IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics最新文献

The application of computer vision-powered large language models (LLMs) for medical image diagnosis has significantly advanced healthcare systems. Recent progress in developing symmetrical architectures has greatly impacted various medical imaging tasks. While CNNs or RNNs have demonstrated excellent performance, these architectures often face notable limitations of substantial losses in detailed information, such as requiring to capture global semantic information effectively and relying heavily on deep encoders and aggressive downsampling. This paper introduces a novel LLM-based Hybrid-Transformer Network (HybridTransNet) designed to encode tokenized Big Data patches with the transformer mechanism, which elegantly embeds multimodal data of varying sizes as token sequence inputs of LLMS. Subsequently, the network performs both inter-scale and intra-scale self-attention, processing data features through a transformer-based symmetric architecture with a refining module, which facilitates accurately recovering both local and global context information. Additionally, the output is refined using a novel fuzzy selector. Compared to other existing methods on two distinct datasets, the experimental findings and formal assessment demonstrate that our LLM-based HybridTransNet provides superior performance for brain tumor diagnosis in healthcare informatics.

Brain tumors are fatal and severely disrupt brain function as they advance. Timely detection and precise monitoring are crucial for improving patient outcomes and survival. A smart healthcare system leveraging the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) revolutionizes patient care by offering streamlined remote healthcare, especially for individuals with acute medical conditions like brain tumors. However, such systems face significant challenges, such as (1) the increasing prevalence of cyber attacks in the expanding digital healthcare landscape, and (2) the lack of reliability and accuracy in existing tumor detection methods. To address these issues, we propose Secured Brain Tumor Detection (SBTD), the first unified system integrating IoMT with secure tumor detection. SBTD features: (1) a robust security framework, grounded in chaos theory, to safeguard medical data; and (2) a reliable machine learning-based tumor detection framework that accurately localizes tumors using their anatomy. Comprehensive experimental evaluations on different multimodal MRI datasets demonstrate the system's suitability, clinical applicability and superior performance over state-of-the-art algorithms.

Vignetting constitutes a prevalent optical degradation that significantly compromises the quality of biomedical microscopic imaging. However, a robust and efficient vignetting correction methodology in multi-channel microscopic images remains absent at present. In this paper, we take advantage of a prior knowledge about the homogeneity of microscopic images and radial attenuation property of vignetting to develop a self-supervised deep learning algorithm that achieves complex vignetting removal in color microscopic images. Our proposed method, vignetting correction lookup table (VCLUT), is trainable on both single and multiple images, which employs adversarial learning to effectively transfer good imaging conditions from the user visually defined central region of its own light field to the entire image. To illustrate its effectiveness, we performed individual correction experiments on data from five distinct biological specimens. The results demonstrate that VCLUT exhibits enhanced performance compared to classical methods. We further examined its performance as a multi-image-based approach on a pathological dataset, revealing its advantage over other stateof-the-art approaches in both qualitative and quantitative measurements. Moreover, it uniquely possesses the capacity for generalization across various levels of vignetting intensity and an ultra-fast model computation capability, rendering it well-suited for integration into high-throughput imaging pipelines of digital microscopy.

This paper addresses the critical need for elctrocardiogram (ECG) classifier architectures that balance high classification performance with robust privacy protection against membership inference attacks (MIA). We introduce a comprehensive approach that innovates in both machine learning efficacy and privacy preservation. Key contributions include the development of a privacy estimator to quantify and mitigate privacy leakage in neural network architectures used for ECG classification. Utilizing this privacy estimator, we propose mDARTS (searching MLbased ECG classifier against MIA), integrating MIA's attack loss into the architecture search process to identify architectures that are both accurate and resilient to MIA threats. Our method achieves significant improvements, with an ECG classification accuracy of 92.1% and a lower privacy score of 54.3%, indicating reduced potential for sensitive information leakage. Heuristic experiments refine architecture search parameters specifically for ECG classification, enhancing classifier performance and privacy scores by up to 3.0% and 1.0%, respectively. The framework's adaptability supports user customization, enabling the extraction of architectures that meet specific criteria such as optimal classification performance with minimal privacy risk. By focusing on the intersection of high-performance ECG classification and the mitigation of privacy risks associated with MIA, our study offers a pioneering solution addressing the limitations of previous approaches.

Predicting the progression from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's disease (AD) is critical for early intervention. Towards this end, various deep learning models have been applied in this domain, typically relying on structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) data from a single time point whereas neglecting the dynamic changes in brain structure over time. Current longitudinal studies inadequately explore disease evolution dynamics and are burdened by high computational complexity. This paper introduces a novel lightweight 3D convolutional neural network specifically designed to capture the evolution of brain diseases for modeling the progression of MCI. First, a longitudinal lesion feature selection strategy is proposed to extract core features from temporal data, facilitating the detection of subtle differences in brain structure between two time points. Next, to refine the model for a more concentrated emphasis on lesion features, a disease trend attention mechanism is introduced to learn the dependencies between overall disease trends and local variation features. Finally, disease prediction visualization techniques are employed to improve the interpretability of the final predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, specificity, precision, and F1 score. This study confirms the efficacy of our early diagnostic method, utilizing only two follow-up sMRI scans to predict the disease status of MCI patients 24 months later with an AUC of 79.03%.

Currently, spatiotemporal convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have emerged as promising tools for seizure prediction (SP), which explore the spatiotemporal biomarkers in an epileptic brain. Generally, these CNNs capture spatiotemporal features at single spectral resolution. However, epileptiform EEG signals contain irregular neural oscillations of different frequencies in different brain regions. Therefore, it may be underperforming and uninterpretable for the CNNs without capturing complex spectral properties sufficiently. This study proposed a novel interpretable multi-branch architecture for spatiotemporal CNNs, namely MultiSincNet. On the one hand, the MultiSincNet could directly show the frequency boundaries using the interpretable sinc-convolution layers. On the other hand, it could extract and integrate multiple spatiotemporal features across varying spectral resolutions using parallel branches. Moreover, we also constructed a post-hoc explanation technique for multi-branch CNNs, using the first-order Taylor expansion and chain rule based on the multivariate composite function, which demonstrates the crucial spatiotemporal features learned by the proposed multi-branch spatiotemporal CNN. When combined with the optimal MultiSincNet, ShallowConvNet, DeepConvNet, and EEGWaveNet had significantly improved the subject-specific performance on most metrics. Specifically, the optimal MultiSincNet significantly increased the average accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, binary F1-score, weighted F1-score, and AUC of EEGWaveNet by about 7%, 8%, 7%, 8%, 7%, and 7%, respectively. Besides, the visualization results showed that the optimal model mainly extracts the spectral energy difference from the high gamma band focalized to specific spatial areas as the dominant spatiotemporal EEG feature.

In the field of diagnosing lung diseases, the application of neural networks (NNs) in image classification exhibits significant potential. However, NNs are considered "black boxes," making it difficult to discern their decision-making processes, thereby leading to skepticism and concern regarding NNs. This compromises model reliability and hampers intelligent medicine's development. To tackle this issue, we introduce the Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search (EvoNAS). In image classification tasks, EvoNAS initially utilizes an Evolutionary Algorithm to explore various Convolutional Neural Networks, ultimately yielding an optimized network that excels at separating between redundant texture features and the most discriminative ones. Retaining the most discriminative features improves classification accuracy, particularly in distinguishing similar features. This approach illuminates the intrinsic mechanics of classification, thereby enhancing the accuracy of the results. Subsequently, we incorporate a Differential Evolution algorithm based on distribution estimation, significantly enhancing search efficiency. Employing visualization techniques, we demonstrate the effectiveness of EvoNAS, endowing the model with interpretability. Finally, we conduct experiments on the diffuse lung disease texture dataset using EvoNAS. Compared to the original network, the classification accuracy increases by 0.56%. Moreover, our EvoNAS approach demonstrates significant advantages over existing methods in the same dataset.

Cancer is a pressing public health problem and one of the main causes of mortality worldwide. The development of advanced computational methods for predicting cancer survival is pivotal in aiding clinicians to formulate effective treatment strategies and improve patient quality of life. Recent advances in survival prediction methods show that integrating diverse information from various cancer-related data, such as pathological images and genomics, is crucial for improving prediction accuracy. Despite promising results of existing approaches, there are great challenges of modality gap and semantic redundancy presented in multiple cancer data, which could hinder the comprehensive integration and pose substantial obstacles to further enhancing cancer survival prediction. In this study, we propose a novel agnostic-specific modality learning (ASML) framework for accurate cancer survival prediction. To bridge the modality gap and provide a comprehensive view of distinct data modalities, we employ an agnostic-specific learning strategy to learn the commonality across modalities and the uniqueness of each modality. Moreover, a cross-modal fusion network is exerted to integrate multimodal information by modeling modality correlations and diminish semantic redundancy in a divide-and-conquer manner. Extensive experiment results on three TCGA datasets demonstrate that ASML reaches better performance than other existing cancer survival prediction methods for multiple data.

Semi-supervised learning effectively mitigates the lack of labeled data by introducing extensive unlabeled data. Despite achieving success in respiratory sound classification, in practice, it usually takes years to acquire a sufficiently sizeable unlabeled set, which consequently results in an extension of the research timeline. Considering that there are also respiratory sounds available in other related tasks, like breath phase detection and COVID-19 detection, it might be an alternative manner to treat these external samples as unlabeled data for respiratory sound classification. However, since these external samples are collected in different scenarios via different devices, there inevitably exists a distribution mismatch between the labeled and external unlabeled data. For existing methods, they usually assume that the labeled and unlabeled data follow the same data distribution. Therefore, they cannot benefit from external samples. To utilize external unlabeled data, we propose a semi-supervised method based on Joint Energy-based Model (JEM) in this paper. During training, the method attempts to use only the essential semantic components within the samples to model the data distribution. When non-semantic components like recording environments and devices vary, as these non-semantic components have a small impact on the model training, a relatively accurate distribution estimation is obtained. Therefore, the method exhibits insensitivity to the distribution mismatch, enabling the model to leverage external unlabeled data to mitigate the lack of labeled data. Taking ICBHI 2017 as the labeled set, HF_Lung_V1 and COVID-19 Sounds as the external unlabeled sets, the proposed method exceeds the baseline by 12.86.

Automatic extraction of valuable, structured evidence from the exponentially growing clinical trial literature can help physicians practice evidence-based medicine quickly and accurately. However, current research on evidence extraction has been limited by the lack of generalization ability on various clinical topics and the high cost of manual annotation. In this work, we address these challenges by constructing a PICO-based evidence dataset PICO-DS, covering five clinical topics. This dataset was automatically labeled by a distant supervision based on our proposed textual similarity algorithm called ROUGE-Hybrid. We then present an Aceso-DSAL model, an extension of our previous supervised evidence extraction model - Aceso. In Aceso-DSAL, distantly-labelled and multi-topic PICO-DS was exploited as training corpus, which greatly enhances the generalization of the extraction model. To mitigate the influence of noise unavoidably-introduced in distant supervision, we employ TextCNN and MW-Net models and a paradigm of active learning to weigh the value of each sample. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model on the PICO-DS dataset and find that it outperforms state-of-the-art studies in identifying evidential sentences.