Current clinical note-taking approaches cannot capture the entirety of information available from patient encounters and detract from patient-clinician interactions. By surveying healthcare providers' current note-taking practices and attitudes toward new clinical technologies, we developed a patient-centered paradigm for clinical note-taking that makes use of hybrid tablet/keyboard devices and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. PhenoPad is an intelligent clinical note-taking interface that captures free-form notes and standard phenotypic information via a variety of modalities, including speech and natural language processing techniques, handwriting recognition, and more. The output is unobtrusively presented on mobile devices to clinicians for real-time validation and can be automatically transformed into digital formats that would be compatible with integration into electronic health record systems. Semi-structured interviews and trials in clinical settings rendered positive feedback from both clinicians and patients, demonstrating that AI-enabled clinical note-taking under our design improves ease and breadth of information captured during clinical visits without compromising patient-clinician interactions. We open source a proof-of-concept implementation that can lay the foundation for broader clinical use cases.
Self-supervised approaches such as Momentum Contrast (MoCo) can leverage unlabeled data to produce pretrained models for subsequent fine-tuning on labeled data. While MoCo has demonstrated promising results on natural image classification tasks, its application to medical imaging tasks like chest X-ray interpretation has been limited. Chest X-ray interpretation is fundamentally different from natural image classification in ways that may limit the applicability of self-supervised approaches, including that (1) classification depends on differences in a small number of pixels, (2) X-rays are large and grayscale, (3) there are far fewer unlabeled chest X-ray images than natural images. In this work, we investigate whether MoCo-pretraining leads to better representations or initializations for chest X-ray interpretation. We conduct MoCo-pretraining on CheXpert, a large labeled dataset of X-rays, followed by supervised fine-tuning experiments on the pleural effusion task. Using 0.1% of labeled training data, we find that a linear model trained on MoCo-pretrained representations outperforms one trained on representations without MoCo-pretraining by an AUC of 0.096 (95% CI 0.061, 0.130), indicating that MoCo-pretrained representations are of higher quality. Furthermore, a model fine-tuned end-to-end with MoCo-pretraining outperforms its non-MoCo-pretrained counterpart by an AUC of 0.037 (95% CI 0.015, 0.062) with the 0.1% label fraction. These AUC improvements are observed for all label fractions for both the linear model and an end-to-end fine-tuned model with the greater improvements for smaller label fractions. Finally, we observe similar results on a small, target chest X-ray dataset (Shenzhen dataset for tuberculosis) with MoCo-pretraining done on the source dataset (CheXpert), which suggests that pretraining on unlabeled X-rays can provide transfer learning benefits for a target task. Our study demonstrates that MoCo-pretraining provides high-quality representations and transferable initializations for chest X-ray interpretation.
With increasing focus on privacy protection, alternative methods to identify vehicle operator without the use of biometric identifiers have gained traction for automotive data analysis. The wide variety of sensors installed on modern vehicles enable autonomous driving, reduce accidents and improve vehicle handling. On the other hand, the data these sensors collect reflect drivers' habit. Drivers' use of turn indicators, following distance, rate of acceleration, etc. can be transformed to an embedding that is representative of their behavior and identity. In this paper, we develop a deep learning architecture (Driver2vec) to map a short interval of driving data into an embedding space that represents the driver's behavior to assist in driver identification. We develop a custom model that leverages performance gains of temporal convolutional networks, embedding separation power of triplet loss and classification accuracy of gradient boosting decision trees. Trained on a dataset of 51 drivers provided by Nervtech, Driver2vec is able to accurately identify the driver from a short 10-second interval of sensor data, achieving an average pairwise driver identification accuracy of 83.1% from this 10-second interval, which is remarkably higher than performance obtained in previous studies. We then analyzed performance of Driver2vec to show that its performance is consistent across scenarios and that modeling choices are sound.
Contrastive learning is a form of self-supervision that can leverage unlabeled data to produce pretrained models. While contrastive learning has demonstrated promising results on natural image classification tasks, its application to medical imaging tasks like chest X-ray interpretation has been limited. In this work, we propose MoCo-CXR, which is an adaptation of the contrastive learning method Momentum Contrast (MoCo), to produce models with better representations and initializations for the detection of pathologies in chest X-rays. In detecting pleural effusion, we find that linear models trained on MoCo-CXR-pretrained representations outperform those without MoCo-CXR-pretrained representations, indicating that MoCo-CXR-pretrained representations are of higher-quality. End-to-end fine-tuning experiments reveal that a model initialized via MoCo-CXR-pretraining outperforms its non-MoCo-CXR-pretrained counterpart. We find that MoCo-CXR-pretraining provides the most benefit with limited labeled training data. Finally, we demonstrate similar results on a target Tuberculosis dataset unseen during pretraining, indicating that MoCo-CXR-pretraining endows models with representations and transferability that can be applied across chest X-ray datasets and tasks.
IMPORTANCE Despite the high prevalence and potential outcomes of major depressive disorder, whether and how patients will respond to antidepressant medications is not easily predicted.OBJECTIVE To identify the extent to which a machine learning approach, using gradient-boosted decision trees, can predict acute improvement for individual depressive symptoms with antidepressants based on pretreatment symptom scores and electroencephalographic (EEG) measures.DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This prognostic study analyzed data collected as part of the International Study to Predict Optimized Treatment in Depression, a randomized, prospective open-label trial to identify clinically useful predictors and moderators of response to commonly used first-line antidepressant medications. Data collection was conducted at 20 sites spanning 5 countries and including 518 adult outpatients (18-65 years of age) from primary care or specialty care practices who received a diagnosis of current major depressive disorder between December 1, 2008, and September 30, 2013. Patients were antidepressant medication naive or willing to undergo a 1-week washout period of any nonprotocol antidepressant medication. Statistical analysis was conducted from January 5 to June 30, 2019.EXPOSURES Participants with major depressive disorder were randomized in a 1:1:1 ratio to undergo 8 weeks of treatment with escitalopram oxalate (n = 162), sertraline hydrochloride (n = 176), or extended-release venlafaxine hydrochloride (n = 180). Main Outcomes and Measures The primary objective was to predict improvement in individual symptoms, defined as the difference in score for each of the symptoms on the 21-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression from baseline to week 8, evaluated using the C index.RESULTS The resulting data set contained 518 patients (274 women; mean [SD] age, 39.0 [12.6] years; mean [SD] 21-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression score improvement, 13.0 [7.0]). With the use of 5-fold cross-validation for evaluation, the machine learning model achieved C index scores of 0.8 or higher on 12 of 21 clinician-rated symptoms, with the highest C index score of 0.963 (95% CI, 0.939-1.000) for loss of insight. The importance of any single EEG feature was higher than 5% for prediction of 7 symptoms, with the most important EEG features being the absolute delta band power at the occipital electrode sites (O1, 18.8%; Oz, 6.7%) for loss of insight. Over and above the use of baseline symptom scores alone, the use of both EEG and baseline symptom features was associated with a significant increase in the C index for improvement in 4 symptoms: loss of insight (C index increase, 0.012 [95% CI, 0.001-0.020]), energy loss (C index increase, 0.035 [95% CI, 0.011-0.059]), appetite changes (C index increase, 0.017 [95% CI, 0.003-0.030]), and psychomotor retardation (C index increase, 0.020 [95% CI, 0.008-0.032]).CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE This study suggests that machine learning may be used to identify independent associations of symptoms and EEG features to predict antidepressant-associated improvements in specific symptoms of depression. The approach should next be prospectively validated in clinical trials and settings.This prognostic study examines the extent to which a machine learning approach, using gradient-boosted decision trees, can predict acute improvement in individual depressive symptoms with antidepressants based on pretreatment symptom scores and electroencephalographic measures.Question Can machine learning models predict improvement of various depressive symptoms with antidepressant treatment based on pretreatment symptom scores and electroencephalographic measures? Findings In this prognostic study, using the machine learning approach of gradient-boosted decision trees, the ElecTreeScore algorithm could reliably distinguish the patients who responded to treatment from those who did not based on various depressive symptoms using pretreatment symptom scores and electroencephalographic features (using the cross-validation approach on 518 patients). Meaning Machine learning approaches that include pretreatment symptom scores and electroencephalographic features may help predict which depressive symptoms will improve with antidepressants.
IMPORTANCE Despite the high prevalence and potential outcomes of major depressive disorder, whether and how patients will respond to antidepressant medications is not easily predicted. OBJECTIVE To identify the extent to which a machine learning approach, using gradient-boosted decision trees, can predict acute improvement for individual depressive symptoms with antidepressants based on pretreatment symptom scores and electroencephalographic (EEG) measures. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This prognostic study analyzed data collected as part of the International Study to Predict Optimized Treatment in Depression, a randomized, prospective open-label trial to identify clinically useful predictors and moderators of response to commonly used first-line antidepressant medications. Data collection was conducted at 20 sites spanning 5 countries and including 518 adult outpatients (18-65 years of age) from primary care or specialty care practices who received a diagnosis of current major depressive disorder between December 1, 2008, and September 30, 2013. Patients were antidepressant medication naive or willing to undergo a 1-week washout period of any nonprotocol antidepressant medication. Statistical analysis was conducted from January 5 to June 30, 2019. EXPOSURES Participants with major depressive disorder were randomized in a 1:1:1 ratio to undergo 8 weeks of treatment with escitalopram oxalate (n = 162), sertraline hydrochloride (n = 176), or extended-release venlafaxine hydrochloride (n = 180). Main Outcomes and Measures The primary objective was to predict improvement in individual symptoms, defined as the difference in score for each of the symptoms on the 21-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression from baseline to week 8, evaluated using the C index. RESULTS The resulting data set contained 518 patients (274 women; mean [SD] age, 39.0 [12.6] years; mean [SD] 21-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression score improvement, 13.0 [7.0]). With the use of 5-fold cross-validation for evaluation, the machine learning model achieved C index scores of 0.8 or higher on 12 of 21 clinician-rated symptoms, with the highest C index score of 0.963 (95% CI, 0.939-1.000) for loss of insight. The importance of any single EEG feature was higher than 5% for prediction of 7 symptoms, with the most important EEG features being the absolute delta band power at the occipital electrode sites (O1, 18.8%; Oz, 6.7%) for loss of insight. Over and above the use of baseline symptom scores alone, the use of both EEG and baseline symptom features was associated with a significant increase in the C index for improvement in 4 symptoms: loss of insight (C index increase, 0.012 [95% CI, 0.001-0.020]), energy loss (C index increase, 0.035 [95% CI, 0.011-0.059]), appetite changes (C index increase, 0.017 [95% CI, 0.003-0.030]), and psychomotor retardation (C index increase, 0.020 [95% CI, 0.008-0.032]). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE This study suggests that machine learning may be used to identify independent associations of symptoms and EEG features to predict antidepressant-associated improvements in specific symptoms of depression. The approach should next be prospectively validated in clinical trials and settings. This prognostic study examines the extent to which a machine learning approach, using gradient-boosted decision trees, can predict acute improvement in individual depressive symptoms with antidepressants based on pretreatment symptom scores and electroencephalographic measures. Question Can machine learning models predict improvement of various depressive symptoms with antidepressant treatment based on pretreatment symptom scores and electroencephalographic measures? Findings In this prognostic study, using the machine learning approach of gradient-boosted decision trees, the ElecTreeScore algorithm could reliably distinguish the patients who responded to treatment from those who did not based on various depressive symptoms using pretreatment symptom scores and electroencephalographic features (using the cross-validation approach on 518 patients). Meaning Machine learning approaches that include pretreatment symptom scores and electroencephalographic features may help predict which depressive symptoms will improve with antidepressants.
With the amount of user data crowdsourced for data mining dramatically increasing, there is an urgent need to protect the privacy of individuals. Differential privacy mechanisms are conventionally adopted to add noise to the user data, so that an adversary is not able to gain any additional knowledge about individuals participating in the crowdsourcing, by inferring from the learned model. However, such protection is usually achieved with significantly degraded learning results. We have observed that the fundamental cause of this problem is that the relationship between model utility and data privacy is not accurately characterized, leading to privacy constraints that are overly strict. In this paper, we address this problem from an optimization perspective, and formulate the problem as one that minimizes the accuracy loss given a set of privacy constraints. We use sensitivity to describe the impact of perturbation noise to the model utility, and propose a new optimized additive noise mechanism that improves overall learning accuracy while conforming to individual privacy constraints. As a highlight of our privacy mechanism, it is highly robust in the high privacy regime (when $\epsilon \rightarrow 0$), and against any changes in the model structure and experimental settings.