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1. NEON Tree Crowns Dataset

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3765871  

   Weinstein, Ben ; Marconi, Sergio ; Zare, Alina ; Bohlman, Stephanie ; Graves, Sarah ; Singh, Aditya ; White, Ethan ( January 2020 , Zenodo)

   Abstract

   The NeonTreeCrowns dataset is a set of individual level crown estimates for 100 million trees at 37 geographic sites across the United States surveyed by the National Ecological Observation Network’s Airborne Observation Platform. Each rectangular bounding box crown prediction includes height, crown area, and spatial location. 

   How can I see the data?

   A web server to look through predictions is available through idtrees.org

   Dataset Organization

   The shapefiles.zip contains 11,000 shapefiles, each corresponding to a 1km^2 RGB tile from NEON (ID: DP3.30010.001). For example "2019_SOAP_4_302000_4100000_image.shp" are the predictions from "2019_SOAP_4_302000_4100000_image.tif" available from the NEON data portal: https://data.neonscience.org/data-products/explore?search=camera. NEON's file convention refers to the year of data collection (2019), the four letter site code (SOAP), the sampling event (4), and the utm coordinate of the top left corner (302000_4100000). For NEON site abbreviations and utm zones see https://www.neonscience.org/field-sites/field-sites-map. 

   The predictions are also available as a single csv for each file. All available tiles for that site and year are combined into one large site. These data are not projected, but contain the utm coordinates for each bounding box (left, bottom, right, top). For both file types the following fields are available:

   Height: The crown height measured in meters. Crown height is defined as the 99th quartile of all canopy height pixels from a LiDAR height model (ID: DP3.30015.001)

   Area: The crown area in m² of the rectangular bounding box.

   Label: All data in this release are "Tree".

   Score: The confidence score from the DeepForest deep learning algorithm. The score ranges from 0 (low confidence) to 1 (high confidence)

   How were predictions made?

   The DeepForest algorithm is available as a python package: https://deepforest.readthedocs.io/. Predictions were overlaid on the LiDAR-derived canopy height model. Predictions with heights less than 3m were removed.

   How were predictions validated?

   Please see

   Weinstein, B. G., Marconi, S., Bohlman, S. A., Zare, A., & White, E. P. (2020). Cross-site learning in deep learning RGB tree crown detection. Ecological Informatics, 56, 101061.

   Weinstein, B., Marconi, S., Aubry-Kientz, M., Vincent, G., Senyondo, H., & White, E. (2020). DeepForest: A Python package for RGB deep learning tree crown delineation. bioRxiv.

   Weinstein, Ben G., et al. "Individual tree-crown detection in RGB imagery using semi-supervised deep learning neural networks." Remote Sensing 11.11 (2019): 1309.

   Were any sites removed?

   Several sites were removed due to poor NEON data quality. GRSM and PUUM both had lower quality RGB data that made them unsuitable for prediction. NEON surveys are updated annually and we expect future flights to correct these errors. We removed the GUIL puerto rico site due to its very steep topography and poor sunangle during data collection. The DeepForest algorithm responded poorly to predicting crowns in intensely shaded areas where there was very little sun penetration. We are happy to make these data are available upon request.

   # Contact

   We welcome questions, ideas and general inquiries. The data can be used for many applications and we look forward to hearing from you. Contact ben.weinstein@weecology.org. 

   Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: GBMF4563 

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2. The Temple University Digital Pathology Corpus: The Breast Tissue Subset

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SPMB52430.2021.9672275  

   Wevodau, Z. ; Doshna, B. ; Jhala, N. ; Akhtar, I. ; Obeid, I. ; Picone, J. ( December 2021 , Proceedings of the IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium (SPMB))

   Obeid, I. (Ed.)

   The Neural Engineering Data Consortium (NEDC) is developing the Temple University Digital Pathology Corpus (TUDP), an open source database of high-resolution images from scanned pathology samples [1], as part of its National Science Foundation-funded Major Research Instrumentation grant titled “MRI: High Performance Digital Pathology Using Big Data and Machine Learning” [2]. The long-term goal of this project is to release one million images. We have currently scanned over 100,000 images and are in the process of annotating breast tissue data for our first official corpus release, v1.0.0. This release contains 3,505 annotated images of breast tissue including 74 patients with cancerous diagnoses (out of a total of 296 patients). In this poster, we will present an analysis of this corpus and discuss the challenges we have faced in efficiently producing high quality annotations of breast tissue. It is well known that state of the art algorithms in machine learning require vast amounts of data. Fields such as speech recognition [3], image recognition [4] and text processing [5] are able to deliver impressive performance with complex deep learning models because they have developed large corpora to support training of extremely high-dimensional models (e.g., billions of parameters). Other fields that do not have access to such data resources must rely on techniques in which existing models can be adapted to new datasets [6]. A preliminary version of this breast corpus release was tested in a pilot study using a baseline machine learning system, ResNet18 [7], that leverages several open-source Python tools. The pilot corpus was divided into three sets: train, development, and evaluation. Portions of these slides were manually annotated [1] using the nine labels in Table 1 [8] to identify five to ten examples of pathological features on each slide. Not every pathological feature is annotated, meaning excluded areas can include focuses particular to these labels that are not used for training. A summary of the number of patches within each label is given in Table 2. To maintain a balanced training set, 1,000 patches of each label were used to train the machine learning model. Throughout all sets, only annotated patches were involved in model development. The performance of this model in identifying all the patches in the evaluation set can be seen in the confusion matrix of classification accuracy in Table 3. The highest performing labels were background, 97% correct identification, and artifact, 76% correct identification. A correlation exists between labels with more than 6,000 development patches and accurate performance on the evaluation set. Additionally, these results indicated a need to further refine the annotation of invasive ductal carcinoma (“indc”), inflammation (“infl”), nonneoplastic features (“nneo”), normal (“norm”) and suspicious (“susp”). This pilot experiment motivated changes to the corpus that will be discussed in detail in this poster presentation. To increase the accuracy of the machine learning model, we modified how we addressed underperforming labels. One common source of error arose with how non-background labels were converted into patches. Large areas of background within other labels were isolated within a patch resulting in connective tissue misrepresenting a non-background label. In response, the annotation overlay margins were revised to exclude benign connective tissue in non-background labels. Corresponding patient reports and supporting immunohistochemical stains further guided annotation reviews. The microscopic diagnoses given by the primary pathologist in these reports detail the pathological findings within each tissue site, but not within each specific slide. The microscopic diagnoses informed revisions specifically targeting annotated regions classified as cancerous, ensuring that the labels “indc” and “dcis” were used only in situations where a micropathologist diagnosed it as such. Further differentiation of cancerous and precancerous labels, as well as the location of their focus on a slide, could be accomplished with supplemental immunohistochemically (IHC) stained slides. When distinguishing whether a focus is a nonneoplastic feature versus a cancerous growth, pathologists employ antigen targeting stains to the tissue in question to confirm the diagnosis. For example, a nonneoplastic feature of usual ductal hyperplasia will display diffuse staining for cytokeratin 5 (CK5) and no diffuse staining for estrogen receptor (ER), while a cancerous growth of ductal carcinoma in situ will have negative or focally positive staining for CK5 and diffuse staining for ER [9]. Many tissue samples contain cancerous and non-cancerous features with morphological overlaps that cause variability between annotators. The informative fields IHC slides provide could play an integral role in machine model pathology diagnostics. Following the revisions made on all the annotations, a second experiment was run using ResNet18. Compared to the pilot study, an increase of model prediction accuracy was seen for the labels indc, infl, nneo, norm, and null. This increase is correlated with an increase in annotated area and annotation accuracy. Model performance in identifying the suspicious label decreased by 25% due to the decrease of 57% in the total annotated area described by this label. A summary of the model performance is given in Table 4, which shows the new prediction accuracy and the absolute change in error rate compared to Table 3. The breast tissue subset we are developing includes 3,505 annotated breast pathology slides from 296 patients. The average size of a scanned SVS file is 363 MB. The annotations are stored in an XML format. A CSV version of the annotation file is also available which provides a flat, or simple, annotation that is easy for machine learning researchers to access and interface to their systems. Each patient is identified by an anonymized medical reference number. Within each patient’s directory, one or more sessions are identified, also anonymized to the first of the month in which the sample was taken. These sessions are broken into groupings of tissue taken on that date (in this case, breast tissue). A deidentified patient report stored as a flat text file is also available. Within these slides there are a total of 16,971 total annotated regions with an average of 4.84 annotations per slide. Among those annotations, 8,035 are non-cancerous (normal, background, null, and artifact,) 6,222 are carcinogenic signs (inflammation, nonneoplastic and suspicious,) and 2,714 are cancerous labels (ductal carcinoma in situ and invasive ductal carcinoma in situ.) The individual patients are split up into three sets: train, development, and evaluation. Of the 74 cancerous patients, 20 were allotted for both the development and evaluation sets, while the remain 34 were allotted for train. The remaining 222 patients were split up to preserve the overall distribution of labels within the corpus. This was done in hope of creating control sets for comparable studies. Overall, the development and evaluation sets each have 80 patients, while the training set has 136 patients. In a related component of this project, slides from the Fox Chase Cancer Center (FCCC) Biosample Repository (https://www.foxchase.org/research/facilities/genetic-research-facilities/biosample-repository -facility) are being digitized in addition to slides provided by Temple University Hospital. This data includes 18 different types of tissue including approximately 38.5% urinary tissue and 16.5% gynecological tissue. These slides and the metadata provided with them are already anonymized and include diagnoses in a spreadsheet with sample and patient ID. We plan to release over 13,000 unannotated slides from the FCCC Corpus simultaneously with v1.0.0 of TUDP. Details of this release will also be discussed in this poster. Few digitally annotated databases of pathology samples like TUDP exist due to the extensive data collection and processing required. The breast corpus subset should be released by November 2021. By December 2021 we should also release the unannotated FCCC data. We are currently annotating urinary tract data as well. We expect to release about 5,600 processed TUH slides in this subset. We have an additional 53,000 unprocessed TUH slides digitized. Corpora of this size will stimulate the development of a new generation of deep learning technology. In clinical settings where resources are limited, an assistive diagnoses model could support pathologists’ workload and even help prioritize suspected cancerous cases. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This material is supported by the National Science Foundation under grants nos. CNS-1726188 and 1925494. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. REFERENCES [1] N. Shawki et al., “The Temple University Digital Pathology Corpus,” in Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology: Emerging Trends in Research and Applications, 1st ed., I. Obeid, I. Selesnick, and J. Picone, Eds. New York City, New York, USA: Springer, 2020, pp. 67 104. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030368432. [2] J. Picone, T. Farkas, I. Obeid, and Y. Persidsky, “MRI: High Performance Digital Pathology Using Big Data and Machine Learning.” Major Research Instrumentation (MRI), Division of Computer and Network Systems, Award No. 1726188, January 1, 2018 – December 31, 2021. https://www. isip.piconepress.com/projects/nsf_dpath/. [3] A. Gulati et al., “Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition,” in Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), 2020, pp. 5036-5040. https://doi.org/10.21437/interspeech.2020-3015. [4] C.-J. Wu et al., “Machine Learning at Facebook: Understanding Inference at the Edge,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), 2019, pp. 331–344. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8675201. [5] I. Caswell and B. Liang, “Recent Advances in Google Translate,” Google AI Blog: The latest from Google Research, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/06/recent-advances-in-google-translate.html. [Accessed: 01-Aug-2021]. [6] V. Khalkhali, N. Shawki, V. Shah, M. Golmohammadi, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Low Latency Real-Time Seizure Detection Using Transfer Deep Learning,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium (SPMB), 2021, pp. 1 7. https://www.isip. piconepress.com/publications/conference_proceedings/2021/ieee_spmb/eeg_transfer_learning/. [7] J. Picone, T. Farkas, I. Obeid, and Y. Persidsky, “MRI: High Performance Digital Pathology Using Big Data and Machine Learning,” Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 2020. https://www.isip.piconepress.com/publications/reports/2020/nsf/mri_dpath/. [8] I. Hunt, S. Husain, J. Simons, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Recent Advances in the Temple University Digital Pathology Corpus,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium (SPMB), 2019, pp. 1–4. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9037859. [9] A. P. Martinez, C. Cohen, K. Z. Hanley, and X. (Bill) Li, “Estrogen Receptor and Cytokeratin 5 Are Reliable Markers to Separate Usual Ductal Hyperplasia From Atypical Ductal Hyperplasia and Low-Grade Ductal Carcinoma In Situ,” Arch. Pathol. Lab. Med., vol. 140, no. 7, pp. 686–689, Apr. 2016. https://doi.org/10.5858/arpa.2015-0238-OA. 

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3. Deep Non-Rigid Structure from Motion with Missing Data

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2020.2997026  

   Kong, Chen ; Lucey, Simon ( May 2020 , IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence)

   null (Ed.)

   Non-Rigid Structure from Motion (NRSfM) refers to the problem of reconstructing cameras and the 3D point cloud of a non-rigid object from an ensemble of images with 2D correspondences. Current NRSfM algorithms are limited from two perspectives: (i) the number of images, and (ii) the type of shape variability they can handle. These difficulties stem from the inherent conflict between the condition of the system and the degrees of freedom needing to be modeled – which has hampered its practical utility for many applications within vision. In this paper we propose a novel hierarchical sparse coding model for NRSFM which can overcome (i) and (ii) to such an extent, that NRSFM can be applied to problems in vision previously thought too ill posed. Our approach is realized in practice as the training of an unsupervised deep neural network (DNN) auto-encoder with a unique architecture that is able to disentangle pose from 3D structure. Using modern deep learning computational platforms allows us to solve NRSfM problems at an unprecedented scale and shape complexity. Our approach has no 3D supervision, relying solely on 2D point correspondences. Further, our approach is also able to handle missing/occluded 2D points without the need for matrix completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the impressive performance of our approach where we exhibit superior precision and robustness against all available state-of-the-art works in some instances by an order of magnitude. We further propose a new quality measure (based on the network weights) which circumvents the need for 3D ground-truth to ascertain the confidence we have in the reconstructability. We believe our work to be a significant advance over state of-the-art in NRSFM. 

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4. A Deep Learning Framework for Sickle Cell Disease Microfluidic Biomarker Assays

   https://doi.org/10.1182/blood-2020-141693  

   Praljak, Niksa ; Shipley, Brandon ; Gonzales, Ayesha ; Goreke, Utku ; Iram, Shamreen ; Singh, Gundeep ; Hill, Ailis ; Gurkan, Umut A. ; Hinczewski, Michael ( November 2020 , Blood)

   null (Ed.)

   Introduction: Vaso-occlusive crises (VOCs) are a leading cause of morbidity and early mortality in individuals with sickle cell disease (SCD). These crises are triggered by sickle red blood cell (sRBC) aggregation in blood vessels and are influenced by factors such as enhanced sRBC and white blood cell (WBC) adhesion to inflamed endothelium. Advances in microfluidic biomarker assays (i.e., SCD Biochip systems) have led to clinical studies of blood cell adhesion onto endothelial proteins, including, fibronectin, laminin, P-selectin, ICAM-1, functionalized in microchannels. These microfluidic assays allow mimicking the physiological aspects of human microvasculature and help characterize biomechanical properties of adhered sRBCs under flow. However, analysis of the microfluidic biomarker assay data has so far relied on manual cell counting and exhaustive visual morphological characterization of cells by trained personnel. Integrating deep learning algorithms with microscopic imaging of adhesion protein functionalized microfluidic channels can accelerate and standardize accurate classification of blood cells in microfluidic biomarker assays. Here we present a deep learning approach into a general-purpose analytical tool covering a wide range of conditions: channels functionalized with different proteins (laminin or P-selectin), with varying degrees of adhesion by both sRBCs and WBCs, and in both normoxic and hypoxic environments. Methods: Our neural networks were trained on a repository of manually labeled SCD Biochip microfluidic biomarker assay whole channel images. Each channel contained adhered cells pertaining to clinical whole blood under constant shear stress of 0.1 Pa, mimicking physiological levels in post-capillary venules. The machine learning (ML) framework consists of two phases: Phase I segments pixels belonging to blood cells adhered to the microfluidic channel surface, while Phase II associates pixel clusters with specific cell types (sRBCs or WBCs). Phase I is implemented through an ensemble of seven generative fully convolutional neural networks, and Phase II is an ensemble of five neural networks based on a Resnet50 backbone. Each pixel cluster is given a probability of belonging to one of three classes: adhered sRBC, adhered WBC, or non-adhered / other. Results and Discussion: We applied our trained ML framework to 107 novel whole channel images not used during training and compared the results against counts from human experts. As seen in Fig. 1A, there was excellent agreement in counts across all protein and cell types investigated: sRBCs adhered to laminin, sRBCs adhered to P-selectin, and WBCs adhered to P-selectin. Not only was the approach able to handle surfaces functionalized with different proteins, but it also performed well for high cell density images (up to 5000 cells per image) in both normoxic and hypoxic conditions (Fig. 1B). The average uncertainty for the ML counts, obtained from accuracy metrics on the test dataset, was 3%. This uncertainty is a significant improvement on the 20% average uncertainty of the human counts, estimated from the variance in repeated manual analyses of the images. Moreover, manual classification of each image may take up to 2 hours, versus about 6 minutes per image for the ML analysis. Thus, ML provides greater consistency in the classification at a fraction of the processing time. To assess which features the network used to distinguish adhered cells, we generated class activation maps (Fig. 1C-E). These heat maps indicate the regions of focus for the algorithm in making each classification decision. Intriguingly, the highlighted features were similar to those used by human experts: the dimple in partially sickled RBCs, the sharp endpoints for highly sickled RBCs, and the uniform curvature of the WBCs. Overall the robust performance of the ML approach in our study sets the stage for generalizing it to other endothelial proteins and experimental conditions, a first step toward a universal microfluidic ML framework targeting blood disorders. Such a framework would not only be able to integrate advanced biophysical characterization into fast, point-of-care diagnostic devices, but also provide a standardized and reliable way of monitoring patients undergoing targeted therapies and curative interventions, including, stem cell and gene-based therapies for SCD. Disclosures Gurkan: Dx Now Inc.: Patents & Royalties; Xatek Inc.: Patents & Royalties; BioChip Labs: Patents & Royalties; Hemex Health, Inc.: Consultancy, Current Employment, Patents & Royalties, Research Funding. 

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5. Water Mass and Biogeochemical Variability in the Kerguelen Sector of the Southern Ocean: A Machine Learning Approach for a Mixing Hot Spot

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JC015877  

   Rosso, Isabella ; Mazloff, Matthew R. ; Talley, Lynne D. ; Purkey, Sarah G. ; Freeman, Natalie M. ; Maze, Guillaume ( March 2020 , Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans)

   The Southern Ocean (SO) is one of the most energetic regions in the world, where strong air‐sea fluxes, oceanic instabilities, and flow‐topography interactions yield complex dynamics. The Kerguelen Plateau (KP) region in the Indian sector of the SO is a hot spot for these energetic dynamics, which result in large spatiotemporal variability of physical and biogeochemical properties throughout the water column. Data from Argo floats (including biogeochemical) are used to investigate the spatial variability of intermediate and deep water physical and biogeochemical properties. An unsupervised machine learning classification approach is used to organize the float profiles into five SO frontal zones based on their temperature and salinity structure between 300 and 900 m, revealing not only the location of frontal zones and their boundaries but also the variability of water mass properties relative to the zonal mean state. We find that the variability is property dependent and can be more than twice as large as the mean zonal variability in intense eddy fields. In particular, we observe this intense variability in the intermediate and deep waters of the Subtropical Zone; in the Subantarctic Zone just west of and at KP; east of KP in the Polar Frontal Zone, associated with intense eddy variability that enhances deep waters convergence and mixing; and, as the deep waters upwell to the upper 500 m and mix with the surface waters in the southernmost regimes, each property shows a large variability.

    

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