The goal of precipitation nowcasting is to predict the future rainfall intensity in a local region over a relatively short period of time. Very few previous studies have examined this crucial and challenging weather forecasting problem from the machine learning perspective. In this paper, we formulate precipitation nowcasting as a spatiotemporal sequence forecasting problem in which both the input and the prediction target are spatiotemporal sequences. By extending the fully connected LSTM (FC-LSTM) to have convolutional structures in both the input-to-state and state-to-state transitions, we propose the convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) and use it to build an end-to-end trainable model for the precipitation nowcasting problem. Experiments show that our ConvLSTM network captures spatiotemporal correlations better and consistently outperforms FC-LSTM and the state-of-the-art operational ROVER algorithm for precipitation nowcasting.

We explore a solution for learning disease signatures from weakly, yet easily obtainable, annotated volumetric medical imaging data by analyzing 3D volumes as a sequence of 2D images. We demonstrate the performance of our solution in the detection of emphysema in lung cancer screening low-dose CT images. Our approach utilizes convolutional long short-term memory (LSTM) to "scan" sequentially through an imaging volume for the presence of disease in a portion of scanned region. This framework allowed effective learning given only volumetric images and binary disease labels, thus enabling training from a large dataset of 6,631 un-annotated image volumes from 4,486 patients. When evaluated in a testing set of 2,163 volumes from 2,163 patients, our model distinguished emphysema with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of .83. This approach was found to outperform 2D convolutional neural networks (CNN) implemented with various multiple-instance learning schemes (AUC=0.69-0.76) and a 3D CNN (AUC=.77).