The growing complexity of machinery and the increasing demand for operational efficiency and safety have driven the development of advanced fault diagnosis techniques. Among these, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool, offering robust and accurate fault detection and classification capabilities. This comprehensive review delves into the application of CNNs in machine fault diagnosis, covering its theoretical foundation, architectural variations, and practical implementations. The strengths and limitations of CNNs are analyzed in this domain, discussing their effectiveness in handling various fault types, data complexities, and operational environments. Furthermore, we explore the evolving landscape of CNN-based fault diagnosis, examining recent advancements in data augmentation, transfer learning, and hybrid architectures. Finally, we highlight future research directions and potential challenges to further enhance the application of CNNs for reliable and proactive machine fault diagnosis.

Audiology entities are using Machine Learning (ML) models to guide their screening towards people at risk. Feature Engineering (FE) focuses on optimizing data for ML models, with evolutionary methods being effective in feature selection and construction tasks. This work aims to benchmark an evolutionary FE wrapper, using models based on decision trees as proxies. The FEDORA framework is applied to a Hearing Loss (HL) dataset, being able to reduce data dimensionality and statistically maintain baseline performance. Compared to traditional methods, FEDORA demonstrates superior performance, with a maximum balanced accuracy of 76.2%, using 57 features. The framework also generated an individual that achieved 72.8% balanced accuracy using a single feature.

Neural networks (NNs), with their powerful nonlinear mapping and end-to-end capabilities, are widely applied in mechanical intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD). However, as typical black-box models, they pose challenges in understanding their decision basis and logic, limiting their deployment in high-reliability scenarios. Hence, various methods have been proposed to enhance the interpretability of IFD. Among these, post-hoc approaches can provide explanations without changing model architecture, preserving its flexibility and scalability. However, existing post-hoc methods often suffer from limitations in explanation forms. They either require preprocessing that disrupts the end-to-end nature or overlook fault mechanisms, leading to suboptimal explanations. To address these issues, we derived the cyclic-spectral (CS) transform and proposed the CS-SHAP by extending Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) to the CS domain. CS-SHAP can evaluate contributions from both carrier and modulation frequencies, aligning more closely with fault mechanisms and delivering clearer and more accurate explanations. Three datasets are utilized to validate the superior interpretability of CS-SHAP, ensuring its correctness, reproducibility, and practical performance. With open-source code and outstanding interpretability, CS-SHAP has the potential to be widely adopted and become the post-hoc interpretability benchmark in IFD, even in other classification tasks. The code is available on https://github.com/ChenQian0618/CS-SHAP.

Recently computer-aided diagnosis has demonstrated promising performance, effectively alleviating the workload of clinicians. However, the inherent sample imbalance among different diseases leads algorithms biased to the majority categories, leading to poor performance for rare categories. Existing works formulated this challenge as a long-tailed problem and attempted to tackle it by decoupling the feature representation and classification. Yet, due to the imbalanced distribution and limited samples from tail classes, these works are prone to biased representation learning and insufficient classifier calibration. To tackle these problems, we propose a new Long-tailed Medical Diagnosis (LMD) framework for balanced medical image classification on long-tailed datasets. In the initial stage, we develop a Relation-aware Representation Learning (RRL) scheme to boost the representation ability by encouraging the encoder to capture intrinsic semantic features through different data augmentations. In the subsequent stage, we propose an Iterative Classifier Calibration (ICC) scheme to calibrate the classifier iteratively. This is achieved by generating a large number of balanced virtual features and fine-tuning the encoder using an Expectation-Maximization manner. The proposed ICC compensates for minority categories to facilitate unbiased classifier optimization while maintaining the diagnostic knowledge in majority classes. Comprehensive experiments on three public long-tailed medical datasets demonstrate that our LMD framework significantly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/peterlipan/LMD.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a well-suited technique for retrieving privacy-sensitive Electronic Health Records (EHR). It can serve as a key module of the healthcare copilot, helping reduce misdiagnosis for healthcare practitioners and patients. However, the diagnostic accuracy and specificity of existing heuristic-based RAG models used in the medical domain are inadequate, particularly for diseases with similar manifestations. This paper proposes MedRAG, a RAG model enhanced by knowledge graph (KG)-elicited reasoning for the medical domain that retrieves diagnosis and treatment recommendations based on manifestations. MedRAG systematically constructs a comprehensive four-tier hierarchical diagnostic KG encompassing critical diagnostic differences of various diseases. These differences are dynamically integrated with similar EHRs retrieved from an EHR database, and reasoned within a large language model. This process enables more accurate and specific decision support, while also proactively providing follow-up questions to enhance personalized medical decision-making. MedRAG is evaluated on both a public dataset DDXPlus and a private chronic pain diagnostic dataset (CPDD) collected from Tan Tock Seng Hospital, and its performance is compared against various existing RAG methods. Experimental results show that, leveraging the information integration and relational abilities of the KG, our MedRAG provides more specific diagnostic insights and outperforms state-of-the-art models in reducing misdiagnosis rates. Our code will be available at https://github.com/SNOWTEAM2023/MedRAG

Efficient use of cultivated areas is a necessary factor for sustainable development of agriculture and ensuring food security. Along with the rapid development of satellite technologies in developed countries, new methods are being searched for accurate and operational identification of cultivated areas. In this context, identification of cropland boundaries based on spectral analysis of data obtained from satellite images is considered one of the most optimal and accurate methods in modern agriculture. This article proposes a new approach to determine the suitability and green index of cultivated areas using satellite data obtained through the "Google Earth Engine" (GEE) platform. In this approach, two powerful algorithms, "SNIC (Simple Non-Iterative Clustering) Super Pixels" and "Canny Edge Detection Method", are combined. The SNIC algorithm combines pixels in a satellite image into larger regions (super pixels) with similar characteristics, thereby providing better image analysis. The Canny Edge Detection Method detects sharp changes (edges) in the image to determine the precise boundaries of agricultural fields. This study, carried out using high-resolution multispectral data from the Sentinel-2 satellite and the Google Earth Engine JavaScript API, has shown that the proposed method is effective in accurately and reliably classifying randomly selected agricultural fields. The combined use of these two tools allows for more accurate determination of the boundaries of agricultural fields by minimizing the effects of outliers in satellite images. As a result, more accurate and reliable maps can be created for agricultural monitoring and resource management over large areas based on the obtained data. By expanding the application capabilities of cloud-based platforms and artificial intelligence methods in the agricultural field.

Causal Bayesian networks are 'causal' models since they make predictions about interventional distributions. To connect such causal model predictions to real-world outcomes, we must determine which actions in the world correspond to which interventions in the model. For example, to interpret an action as an intervention on a treatment variable, the action will presumably have to a) change the distribution of treatment in a way that corresponds to the intervention, and b) not change other aspects, such as how the outcome depends on the treatment; while the marginal distributions of some variables may change as an effect. We introduce a formal framework to make such requirements for different interpretations of actions as interventions precise. We prove that the seemingly natural interpretation of actions as interventions is circular: Under this interpretation, every causal Bayesian network that correctly models the observational distribution is trivially also interventionally valid, and no action yields empirical data that could possibly falsify such a model. We prove an impossibility result: No interpretation exists that is non-circular and simultaneously satisfies a set of natural desiderata. Instead, we examine non-circular interpretations that may violate some desiderata and show how this may in turn enable the falsification of causal models. By rigorously examining how a causal Bayesian network could be a 'causal' model of the world instead of merely a mathematical object, our formal framework contributes to the conceptual foundations of causal representation learning, causal discovery, and causal abstraction, while also highlighting some limitations of existing approaches.

Objective: Assessing Alzheimer's disease (AD) using high-dimensional radiology images is clinically important but challenging. Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced AD diagnosis, it remains unclear how to design AI models embracing predictability and explainability. Here, we propose VisTA, a multimodal language-vision model assisted by contrastive learning, to optimize disease prediction and evidence-based, interpretable explanations for clinical decision-making. Methods: We developed VisTA (Vision-Text Alignment Model) for AD diagnosis. Architecturally, we built VisTA from BiomedCLIP and fine-tuned it using contrastive learning to align images with verified abnormalities and their descriptions. To train VisTA, we used a constructed reference dataset containing images, abnormality types, and descriptions verified by medical experts. VisTA produces four outputs: predicted abnormality type, similarity to reference cases, evidence-driven explanation, and final AD diagnoses. To illustrate VisTA's efficacy, we reported accuracy metrics for abnormality retrieval and dementia prediction. To demonstrate VisTA's explainability, we compared its explanations with human experts' explanations. Results: Compared to 15 million images used for baseline pretraining, VisTA only used 170 samples for fine-tuning and obtained significant improvement in abnormality retrieval and dementia prediction. For abnormality retrieval, VisTA reached 74% accuracy and an AUC of 0.87 (26% and 0.74, respectively, from baseline models). For dementia prediction, VisTA achieved 88% accuracy and an AUC of 0.82 (30% and 0.57, respectively, from baseline models). The generated explanations agreed strongly with human experts' and provided insights into the diagnostic process. Taken together, VisTA optimize prediction, clinical reasoning, and explanation.

Recent generalizable fault diagnosis researches have effectively tackled the distributional shift between unseen working conditions. Most of them mainly focus on learning domain-invariant representation through feature-level methods. However, the increasing numbers of unseen domains may lead to domain-invariant features contain instance-level spurious correlations, which impact the previous models' generalizable ability. To address the limitations, we propose the Fourier-based Augmentation Reconstruction Network, namely FARNet.The methods are motivated by the observation that the Fourier phase component and amplitude component preserve different semantic information of the signals, which can be employed in domain augmentation techniques. The network comprises an amplitude spectrum sub-network and a phase spectrum sub-network, sequentially reducing the discrepancy between the source and target domains. To construct a more robust generalized model, we employ a multi-source domain data augmentation strategy in the frequency domain. Specifically, a Frequency-Spatial Interaction Module (FSIM) is introduced to handle global information and local spatial features, promoting representation learning between the two sub-networks. To refine the decision boundary of our model output compared to conventional triplet loss, we propose a manifold triplet loss to contribute to generalization. Through extensive experiments on the CWRU and SJTU datasets, FARNet demonstrates effective performance and achieves superior results compared to current cross-domain approaches on the benchmarks.

Machine-learning models are increasingly deployed on resource-constrained embedded systems with strict timing constraints. In such scenarios, the worst-case execution time (WCET) of the models is required to ensure safe operation. Specifically, decision trees are a prominent class of machine-learning models and the main building blocks of tree-based ensemble models (e.g., random forests), which are commonly employed in resource-constrained embedded systems. In this paper, we develop a systematic approach for WCET optimization of decision tree implementations. To this end, we introduce a linear surrogate model that estimates the execution time of individual paths through a decision tree based on the path's length and the number of taken branches. We provide an optimization algorithm that constructively builds a WCET-optimal implementation of a given decision tree with respect to this surrogate model. We experimentally evaluate both the surrogate model and the WCET-optimization algorithm. The evaluation shows that the optimization algorithm improves analytically determined WCET by up to $17\%$ compared to an unoptimized implementation.