Publications

HyperFusion: A Hypernetwork Approach to Multimodal Integration of Tabular and Medical Imaging Data for Predictive Modeling
Daniel Duenias
Brennan Nichyporuk
Tammy Riklin-Raviv
The integration of diverse clinical modalities such as medical imaging and the tabular data obtained by the patients' Electronic Health Reco… (voir plus)rds (EHRs) is a crucial aspect of modern healthcare. The integrative analysis of multiple sources can provide a comprehensive understanding of a patient's condition and can enhance diagnoses and treatment decisions. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) consistently showcase outstanding performance in a wide range of multimodal tasks in the medical domain. However, the complex endeavor of effectively merging medical imaging with clinical, demographic and genetic information represented as numerical tabular data remains a highly active and ongoing research pursuit. We present a novel framework based on hypernetworks to fuse clinical imaging and tabular data by conditioning the image processing on the EHR's values and measurements. This approach aims to leverage the complementary information present in these modalities to enhance the accuracy of various medical applications. We demonstrate the strength and the generality of our method on two different brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) analysis tasks, namely, brain age prediction conditioned by subject's sex, and multiclass Alzheimer's Disease (AD) classification conditioned by tabular data. We show that our framework outperforms both single-modality models and state-of-the-art MRI-tabular data fusion methods. The code, enclosed to this manuscript will be made publicly available.
Unravelling the neural dynamics of hypnotic susceptibility: Aperiodic neural activity as a central feature of hypnosis
Mathieu Landry
Jason da Silva Castanheira
Catherine Boisvert
Floriane Rousseaux
Jérôme Sackur
Amir Raz
Philippe Richebé
David Ogez
Pierre Rainville
Solving Combinatorial Pricing Problems using Embedded Dynamic Programming Models
Quang Minh Bui
Jos'e Neto
The combinatorial pricing problem (CPP) is a bilevel problem in which the leader maximizes their revenue by imposing tolls on certain items … (voir plus)that they can control. Based on the tolls set by the leader, the follower selects a subset of items corresponding to an optimal solution of a combinatorial optimization problem. To accomplish the leader's goal, the tolls need to be sufficiently low to discourage the follower from choosing the items offered by the competitors. In this paper, we derive a single-level reformulation for the CPP by rewriting the follower's problem as a longest path problem using a dynamic programming model, and then taking its dual and applying strong duality. We proceed to solve the reformulation in a dynamic fashion with a cutting plane method. We apply this methodology to 2 distinct dynamic programming models, namely, a novel formulation designated as selection diagram and the well-known decision diagram. We also produce numerical results to evaluate their performances across 3 different specializations of the CPP and a closely related problem that is the knapsack interdiction problem. Our results showcase the potential of the 2 proposed reformulations over the natural value function approach, expanding the set of tools to solve combinatorial bilevel programs.
Two-stage Multiple-Model Compression Approach for Sampled Electrical Signals
Corentin Presvôts
Michel Kieffer
Thibault Prevost
Patrick Panciatici
Zuxing Li
This paper presents a two-stage Multiple-Model Compression (MMC) approach for sampled electrical waveforms. To limit latency, the processing… (voir plus) is window-based, with a window length commensurate to the electrical period. For each window, the first stage compares several parametric models to get a coarse representation of the samples. The second stage then compares different residual compression techniques to minimize the norm of the reconstruction error. The allocation of the rate budget among the two stages is optimized. The proposed MMC approach provides better signal-to-noise ratios than state-of-the-art solutions on periodic and transient waveforms.
Graph-Jigsaw Conditioned Diffusion Model for Skeleton-based Video Anomaly Detection
Ali Karami
Thi Kieu Khanh Ho
Reinforcement learning for freight booking control problems
Justin Dumouchelle
Andrea Lodi
Normalizing Spinal Cord Compression Morphometric Measures: Application in Degenerative Cervical Myelopathy
Sandrine Bédard
Jan Valošek
Maryam Seif PhD
Armin Curt PhD
Simon Schading Md
M.Sc
Nikolai Pfender
Patrick Freund Md
Markus Hupp MD PhD
Julien Cohen-adad Md
Objective: Automatic and robust characterization of spinal cord shape from MRI images is relevant to assess the severity of spinal cord comp… (voir plus)ression in degenerative cervical myelopathy (DCM) and to guide therapeutic strategy. Despite its popularity, the maximum spinal cord compression (MSCC) index has practical limitations to objectively assess the severity of cord compression. Firstly, it is computed by normalizing the anteroposterior cord diameter by that above and below the level of compression, but it does not account for the fact that the spinal cord itself varies in size along the superior-inferior axis, making this MSCC sensitive to the level of compression. Secondly, spinal cord shape varies across individuals, making MSCC also sensitive to the size and shape of every individual. Thirdly, MSCC is typically computed by the expert-rater on a single sagittal slice, which is time-consuming and prone to inter-rater variability. In this study, we propose a fully automatic pipeline to compute MSCC. Methods: We extended the traditional MSCC (based on the anteroposterior diameter) to other shape metrics (transverse diameter, area, eccentricity, and solidity), and proposed a normalization strategy using a database of healthy adults (n=203) to address the variability of the spinal cord anatomy between individuals. We validated the proposed method in a cohort of DCM patients (n=120) with manually derived morphometric measures and predicted the therapeutic decision (operative/conservative) using a stepwise binary logistic regression including demographics, clinical scores, and electrophysiological assessment. Results: The automatic and normalized MSCC measures significantly correlated with clinical scores and predicted the therapeutic decision with higher accuracy than the manual MSCC. Results show that the sensory dysfunction of the upper extremities (mJOA subscore), the presence of myelopathy and the proposed MRI-based normalized morphometric measures were significant predictors of the therapeutic decision. The model yielded an area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristic of 80%. Conclusion: The study introduced an automatic method for computation of normalized MSCC measures of cord compression from MRI scans, which is an important step towards better informed therapeutic decisions in DCM patients. The method is open-source and available in the Spinal Cord Toolbox v6.0.
Safety Cases: How to Justify the Safety of Advanced AI Systems
Joshua Clymer
Nick Gabrieli
Thomas Larsen
As AI systems become more advanced, companies and regulators will make difficult decisions about whether it is safe to train and deploy them… (voir plus). To prepare for these decisions, we investigate how developers could make a 'safety case,' which is a structured rationale that AI systems are unlikely to cause a catastrophe. We propose a framework for organizing a safety case and discuss four categories of arguments to justify safety: total inability to cause a catastrophe, sufficiently strong control measures, trustworthiness despite capability to cause harm, and -- if AI systems become much more powerful -- deference to credible AI advisors. We evaluate concrete examples of arguments in each category and outline how arguments could be combined to justify that AI systems are safe to deploy.
On the Identifiability of Quantized Factors
Vitória Barin Pacela
Kartik Ahuja
Disentanglement aims to recover meaningful latent ground-truth factors from the observed distribution solely, and is formalized through the… (voir plus) theory of identifiability. The identifiability of independent latent factors is proven to be impossible in the unsupervised i.i.d. setting under a general nonlinear map from factors to observations. In this work, however, we demonstrate that it is possible to recover quantized latent factors under a generic nonlinear diffeomorphism. We only assume that the latent factors have independent discontinuities in their density, without requiring the factors to be statistically independent. We introduce this novel form of identifiability, termed quantized factor identifiability, and provide a comprehensive proof of the recovery of the quantized factors.
Aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty extraction of patient-specific deep learning-based dose predictions in LDR prostate brachytherapy
Francisco Berumen
Samuel Ouellet
Luc Beaulieu
Analyzing Data Augmentation for Medical Images: A Case Study in Ultrasound Images
Adam Tupper
Data augmentation is one of the most effective techniques to improve the generalization performance of deep neural networks. Yet, despite of… (voir plus)ten facing limited data availability in medical image analysis, it is frequently underutilized. This appears to be due to a gap in our collective understanding of the efficacy of different augmentation techniques across medical imaging tasks and modalities. One domain where this is especially true is breast ultrasound images. This work addresses this issue by analyzing the effectiveness of different augmentation techniques for the classification of breast lesions in ultrasound images. We assess the generalizability of our findings across several datasets, demonstrate that certain augmentations are far more effective than others, and show that their usage leads to significant performance gains.
Bugs in Large Language Models Generated Code: An Empirical Study
Florian Tambon
Arghavan Moradi Dakhel
Amin Nikanjam
Michel C. Desmarais
Giuliano Antoniol