Classification of developmental and brain disorders via graph convolutional aggregation

While graph convolution based methods have become the de-facto standard for graph representation learning, their applications to disease prediction tasks remain quite limited, particularly in the classification of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative brain disorders. In this paper, we introduce an aggregator normalization graph convolutional network by leveraging aggregation in graph sampling, as well as skip connections and identity mapping. The proposed model learns discriminative graph node representations by incorporating both imaging and non-imaging features into the graph nodes and edges, respectively, with the aim of augmenting predictive capabilities and providing a holistic perspective on the underlying mechanisms of brain disorders. Skip connections enable the direct flow of information from the input features to later layers of the network, while identity mapping helps maintain the structural information of the graph during feature learning. We benchmark our model against several recent baseline methods on two large datasets, Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) and Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), for the prediction of autism spectrum disorder and Alzheimer's disease, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the competitive performance of our approach in comparison with recent baselines in terms of several evaluation metrics, achieving relative improvements of 50% and 13.56% in classification accuracy over graph convolutional networks on ABIDE and ADNI, respectively.

Ridge Regression Neural Network for Pediatric Bone Age Assessment

Bone age is an important measure for assessing the skeletal and biological maturity of children. Delayed or increased bone age is a serious concern for pediatricians, and needs to be accurately assessed in a bid to determine whether bone maturity is occurring at a rate consistent with chronological age. In this paper, we introduce a unified deep learning framework for bone age assessment using instance segmentation and ridge regression. The proposed approach consists of two integrated stages. In the first stage, we employ an image annotation and segmentation model to annotate and segment the hand from the radiographic image, followed by background removal. In the second stage, we design a regression neural network architecture composed of a pre-trained convolutional neural network for learning salient features from the segmented pediatric hand radiographs and a ridge regression output layer for predicting the bone age. Experimental evaluation on a dataset of hand radiographs demonstrates the competitive performance of our approach in comparison with existing deep learning based methods for bone age assessment.