Africa
Local Adaptation Improves Accuracy of Deep Learning Model for Automated X-Ray Thoracic Disease Detection : A Thai Study
Chamveha, Isarun, Tongdee, Trongtum, Saiviroonporn, Pairash, Chaisangmongkon, Warasinee
Despite much promising research in the area of artificial intelligence for medical image diagnosis, there has been no large-scale validation study done in Thailand to confirm the accuracy and utility of such algorithms when applied to local datasets. Here we present a wide-reaching development and testing of a deep learning algorithm for automated thoracic disease detection, utilizing 421,859 local chest radiographs. Our study shows that convolutional neural networks can achieve remarkable performance in detecting 13 common abnormality conditions on chest X-ray, and the incorporation of local images into the training set is key to the model's success. This paper presents a state-of-the-art model for CXR abnormality detection, reaching an average AUROC of 0.91. This model, if integrated to the workflow, can result in up to 55.6% work reduction for medical practitioners in the CXR analysis process. Our work emphasizes the importance of investing in local research of medical diagnosis algorithms to ensure safe and efficient usage within the intended region.
Learning and Evaluating Emotion Lexicons for 91 Languages
Buechel, Sven, Rücker, Susanna, Hahn, Udo
Emotion lexicons describe the affective meaning of words and thus constitute a centerpiece for advanced sentiment and emotion analysis. Yet, manually curated lexicons are only available for a handful of languages, leaving most languages of the world without such a precious resource for downstream applications. Even worse, their coverage is often limited both in terms of the lexical units they contain and the emotional variables they feature. In order to break this bottleneck, we here introduce a methodology for creating almost arbitrarily large emotion lexicons for any target language. Our approach requires nothing but a source language emotion lexicon, a bilingual word translation model, and a target language embedding model. Fulfilling these requirements for 91 languages, we are able to generate representationally rich high-coverage lexicons comprising eight emotional variables with more than 100k lexical entries each. We evaluated the automatically generated lexicons against human judgment from 26 datasets, spanning 12 typologically diverse languages, and found that our approach produces results in line with state-of-the-art monolingual approaches to lexicon creation and even surpasses human reliability for some languages and variables. Code and data are available at https://github.com/JULIELab/MEmoLon archived under DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3779901.
Open Data Resources for Fighting COVID-19
Alamo, Teodoro, Reina, Daniel G., Mammarella, Martina, Abella, Alberto
We provide an insight into the open data resources pertinent to the study of the spread of Covid-19 pandemic and its control. We identify the variables required to analyze fundamental aspects like seasonal behaviour, regional mortality rates, and effectiveness of government measures. Open data resources, along with data-driven methodologies, provide many opportunities to improve the response of the different administrations to the virus. We describe the present limitations and difficulties encountered in most of the open-data resources. To facilitate the access to the main open-data portals and resources, we identify the most relevant institutions, at a world scale, providing Covid-19 information and/or auxiliary variables (demographics, mobility, etc.). We also describe several open resources to access Covid-19 data-sets at a country-wide level (i.e. China, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, U.S., etc.). In an attempt to facilitate the rapid response to the study of the seasonal behaviour of Covid-19, we enumerate the main open resources in terms of weather and climate variables. CONCO-Team: The authors of this paper belong to the CONtrol COvid-19 Team, which is composed of different researches from universities of Spain, Italy, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Argentina. The main goal of CONCO-Team is to develop data-driven methods for the better understanding and control of the pandemic.
Optimal Covid-19 Pool Testing with a priori Information
Beunardeau, Marc, Brier, Éric, Cartier, Noémie, Connolly, Aisling, Courant, Nathanaël, Géraud-Stewart, Rémi, Naccache, David, Yifrach-Stav, Ofer
As humanity struggles to contain the global Covid-19 infection, prophylactic actions are grandly slowed down by the shortage of testing kits. Governments have taken several measures to work around this shortage: the FDA has become more liberal on the approval of Covid-19 tests in the US. In the UK emergency measures allowed to increase the daily number of locally produced test kits to 100,000. China has recently launched a massive test manufacturing program. However, all those efforts are very insufficient and many poor countries are still under threat. A popular method for reducing the number of tests consists in pooling samples, i.e. mixing patient samples and testing the mixed samples once. If all the samples are negative, pooling succeeds at a unitary cost. However, if a single sample is positive, failure does not indicate which patient is infected. This paper describes how to optimally detect infected patients in pools, i.e. using a minimal number of tests to precisely identify them, given the a priori probabilities that each of the patients is healthy. Those probabilities can be estimated using questionnaires, supervised machine learning or clinical examinations. The resulting algorithms, which can be interpreted as informed divide-and-conquer strategies, are non-intuitive and quite surprising. They are patent-free. Co-authors are listed in alphabetical order.
Libya's GNA launches counterattack after deadly rocket barrage
Libya's UN-supported government launched a counterattack on Sunday against a strategic military base used by renegade commander Khalifa Haftar to pound the capital Tripoli with rocket fire. The response came after a missile barrage damaged Tripoli's main airport and set fuel tanks and several aircraft ablaze, with at least six civilians killed in surrounding residential areas in the attacks on Saturday. Meanwhile, Turkey - the Government of National Accord's (GNA) main ally defending Tripoli against Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA) - threatened to step up its attacks against the eastern-based LNA, which has attempted to seize the capital for more than a year. "The forces of war criminal [Haftar] fired more than a hundred rockets and missiles at residential areas in the centre of the capital," the GNA said in a statement on Facebook. The airport was badly damaged and came under renewed rocket fire on Sunday morning, it said.
Artificial Intelligence against COVID-19: An Early Review
COVID-19 disease, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, was identified in December 2019 in China and declared a global pandemic by the WHO on 11 March 2020. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a potentially powerful tool in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. AI can, for present purposes, be defined as Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Computer Vision applications to teach computers to use big data-based models for pattern recognition, explanation, and prediction. These functions can be useful to recognize (diagnose), predict, and explain (treat) COVID-19 infections, and help manage socio-economic impacts. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, there has been a scramble to use and explore AI, and other data analytic tools, for these purposes. In this article, I provide an early review, discussing the actual and potential contribution of AI to the fight against COVID-19, as well as the current constraints on these contributions. It aims to draw quick take-aways from a fast expanding discussion and growing body of work, in order to serve as an input for rapid responses in research, policy and medical analysis. The cost of the pandemic in terms of lives and economic damage will be terrible; at the time of writing, great uncertainty surrounded estimates of just how terrible, and of how successful both non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical responses can be. Improving AI, one of the most promising data analytic tools to have been developed over the past decade or so, so as to help reduce these uncertainties, is a worthwhile pursuit.
Fuzzy Mutation Embedded Hybrids of Gravitational Search and Particle Swarm Optimization Methods for Engineering Design Problems
Kar, Devroop, Ghosh, Manosij, Guha, Ritam, Sarkar, Ram, García-Hernández, Laura, Abraham, Ajith
Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) are nature-inspired, swarm-based optimization algorithms respectively. Though they have been widely used for single-objective optimization since their inception, they suffer from premature convergence. Even though the hybrids of GSA and PSO perform much better, the problem remains. Hence, to solve this issue we have proposed a fuzzy mutation model for two hybrid versions of PSO and GSA - Gravitational Particle Swarm (GPS) and PSOGSA. The developed algorithms are called Mutation based GPS (MGPS) and Mutation based PSOGSA (MPSOGSA). The mutation operator is based on a fuzzy model where the probability of mutation has been calculated based on the closeness of particle to population centroid and improvement in the particle value. We have evaluated these two new algorithms on 23 benchmark functions of three categories (unimodal, multi-modal and multi-modal with fixed dimension). The experimental outcome shows that our proposed model outperforms their corresponding ancestors, MGPS outperforms GPS 13 out of 23 times (56.52%) and MPSOGSA outperforms PSOGSA 17 times out of 23 (73.91 %). We have also compared our results against those of recent optimization algorithms such as Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), Opposition-Based SCA, and Volleyball Premier League Algorithm (VPL). In addition, we have applied our proposed algorithms on some classic engineering design problems and the outcomes are satisfactory. The related codes of the proposed algorithms can be found in this link: Fuzzy-Mutation-Embedded-Hybrids-of-GSA-and-PSO.
The New Indiana Jones? AI. Here's How It's Overhauling Archaeology
Archaeologists have uncovered scores of long-abandoned settlements along coastal Madagascar that reveal environmental connections to modern-day communities. They have detected the nearly indiscernible bumps of earthen mounds left behind by prehistoric North American cultures. Still other researchers have mapped Bronze Age river systems in the Indus Valley, one of the cradles of civilization. All of these recent discoveries are examples of landscape archaeology. They're also examples of how artificial intelligence is helping scientists hunt for new archaeological digs on a scale and at a pace unimaginable even a decade ago.
An Extensive Study on Cross-Dataset Bias and Evaluation Metrics Interpretation for Machine Learning applied to Gastrointestinal Tract Abnormality Classification
Thambawita, Vajira, Jha, Debesh, Hammer, Hugo Lewi, Johansen, Håvard D., Johansen, Dag, Halvorsen, Pål, Riegler, Michael A.
Precise and efficient automated identification of Gastrointestinal (GI) tract diseases can help doctors treat more patients and improve the rate of disease detection and identification. Currently, automatic analysis of diseases in the GI tract is a hot topic in both computer science and medical-related journals. Nevertheless, the evaluation of such an automatic analysis is often incomplete or simply wrong. Algorithms are often only tested on small and biased datasets, and cross-dataset evaluations are rarely performed. A clear understanding of evaluation metrics and machine learning models with cross datasets is crucial to bring research in the field to a new quality level. Towards this goal, we present comprehensive evaluations of five distinct machine learning models using Global Features and Deep Neural Networks that can classify 16 different key types of GI tract conditions, including pathological findings, anatomical landmarks, polyp removal conditions, and normal findings from images captured by common GI tract examination instruments. In our evaluation, we introduce performance hexagons using six performance metrics such as recall, precision, specificity, accuracy, F1-score, and Matthews Correlation Coefficient to demonstrate how to determine the real capabilities of models rather than evaluating them shallowly. Furthermore, we perform cross-dataset evaluations using different datasets for training and testing. With these cross-dataset evaluations, we demonstrate the challenge of actually building a generalizable model that could be used across different hospitals. Our experiments clearly show that more sophisticated performance metrics and evaluation methods need to be applied to get reliable models rather than depending on evaluations of the splits of the same dataset, i.e., the performance metrics should always be interpreted together rather than relying on a single metric.
Super-App Behavioral Patterns in Credit Risk Models: Financial, Statistical and Regulatory Implications
Roa, Luisa, Correa-Bahnsen, Alejandro, Suarez, Gabriel, Cortés-Tejada, Fernando, Luque, María A., Bravo, Cristián
In this paper we present the impact of alternative data that originates from an app-based marketplace, in contrast to traditional bureau data, upon credit scoring models. These alternative data sources have shown themselves to be immensely powerful in predicting borrower behavior in segments traditionally underserved by banks and financial institutions. Our results, validated across two countries, show that these new sources of data are particularly useful for predicting financial behavior in low-wealth and young individuals, who are also the most likely to engage with alternative lenders. Furthermore, using the TreeSHAP method for Stochastic Gradient Boosting interpretation, our results also revealed interesting non-linear trends in the variables originating from the app, which would not normally be available to traditional banks. Our results represent an opportunity for technology companies to disrupt traditional banking by correctly identifying alternative data sources and handling this new information properly. At the same time alternative data must be carefully validated to overcome regulatory hurdles across diverse jurisdictions.