Abstract
Despite the fact that deep learning has achieved remarkable success in various domains over the past decade, its application in molecular informatics and drug discovery is still limited. ...Recent advances in adapting deep architectures to structured data have opened a new paradigm for pharmaceutical research. In this survey, we provide a systematic review on the emerging field of graph convolutional networks and their applications in drug discovery and molecular informatics. Typically we are interested in why and how graph convolution networks can help in drug-related tasks. We elaborate the existing applications through four perspectives: molecular property and activity prediction, interaction prediction, synthesis prediction and de novo drug design. We briefly introduce the theoretical foundations behind graph convolutional networks and illustrate various architectures based on different formulations. Then we summarize the representative applications in drug-related problems. We also discuss the current challenges and future possibilities of applying graph convolutional networks to drug discovery.
Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common type of dementia, is a severe neurodegenerative disorder. Identifying biomarkers that can track the progress of the disease has recently received increasing ...attentions in AD research. An accurate prediction of disease progression would facilitate optimal decision-making for clinicians and patients. A definitive diagnosis of AD requires autopsy confirmation, thus many clinical/cognitive measures including Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale cognitive subscale (ADAS-Cog) have been designed to evaluate the cognitive status of the patients and used as important criteria for clinical diagnosis of probable AD. In this paper, we consider the problem of predicting disease progression measured by the cognitive scores and selecting biomarkers predictive of the progression. Specifically, we formulate the prediction problem as a multi-task regression problem by considering the prediction at each time point as a task and propose two novel multi-task learning formulations. We have performed extensive experiments using data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Specifically, we use the baseline MRI features to predict MMSE/ADAS-Cog scores in the next 4years. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-task learning formulations for disease progression in comparison with single-task learning algorithms including ridge regression and Lasso. We also perform longitudinal stability selection to identify and analyze the temporal patterns of biomarkers in disease progression. We observe that cortical thickness average of left middle temporal, cortical thickness average of left and right Entorhinal, and white matter volume of left Hippocampus play significant roles in predicting ADAS-Cog at all time points. We also observe that several MRI biomarkers provide significant information for predicting MMSE scores for the first 2years, however very few are shown to be significant in predicting MMSE score at later stages. The lack of predictable MRI biomarkers in later stages may contribute to the lower prediction performance of MMSE than that of ADAS-Cog in our study and other related studies.
•Ability to simultaneously learn and predict disease status at multiple time points.•Two multi-task learning formulations for high dimensional data.•Longitudinal stability selection to analyze the dynamic patterns of biomarkers.•Detailed comparison among different methods of disease progression on ADNI data.
Many neuroimaging applications deal with imbalanced imaging data. For example, in Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset, the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) cases eligible for ...the study are nearly two times the Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients for structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modality and six times the control cases for proteomics modality. Constructing an accurate classifier from imbalanced data is a challenging task. Traditional classifiers that aim to maximize the overall prediction accuracy tend to classify all data into the majority class. In this paper, we study an ensemble system of feature selection and data sampling for the class imbalance problem. We systematically analyze various sampling techniques by examining the efficacy of different rates and types of undersampling, oversampling, and a combination of over and undersampling approaches. We thoroughly examine six widely used feature selection algorithms to identify significant biomarkers and thereby reduce the complexity of the data. The efficacy of the ensemble techniques is evaluated using two different classifiers including Random Forest and Support Vector Machines based on classification accuracy, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity measures. Our extensive experimental results show that for various problem settings in ADNI, (1) a balanced training set obtained with K-Medoids technique based undersampling gives the best overall performance among different data sampling techniques and no sampling approach; and (2) sparse logistic regression with stability selection achieves competitive performance among various feature selection algorithms. Comprehensive experiments with various settings show that our proposed ensemble model of multiple undersampled datasets yields stable and promising results.
Affordable sensors lead to an increasing interest in acquiring and modeling data with multiple modalities. Learning from multiple modalities has shown to significantly improve performance in object ...recognition. However, in practice it is common that the sensing equipment experiences unforeseeable malfunction or configuration issues, leading to corrupted data with missing modalities. Most existing multi-modal learning algorithms could not handle missing modalities, and would discard either all modalities with missing values or all corrupted data. To leverage the valuable information in the corrupted data, we propose to impute the missing data by leveraging the relatedness among different modalities. Specifically, we propose a novel Cascaded Residual Autoencoder (CRA) to impute missing modalities. By stacking residual autoencoders, CRA grows iteratively to model the residual between the current prediction and original data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of CRA on both the data imputation and the object recognition task on imputed data.
PC/ABS composites are commonly used in airbag covers. In this paper, uniaxial tensile experiments of a PC/ABS composite at different temperatures and strain rates were conducted. The results showed ...that the temperature and loading rate affect the mechanical properties of the PC/ABS composite. As the temperature increases, the yield stress decreases and the strain at the moment of fracture increases, but the strain rate at the same temperature has a relatively small effect on the mechanical properties, which are similar to ductile materials. The experimental results were applied to the Abaqus model which considered thermal effects and the exact Johnson-Cook constitutive parameters were calculated by applying the inverse method. Based on the constitutive model and the failure analysis findings acquired by DIC, the uniaxial tensile test at the room temperature and varied strain rates were simulated and compared to the test results, which accurately reproduced the test process. The experiment on target plate intrusion of the PC/ABS composite was designed, and a finite-element model was established to simulate the experimental process. The results were compared with the experiments, which showed that the constitutive and the failure fracture strains were valid.
Microtia is a congenital external ear malformation that can seriously influence the psychological and physiological well-being of affected children. The successful regeneration of human ear-shaped ...cartilage using a tissue engineering approach in a nude mouse represents a promising approach for auricular reconstruction. However, owing to technical issues in cell source, shape control, mechanical strength, biosafety, and long-term stability of the regenerated cartilage, human tissue engineered ear-shaped cartilage is yet to be applied clinically. Using expanded microtia chondrocytes, compound biodegradable scaffold, and in vitro culture technique, we engineered patient-specific ear-shaped cartilage in vitro. Moreover, the cartilage was used for auricle reconstruction of five microtia patients and achieved satisfactory aesthetical outcome with mature cartilage formation during 2.5years follow-up in the first conducted case. Different surgical procedures were also employed to find the optimal approach for handling tissue engineered grafts. In conclusion, the results represent a significant breakthrough in clinical translation of tissue engineered human ear-shaped cartilage given the established in vitro engineering technique and suitable surgical procedure.
This study was registered in Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR-ICN-14005469).
•Patient-specific ear-shaped cartilage was engineered in vitro using expanded MCs and compound biodegradable scaffold.•The first microtia case treated with the tissue engineered ear-shaped cartilage was follow-up for 2.5years.•Other four cases with similar and different surgical procedures were also presented.
Microtia is a congenital external ear malformation that can seriously influence the psychological and physiological well-being of affected children. Using expanded microtia chondrocytes, compound biodegradable scaffold, and in vitro culture technique, we engineered patient-specific ear-shaped cartilage in vitro, and performed a pilot clinical trial of auricle reconstruction using the engineered ear cartilage on five patients. Satisfactory aesthetical outcome with mature cartilage formation was achieved with the longest follow-up of 2.5years.
This paper considers secure communication in buffer-aided cooperative wireless networks in the presence of one eavesdropper, which can intercept the data transmission from both the source and relay ...nodes. It is assumed that the relays employ the randomize-and-forward (RF) strategy such that the eavesdropper can only decode the signals received in the two hops independently. Two cooperative secure transmission schemes, i.e., hybrid imitating full-duplex max-max-ratio relay selection (HyIFD) scheme and threshold-based link selection (TBLS) scheme are proposed for adaptive- and fixed-rate transmissions aiming at improving the secrecy throughput and secrecy outage probability, respectively. For adaptive-rate transmissions (ART), the proposed scheme switches among three sub-strategies according to different conditions such as the number of relays and transmit power. Different relays are chosen for reception and transmission according to the ratio of the legitimate channels to the eavesdropper channels to imitate the full-duplex transmission mode. For fixed-rate transmissions (FRT), a hybrid HD/FD transmission mode is designed to increase the transmission probabilities of two hops under the transmission quality constraint. Two parameters are introduced and optimized to minimize the secrecy outage probability. A sub-optimal TBLS (SO-TBLS) scheme is also given. Theoretical analysis of the secrecy throughput and the secrecy outage probability are provided and the closed-form expressions are derived, and verified by numerical results. It is shown that the proposed schemes outperform benchmark schemes in terms of secrecy throughput and secrecy outage probability.
Latent fingerprints are one of the most crucial sources of evidence in forensic investigations. As such, development of automatic latent fingerprint recognition systems to quickly and accurately ...identify the suspects is one of the most pressing problems facing fingerprint researchers. One of the first steps in manual latent processing is for a fingerprint examiner to perform a triage by assigning one of the following three values to a query latent: Value for Individualization (VID), Value for Exclusion Only (VEO), or No Value (NV). However, latent value determination by examiners is known to be subjective, resulting in large intra-examiner and inter-examiner variations. Furthermore, in spite of the guidelines available, the underlying bases that examiners implicitly use for value determination are unknown. In this paper, we propose a crowdsourcing based framework for understanding the underlying bases of value assignment by fingerprint examiners, and use it to learn a predictor for quantitative latent value assignment. Experimental results are reported using four latent fingerprint databases, two from forensic casework (NIST SD27 and MSP) and two collected in laboratory settings (WVU and IIITD), and a state-of-the-art latent automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS). The main conclusions of this paper are as follows: 1) crowdsourced latent value is more robust than prevailing value determination (VID, VEO, and NV) and latent fingerprint image quality for predicting AFIS performance; 2) two bases can explain expert value assignments, which can be interpreted in terms of latent features; and 3) our value predictor can rank a collection of latents from most informative to least informative.
The search for early biomarkers of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has been central to the Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and dementia research community in recent years. To identify MCI status at the ...earliest possible point, recent studies have shown that linguistic markers such as word choice, utterance and sentence structures can potentially serve as preclinical behavioral markers. Here we present an adaptive dialogue algorithm (an AI-enabled dialogue agent) to identify sequences of questions (a dialogue policy) that distinguish MCI from normal (NL) cognitive status. Our AI agent adapts its questioning strategy based on the user's previous responses to reach an individualized conversational strategy per user. Because the AI agent is adaptive and scales favorably with additional data, our method provides a potential avenue for large-scale preclinical screening of neurocognitive decline as a new digital biomarker, as well as longitudinal tracking of aging patterns in the outpatient setting.