state-of-the-art by over 17%. However, human evaluation reveals key gaps in Flan-PaLM responses. To resolve this we introduce instruction prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for aligning LLMs to new domains using a few exemplars. The resulting model, Med-PaLM, performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians. We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today's models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.

The ability to convert reciprocating, i.e., alternating, actuation into rotary motion using linkages is hindered fundamentally by their poor torque transmission capability around kinematic singularity configurations. Here, we harness the elastic potential energy of a linear spring attached to the coupler link of four-bar mechanisms to manipulate force transmission around the kinematic singularities. We developed a theoretical model to explore the parameter space for proper force transmission in slider-crank and rocker-crank four-bar kinematics. Finally, we verified the proposed model and methodology by building and testing a macro-scale prototype of a slider-crank mechanism. We expect this approach to enable the development of small-scale rotary engines and robotic devices with closed kinematic chains dealing with serial kinematic singularities, such as linkages and parallel manipulators.

This paper considers a combination of actuation tendons and measurement strings to achieve accurate shape sensing and direct kinematics of continuum robots. Assuming general string routing, a methodical Lie group formulation for the shape sensing of these robots is presented. The shape kinematics is expressed using arc-length-dependent curvature distributions parameterized by modal functions, and the Magnus expansion for Lie group integration is used to express the shape as a product of exponentials. The tendon and string length kinematic constraints are solved for the modal coefficients and the configuration space and body Jacobian are derived. The noise amplification index for the shape reconstruction problem is defined and used for optimizing the string/tendon routing paths, and a planar simulation study shows the minimal number of strings/tendons needed for accurate shape reconstruction. A torsionally stiff continuum segment is used for experimental evaluation, demonstrating mean (maximal) end-effector absolute position error of less than 2% (5%) of total length. Finally, a simulation study of a torsionally compliant segment demonstrates the approach for general deflections and string routings. We believe that the methods of this paper can benefit the design process, sensing and control of continuum and soft robots.