Vegh, Viktor
The potential role of AI agents in transforming nuclear medicine research and cancer management in India
Vashistha, Rajat, Gulzar, Arif, Kundu, Parveen, Sharma, Punit, Brunstein, Mark, Vegh, Viktor
India faces a significant cancer burden, with an incidence - to - mortality ratio indicating that nearly three out of five individuals diagnosed with cancer succumb to the disease. While the limitations of physical healthcare infrastructure are widely acknowledged as a primary challenge, concerted efforts by government and healthcare agencies are underway to mitigate these constraints. However, given the country's vast geography and high population density, it is imperative to explore alternative soft infrastructure solutions to complement existing frameworks . Artificial Intelligence agents are increasingly transforming problem - solving approaches across various domains, with their application in medicine proving particularly transformative. In this perspective, we examine the potential role of AI agents in advancing nuclear medicine fo r cancer research, diagnosis, and management in India. We begin with a brief overview of AI agents and their capabilities, followed by a proposed agent - based ecosystem that can address prevailing sustainability challenges in India's nuclear medicine. Keywords: AI Agents; cancer; nuclear medicine ecosystem; sustainability challenges 1. Introduction India's with population of 1.4 billion faces a significant cancer burden, with ~1.5 million new cases and ~850,000 deaths annually [1] [2] . With an i ncidence - to - m ortality p ercentage of approximately 64.8%, nearly three out of five individuals diagnosed with cancer are expected to succumb to the disease [2] . Projections indicate that mortality rates will rise significantly, increasing from 64.7% to 109.6% between 2022 and 2050, largely due to demographic shifts as the reproductive - age population transitions into middle and old age. This growing cancer burden will place even more pressure on the already overburdened healthcare system, making it essential to address the gaps in both infrastructure and indigenous research and innovations to ensure timely and effective patient treatment [3] . This trend underscores the urgent need for a resilient, patient - centred framework that integrates medical advancements, early detection through diagnostics, timely therapeutic interventions, and equitable access to care. Nuclear medicine uses a small amount of targeted radioactive material to diagnose and treat cancer [4] .
Machine Learning Applications in Traumatic Brain Injury: A Spotlight on Mild TBI
Ellethy, Hanem, Chandra, Shekhar S., Vegh, Viktor
Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) poses a significant global public health challenge, contributing to high morbidity and mortality rates and placing a substantial economic burden on healthcare systems worldwide. The diagnosis of TBI relies on clinical information along with Computed Tomography (CT) scans. Addressing the multifaceted challenges posed by TBI has seen the development of innovative, data-driven approaches, for this complex condition. Particularly noteworthy is the prevalence of mild TBI (mTBI), which constitutes the majority of TBI cases where conventional methods often fall short. As such, we review the state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) techniques applied to clinical information and CT scans in TBI, with a particular focus on mTBI. We categorize ML applications based on their data sources, and there is a spectrum of ML techniques used to date. Most of these techniques have primarily focused on diagnosis, with relatively few attempts at predicting the prognosis. This review may serve as a source of inspiration for future research studies aimed at improving the diagnosis of TBI using data-driven approaches and standard diagnostic data.
Enhancing mTBI Diagnosis with Residual Triplet Convolutional Neural Network Using 3D CT
Ellethy, Hanem, Chandra, Shekhar S., Vegh, Viktor
Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) is a common and challenging condition to diagnose accurately. Timely and precise diagnosis is essential for effective treatment and improved patient outcomes. Traditional diagnostic methods for mTBI often have limitations in terms of accuracy and sensitivity. In this study, we introduce an innovative approach to enhance mTBI diagnosis using 3D Computed Tomography (CT) images and a metric learning technique trained with triplet loss. To address these challenges, we propose a Residual Triplet Convolutional Neural Network (RTCNN) model to distinguish between mTBI cases and healthy ones by embedding 3D CT scans into a feature space. The triplet loss function maximizes the margin between similar and dissimilar image pairs, optimizing feature representations. This facilitates better context placement of individual cases, aids informed decision-making, and has the potential to improve patient outcomes. Our RTCNN model shows promising performance in mTBI diagnosis, achieving an average accuracy of 94.3%, a sensitivity of 94.1%, and a specificity of 95.2%, as confirmed through a five-fold cross-validation. Importantly, when compared to the conventional Residual Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) model, the RTCNN exhibits a significant improvement, showcasing a remarkable 22.5% increase in specificity, a notable 16.2% boost in accuracy, and an 11.3% enhancement in sensitivity. Moreover, RTCNN requires lower memory resources, making it not only highly effective but also resource-efficient in minimizing false positives while maximizing its diagnostic accuracy in distinguishing normal CT scans from mTBI cases. The quantitative performance metrics provided and utilization of occlusion sensitivity maps to visually explain the model's decision-making process further enhance the interpretability and transparency of our approach.
Interpretable 3D Multi-Modal Residual Convolutional Neural Network for Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Diagnosis
Ellethy, Hanem, Vegh, Viktor, Chandra, Shekhar S.
Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) is a significant public health challenge due to its high prevalence and potential for long-term health effects. Despite Computed Tomography (CT) being the standard diagnostic tool for mTBI, it often yields normal results in mTBI patients despite symptomatic evidence. This fact underscores the complexity of accurate diagnosis. In this study, we introduce an interpretable 3D Multi-Modal Residual Convolutional Neural Network (MRCNN) for mTBI diagnostic model enhanced with Occlusion Sensitivity Maps (OSM). Our MRCNN model exhibits promising performance in mTBI diagnosis, demonstrating an average accuracy of 82.4%, sensitivity of 82.6%, and specificity of 81.6%, as validated by a five-fold cross-validation process. Notably, in comparison to the CT-based Residual Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) model, the MRCNN shows an improvement of 4.4% in specificity and 9.0% in accuracy. We show that the OSM offers superior data-driven insights into CT images compared to the Grad-CAM approach. These results highlight the efficacy of the proposed multi-modal model in enhancing the diagnostic precision of mTBI.
Linear centralization classifier
Bonyadi, Mohammad Reza, Vegh, Viktor, Reutens, David C.
A classification algorithm, called the Linear Centralization Classifier (LCC), is introduced. The algorithm seeks to find a transformation that best maps instances from the feature space to a space where they concentrate towards the center of their own classes, while maximimizing the distance between class centers. We formulate the classifier as a quadratic program with quadratic constraints. We then simplify this formulation to a linear program that can be solved effectively using a linear programming solver (e.g., simplex-dual). We extend the formulation for LCC to enable the use of kernel functions for non-linear classification applications. We compare our method with two standard classification methods (support vector machine and linear discriminant analysis) and four state-of-the-art classification methods when they are applied to eight standard classification datasets. Our experimental results show that LCC is able to classify instances more accurately (based on the area under the receiver operating characteristic) in comparison to other tested methods on the chosen datasets. We also report the results for LCC with a particular kernel to solve for synthetic non-linear classification problems.