Counting with Adaptive Auxiliary Learning

This paper proposes an adaptive auxiliary task learning based approach for object counting problems. Unlike existing auxiliary task learning based methods, we develop an attention-enhanced adaptively shared backbone network to enable both task-shared and task-tailored features learning in an end-to-end manner. The network seamlessly combines standard Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and Graph Convolution Network (GCN) for feature extraction and feature reasoning among different domains of tasks. Our approach gains enriched contextual information by iteratively and hierarchically fusing the features across different task branches of the adaptive CNN backbone. The whole framework pays special attention to the objects' spatial locations and varied density levels, informed by object (or crowd) segmentation and density level segmentation auxiliary tasks. In particular, thanks to the proposed dilated contrastive density loss function, our network benefits from individual and regional context supervision in terms of pixel-independent and pixel-dependent feature learning mechanisms, along with strengthened robustness. Experiments on seven challenging multi-domain datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art auxiliary task learning based counting methods. Our code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/smallmax00/Counting_With_Adaptive_Auxiliary

Development and Validation of a Novel Prognostic Model for Predicting AMD Progression Using Longitudinal Fundus Images

Prognostic models aim to predict the future course of a disease or condition and are a vital component of personalized medicine. Statistical models make use of longitudinal data to capture the temporal aspect of disease progression; however, these models require prior feature extraction. Deep learning avoids explicit feature extraction, meaning we can develop models for images where features are either unknown or impossible to quantify accurately. Previous prognostic models using deep learning with imaging data require annotation during training or only utilize a single time point. We propose a novel deep learning method to predict the progression of diseases using longitudinal imaging data with uneven time intervals, which requires no prior feature extraction. Given previous images from a patient, our method aims to predict whether the patient will progress onto the next stage of the disease. The proposed method uses InceptionV3 to produce feature vectors for each image. In order to account for uneven intervals, a novel interval scaling is proposed. Finally, a Recurrent Neural Network is used to prognosticate the disease. We demonstrate our method on a longitudinal dataset of color fundus images from 4903 eyes with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), taken from the Age-Related Eye Disease Study, to predict progression to late AMD. Our method attains a testing sensitivity of 0.878, a specificity of 0.887, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic of 0.950. We compare our method to previous methods, displaying superior performance in our model. Class activation maps display how the network reaches the final decision.