Voice disorders significantly impact patient quality of life, yet non-invasive automated diagnosis remains under-explored due to both the scarcity of pathological voice data, and the variability in recording sources. This work introduces MVP (Multi-source Voice Pathology detection), a novel approach that leverages transformers operating directly on raw voice signals. We explore three fusion strategies to combine sentence reading and sustained vowel recordings: waveform concatenation, intermediate feature fusion, and decision-level combination. Empirical validation across the German, Portuguese, and Italian languages shows that intermediate feature fusion using transformers best captures the complementary characteristics of both recording types. Our approach achieves up to +13% AUC improvement over single-source methods.

Pathology detection in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) using deep learning has been explored in the recent past. However, deep learning models can be influenced by the color quality of the dataset used to train them, impacting detection, segmentation and classification tasks. In this work, we evaluate the impact of color correction on pathology detection using two prominent object detection models: Retinanet and YOLOv5. We first generate two color corrected versions of a popular WCE dataset (i.e., SEE-AI dataset) using two different color correction functions. We then evaluate the performance of the Retinanet and YOLOv5 on the original and color corrected versions of the dataset. The results reveal that color correction makes the models generate larger bounding boxes and larger intersection areas with the ground truth annotations. Furthermore, color correction leads to an increased number of false positives for certain pathologies. However, these effects do not translate into a consistent improvement in performance metrics such as F1-scores, IoU, and AP50.

Pulmonary diseases are a public health problem that requires accurate and fast diagnostic techniques. In this paper, a method based on convolutional neural networks (CNN), Data Augmentation, ResNet50 and Vision Transformers (ViT) is proposed to detect lung pathologies from medical images. A dataset of X-ray images and CT scans of patients with different lung diseases, such as cancer, pneumonia, tuberculosis and fibrosis, is used. The results obtained by the proposed method are compared with those of other existing methods, using performance metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and area under the ROC curve. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the other methods in all metrics, achieving an accuracy of 98% and an area under the ROC curve of 99%. It is concluded that the proposed method is an effective and promising tool for the diagnosis of pulmonary pathologies by medical imaging.

Multimodal language modeling constitutes a recent breakthrough which leverages advances in large language models to pretrain capable multimodal models. The integration of natural language during pretraining has been shown to significantly improve learned representations, particularly in computer vision. However, the efficacy of multimodal language modeling in the realm of functional brain data, specifically for advancing pathology detection, remains unexplored. This study pioneers EEG-language models trained on clinical reports and 15000 EEGs. We extend methods for multimodal alignment to this novel domain and investigate which textual information in reports is useful for training EEG-language models. Our results indicate that models learn richer representations from being exposed to a variety of report segments, including the patient's clinical history, description of the EEG, and the physician's interpretation. Compared to models exposed to narrower clinical text information, we find such models to retrieve EEGs based on clinical reports (and vice versa) with substantially higher accuracy. Yet, this is only observed when using a contrastive learning approach. Particularly in regimes with few annotations, we observe that representations of EEG-language models can significantly improve pathology detection compared to those of EEG-only models, as demonstrated by both zero-shot classification and linear probes. In sum, these results highlight the potential of integrating brain activity data with clinical text, suggesting that EEG-language models represent significant progress for clinical applications.

Automatic detection of voice pathology enables objective assessment and earlier intervention for the diagnosis. This study provides a systematic analysis of glottal source features and investigates their effectiveness in voice pathology detection. Glottal source features are extracted using glottal flows estimated with the quasi-closed phase (QCP) glottal inverse filtering method, using approximate glottal source signals computed with the zero frequency filtering (ZFF) method, and using acoustic voice signals directly. In addition, we propose to derive mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) from the glottal source waveforms computed by QCP and ZFF to effectively capture the variations in glottal source spectra of pathological voice. Experiments were carried out using two databases, the Hospital Universitario Principe de Asturias (HUPA) database and the Saarbrucken Voice Disorders (SVD) database. Analysis of features revealed that the glottal source contains information that discriminates normal and pathological voice. Pathology detection experiments were carried out using support vector machine (SVM). From the detection experiments it was observed that the performance achieved with the studied glottal source features is comparable or better than that of conventional MFCCs and perceptual linear prediction (PLP) features. The best detection performance was achieved when the glottal source features were combined with the conventional MFCCs and PLP features, which indicates the complementary nature of the features.

Pathology diagnosis based on EEG signals and decoding brain activity holds immense importance in understanding neurological disorders. With the advancement of artificial intelligence methods and machine learning techniques, the potential for accurate data-driven diagnoses and effective treatments has grown significantly. However, applying machine learning algorithms to real-world datasets presents diverse challenges at multiple levels. The scarcity of labelled data, especially in low regime scenarios with limited availability of real patient cohorts due to high costs of recruitment, underscores the vital deployment of scaling and transfer learning techniques. In this study, we explore a real-world pathology classification task to highlight the effectiveness of data and model scaling and cross-dataset knowledge transfer. As such, we observe varying performance improvements through data scaling, indicating the need for careful evaluation and labelling. Additionally, we identify the challenges of possible negative transfer and emphasize the significance of some key components to overcome distribution shifts and potential spurious correlations and achieve positive transfer. We see improvement in the performance of the target model on the target (NMT) datasets by using the knowledge from the source dataset (TUAB) when a low amount of labelled data was available. Our findings indicate a small and generic model (e.g. ShallowNet) performs well on a single dataset, however, a larger model (e.g. TCN) performs better on transfer and learning from a larger and diverse dataset.

Due to the environmental impacts caused by the construction industry, repurposing existing buildings and making them more energy-efficient has become a high-priority issue. However, a legitimate concern of land developers is associated with the buildings' state of conservation. For that reason, infrared thermography has been used as a powerful tool to characterize these buildings' state of conservation by detecting pathologies, such as cracks and humidity. Thermal cameras detect the radiation emitted by any material and translate it into temperature-color-coded images. Abnormal temperature changes may indicate the presence of pathologies, however, reading thermal images might not be quite simple. This research project aims to combine infrared thermography and machine learning (ML) to help stakeholders determine the viability of reusing existing buildings by identifying their pathologies and defects more efficiently and accurately. In this particular phase of this research project, we've used an image classification machine learning model of Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) to differentiate three levels of cracks in one particular building. The model's accuracy was compared between the MSX and thermal images acquired from two distinct thermal cameras and fused images (formed through multisource information) to test the influence of the input data and network on the detection results.

Objective. Supervised learning paradigms are often limited by the amount of labeled data that is available. This phenomenon is particularly problematic in clinically-relevant data, such as electroencephalography (EEG), where labeling can be costly in terms of specialized expertise and human processing time. Consequently, deep learning architectures designed to learn on EEG data have yielded relatively shallow models and performances at best similar to those of traditional feature-based approaches. However, in most situations, unlabeled data is available in abundance. By extracting information from this unlabeled data, it might be possible to reach competitive performance with deep neural networks despite limited access to labels. Approach. We investigated self-supervised learning (SSL), a promising technique for discovering structure in unlabeled data, to learn representations of EEG signals. Specifically, we explored two tasks based on temporal context prediction as well as contrastive predictive coding on two clinically-relevant problems: EEG-based sleep staging and pathology detection. We conducted experiments on two large public datasets with thousands of recordings and performed baseline comparisons with purely supervised and hand-engineered approaches. Main results. Linear classifiers trained on SSL-learned features consistently outperformed purely supervised deep neural networks in low-labeled data regimes while reaching competitive performance when all labels were available. Additionally, the embeddings learned with each method revealed clear latent structures related to physiological and clinical phenomena, such as age effects. Significance. We demonstrate the benefit of self-supervised learning approaches on EEG data. Our results suggest that SSL may pave the way to a wider use of deep learning models on EEG data.