An Unsupervised Deep-Learning Method for Bone Age Assessment

The bone age, reflecting the degree of development of the bones, can be used to predict the adult height and detect endocrine diseases of children. Both examinations of radiologists and variability of operators have a significant impact on bone age assessment. To decrease human intervention , machine learning algorithms are used to assess the bone age automatically. However, conventional supervised deep-learning methods need pre-labeled data. In this paper, based on the convolutional auto-encoder with constraints (CCAE), an unsupervised deep-learning model proposed in the classification of the fingerprint, we propose this model for the classification of the bone age and baptize it BA-CCAE. In the proposed BA-CCAE model, the key regions of the raw X-ray images of the bone age are encoded, yielding the latent vectors. The K-means clustering algorithm is used to obtain the final classifications by grouping the latent vectors of the bone images. A set of experiments on the Radiological Society of North America pediatric bone age dataset (RSNA) show that the accuracy of classifications at 48-month intervals is 76.15%. Although the accuracy now is lower than most of the existing supervised models, the proposed BA-CCAE model can establish the classification of bone age without any pre-labeled data, and to the best of our knowledge, the proposed BA-CCAE is one of the few trails using the unsupervised deep-learning method for the bone age assessment.

Early Abnormal Detection of Sewage Pipe Network: Bagging of Various Abnormal Detection Algorithms

Abnormalities of the sewage pipe network will affect the normal operation of the whole city. Therefore, it is important to detect the abnormalities early. This paper propose an early abnormal-detection method. The abnormalities are detected by using the conventional algorithms, such as isolation forest algorithm, two innovations are given: (1) The current and historical data measured by the sensors placed in the sewage pipe network (such as ultrasonic Doppler flowmeter) are taken as the overall dataset, and then the general dataset is detected by using the conventional anomaly detection method to diagnose the anomaly of the data. The anomaly refers to the sample different from the others samples in the whole dataset. Because the definition of anomaly is not through the algorithm, but the whole dataset, the construction of the whole dataset is the key to propose the early abnormal-detection algorithms. (2) A bagging strategy for a variety of conventional anomaly detection algorithms is proposed to achieve the early detection of anomalies with the high precision and recall. The results show that this method can achieve the early anomaly detection with the highest precision of 98.21%, the recall rate 63.58% and F1-score of 0.774.

An Unsupervised Deep-Learning Method for Fingerprint Classification: the CCAE Network and the Hybrid Clustering Strategy

The fingerprint classification is an important and effective method to quicken the process and improve the accuracy in the fingerprint matching process. Conventional supervised methods need a large amount of pre-labeled data and thus consume immense human resources. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient unsupervised deep learning method that can extract fingerprint features and classify fingerprint patterns automatically. In this approach, a new model named constraint convolutional auto-encoder (CCAE) is used to extract fingerprint features and a hybrid clustering strategy is applied to obtain the final clusters. A set of experiments in the NIST-DB4 dataset shows that the proposed unsupervised method exhibits the efficient performance on fingerprint classification. For example, the CCAE achieves an accuracy of 97.3% on only 1000 unlabeled fingerprints in the NIST-DB4.