Deep Learning-Based Prediction of PET Amyloid Status Using Multi-Contrast MRI

Identifying amyloid-beta positive patients is crucial for determining eligibility for Alzheimer's disease (AD) clinical trials and new disease-modifying treatments, but currently requires PET or CSF sampling. Previous MRI-based deep learning models for predicting amyloid positivity, using only T1w sequences, have shown moderate performance. We trained deep learning models to predict amyloid PET positivity and evaluated whether multi-contrast inputs improve performance. A total of 4,058 exams with multi-contrast MRI and PET-based quantitative amyloid deposition were obtained from three public datasets: the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies 3 (OASIS3), and the Anti-Amyloid Treatment in Asymptomatic Alzheimer's Disease (A4). Two separate EfficientNet models were trained for amyloid positivity prediction: one with only T1w images and the other with both T1w and T2-FLAIR images as network inputs. The area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were determined using an internal held-out test set. The trained models were further evaluated using an external test set. In the held-out test sets, the T1w and T1w+T2FLAIR models demonstrated AUCs of 0.62 (95% CI: 0.60, 0.64) and 0.67 (95% CI: 0.64, 0.70) (p = 0.006); accuracies were 61% (95% CI: 60%, 63%) and 64% (95% CI: 62%, 66%) (p = 0.008); sensitivities were 0.88 and 0.71; and specificities were 0.23 and 0.53, respectively. The trained models showed similar performance in the external test set. Performance of the current model on both test sets exceeded that of the publicly available model. In conclusion, the use of multi-contrast MRI, specifically incorporating T2-FLAIR in addition to T1w images, significantly improved the predictive accuracy of PET-determined amyloid status from MRI scans using a deep learning approach.

Accelerating Longitudinal MRI using Prior Informed Latent Diffusion

MRI is a widely used ionization-free soft-tissue imaging modality, often employed repeatedly over a patient's lifetime. However, prolonged scanning durations, among other issues, can limit availability and accessibility. In this work, we aim to substantially reduce scan times by leveraging prior scans of the same patient. These prior scans typically contain considerable shared information with the current scan, thereby enabling higher acceleration rates when appropriately utilized. We propose a prior informed reconstruction method with a trained diffusion model in conjunction with data-consistency steps. Our method can be trained with unlabeled image data, eliminating the need for a dataset of either k-space measurements or paired longitudinal scans as is required of other learning-based methods. We demonstrate superiority of our method over previously suggested approaches in effectively utilizing prior information without over-biasing prior consistency, which we validate on both an open-source dataset of healthy patients as well as several longitudinal cases of clinical interest.

Merlin: A Vision Language Foundation Model for 3D Computed Tomography

Over 85 million computed tomography (CT) scans are performed annually in the US, of which approximately one quarter focus on the abdomen. Given the current radiologist shortage, there is a large impetus to use artificial intelligence to alleviate the burden of interpreting these complex imaging studies. Prior state-of-the-art approaches for automated medical image interpretation leverage vision language models (VLMs). However, current medical VLMs are generally limited to 2D images and short reports, and do not leverage electronic health record (EHR) data for supervision. We introduce Merlin - a 3D VLM that we train using paired CT scans (6+ million images from 15,331 CTs), EHR diagnosis codes (1.8+ million codes), and radiology reports (6+ million tokens). We evaluate Merlin on 6 task types and 752 individual tasks. The non-adapted (off-the-shelf) tasks include zero-shot findings classification (31 findings), phenotype classification (692 phenotypes), and zero-shot cross-modal retrieval (image to findings and image to impressions), while model adapted tasks include 5-year disease prediction (6 diseases), radiology report generation, and 3D semantic segmentation (20 organs). We perform internal validation on a test set of 5,137 CTs, and external validation on 7,000 clinical CTs and on two public CT datasets (VerSe, TotalSegmentator). Beyond these clinically-relevant evaluations, we assess the efficacy of various network architectures and training strategies to depict that Merlin has favorable performance to existing task-specific baselines. We derive data scaling laws to empirically assess training data needs for requisite downstream task performance. Furthermore, unlike conventional VLMs that require hundreds of GPUs for training, we perform all training on a single GPU.

DR-HAI: Argumentation-based Dialectical Reconciliation in Human-AI Interactions

We introduce DR-HAI -- a novel argumentation-based framework designed to extend model reconciliation approaches, commonly used in explainable AI planning, for enhanced human-AI interaction. By adopting a multi-shot reconciliation paradigm and not assuming a-priori knowledge of the human user's model, DR-HAI enables interactive reconciliation to address knowledge discrepancies between an explainer and an explainee. We formally describe the operational semantics of DR-HAI, provide theoretical guarantees related to termination and success, and empirically evaluate its efficacy. Our findings suggest that DR-HAI offers a promising direction for fostering effective human-AI interactions.

Using Simple Incentives to Improve Two-Sided Fairness in Ridesharing Systems

State-of-the-art order dispatching algorithms for ridesharing batch passenger requests and allocate them to a fleet of vehicles in a centralized manner, optimizing over the estimated values of each passenger-vehicle matching using integer linear programming (ILP). Using good estimates of future values, such ILP-based approaches are able to significantly increase the service rates (percentage of requests served) for a fixed fleet of vehicles. However, such approaches that focus solely on maximizing efficiency can lead to disparities for both drivers (e.g., income inequality) and passengers (e.g., inequality of service for different groups). Existing approaches that consider fairness only do it for naive assignment policies, require extensive training, or look at only single-sided fairness. We propose a simple incentive-based fairness scheme that can be implemented online as a part of this ILP formulation that allows us to improve fairness over a variety of fairness metrics. Deriving from a lens of variance minimization, we describe how these fairness incentives can be formulated for two distinct use cases for passenger groups and driver fairness. We show that under mild conditions, our approach can guarantee an improvement in the chosen metric for the worst-off individual. We also show empirically that our Simple Incentives approach significantly outperforms prior art, despite requiring no retraining; indeed, it often leads to a large improvement over the state-of-the-art fairness-aware approach in both overall service rate and fairness.