Clinnova, a collaborative initiative involving France, Germany, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, is dedicated to unlocking the power of precision medicine through data federation, standardization, and interoperability. This European Greater Region initiative seeks to create an interoperable European standard using artificial intelligence (AI) and data science to enhance healthcare outcomes and efficiency. Key components include multidisciplinary research centers, a federated biobanking strategy, a digital health innovation platform, and a federated AI strategy. It targets inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid diseases, and multiple sclerosis (MS), emphasizing data quality to develop AI algorithms for personalized treatment and translational research. The IHU Strasbourg (Institute of Minimal-invasive Surgery) has the lead in this initiative to develop the federated learning (FL) proof of concept (POC) that will serve as a foundation for advancing AI in healthcare. At its core, Clinnova-MS aims to enhance MS patient care by using FL to develop more accurate models that detect disease progression, guide interventions, and validate digital biomarkers across multiple sites. This technical report presents insights and key takeaways from the first cross-border federated POC on MS segmentation of MRI images within the Clinnova framework. While our work marks a significant milestone in advancing MS segmentation through cross-border collaboration, it also underscores the importance of addressing technical, logistical, and ethical considerations to realize the full potential of FL in healthcare settings.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) emerged recently as a standard toolkit for learning from data on graphs. Current GNN designing works depend on immense human expertise to explore different message-passing mechanisms, and require manual enumeration to determine the proper message-passing depth. Inspired by the strong searching capability of neural architecture search (NAS) in CNN, this paper proposes Graph Neural Architecture Search (GNAS) with novel-designed search space. The GNAS can automatically learn better architecture with the optimal depth of message passing on the graph. Specifically, we design Graph Neural Architecture Paradigm (GAP) with tree-topology computation procedure and two types of fine-grained atomic operations (feature filtering and neighbor aggregation) from message-passing mechanism to construct powerful graph network search space. Feature filtering performs adaptive feature selection, and neighbor aggregation captures structural information and calculates neighbors' statistics. Experiments show that our GNAS can search for better GNNs with multiple message-passing mechanisms and optimal message-passing depth. The searched network achieves remarkable improvement over state-of-the-art manual designed and search-based GNNs on five large-scale datasets at three classical graph tasks. Codes can be found at https://github.com/phython96/GNAS-MP.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) based recommendation methods have been widely studied, which can be generally categorized into two types, i.e., representation learning-based CF methods and matching function learning-based CF methods. Representation learning tries to learn a common low dimensional space for the representations of users and items. In this case, a user and item match better if they have higher similarity in that common space. Matching function learning tries to directly learn the complex matching function that maps user-item pairs to matching scores. Although both methods are well developed, they suffer from two fundamental flaws, i.e., the representation learning resorts to applying a dot product which has limited expressiveness on the latent features of users and items, while the matching function learning has weakness in capturing low-rank relations. To overcome such flaws, we propose a novel recommendation model named Balanced Collaborative Filtering Network (BCFNet), which has the strengths of the two types of methods. In addition, an attention mechanism is designed to better capture the hidden information within implicit feedback and strengthen the learning ability of the neural network. Furthermore, a balance module is designed to alleviate the over-fitting issue in DNNs. Extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Patients in intensive care units (ICU) are acutely ill and have the highest mortality rates for hospitalized patients. Predictive models and planning system could forecast and guide interventions to prevent the hazardous deterioration of patients’ physiologies, thereby giving the opportunity of employing machine learning and inference to assist with the care of ICU patients. We report on the construction of a prediction pipeline that estimates the probability of death by inferring rates of hazard over time, based on patients’ physiological measurements. The inferred model provided the contribution of each variable and information about the influence of sets of observations on the overall risks and expected trajectories of patients.