Statistical Fusion Method Research Articles

An Integrated Deep Learning-Based Data Fusion and Degradation Modeling Method for Improving Prognostics

Accurate prognostics are crucially important to prevent unexpected failures in industrial and service systems. This process aims to monitor the degradation status of units and predict their remaining useful lifetime (RUL) by analyzing the data collected from multiple sensors. Existing studies for prognostics either focus on health index (HI)-based statistical fusion methods that are limited by restrictive assumptions or machine learning methods that model the HI and degradation status in two separate steps. However, the restrictive assumptions are often invalid in practice, and the intrinsic connection between the HI and degradation status is missing if the two parts are modeled separately, leading to poor prognostic results. This paper proposes an integrated deep learning-based data fusion and degradation modeling method by integrating a deep neural network (DNN) and a long short-term memory (LSTM) to characterize the nonlinear relationship between the HI and multiple sensor signals and to describe the underlying degradation status of units. In particular, our innovative idea is to develop an integrated backpropagation parameter estimation algorithm to solve the fusion procedure and the degradation modeling in an integrated manner by considering the properties of HI construction in the loss functions. Thus, the constructed HI is expected to better characterize the underlying degradation process and lead to a superior prognostic result. In the case study on the degradation of aircraft gas turbine engines, the proposed method achieves promising performance compared with the existing benchmarks of statistical models and other deep learning models. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —This paper develops an integrated deep learning-based data fusion and degradation modeling method for improving prognostics when multiple sensors are available to monitor the degradation status of a unit. There are four steps for implementing this method in practice: 1) collecting multiple sensor signals of historical units; 2) constructing the HI and modeling the degradation status of units by combining a DNN model and an LSTM model; 3) solving the fusion procedure and the degradation modeling in an integrated manner by developing an integrated backpropagation parameter estimation algorithm; and 4) making prognostics for in-service units. The novelty of the proposed method is that it conducts prognostics by combining a DNN fusion model and an LSTM degradation model, and seamlessly integrates the fusion procedure with the degradation modeling to construct the HI for better characterizing the status of a unit. As a result, the proposed method has two main advantages: (i) capable of characterizing various degradation processes of different engineering systems; and (ii) superior prognostic results by constructing more suitable HI for the degradation process.

Segmentation of malignant gliomas through remote collaboration and statistical fusion

Malignant gliomas represent an aggressive class of central nervous system neoplasms. Correlation of interventional outcomes with tumor morphometry data necessitates 3D segmentation of tumors (typically based on magnetic resonance imaging). Expert delineation is the long-held gold standard for tumor segmentation, but is exceptionally resource intensive and subject to intrarater and inter-rater variability. Automated tumor segmentation algorithms have been demonstrated for a variety of imaging modalities and tumor phenotypes, but translation of these methods across clinical study designs is problematic given variation in image acquisition, tumor characteristics, segmentation objectives, and validation criteria. Herein, the authors demonstrate an alternative approach for high-throughput tumor segmentation using Internet-based, collaborative labeling. In a study of 85 human raters and 98 tumor patients, raters were recruited from a general university campus population (i.e., no specific medical knowledge), given minimal training, and provided web-based tools to label MRI images based on 2D cross sections. The labeling goal was characterized as to extract the enhanced tumor cores on T1-weighted MRI and the bright abnormality on T2-weighted MRI. An experienced rater manually constructed the ground truth volumes of a randomly sampled subcohort of 48 tumor subjects (for both T1w and T2w). Raters' taskwise individual observations, as well as the volume wise truth estimates via statistical fusion method, were evaluated over the subjects having the ground truth. Individual raters were able to reliably characterize (with >0.8 dice similarity coefficient, DSC) the gadolinium-enhancing cores and extent of the edematous areas only slightly more than half of the time. Yet, human raters were efficient in terms of providing these highly variable segmentations (less than 20 s per slice). When statistical fusion was used to combine the results of seven raters per slice for all slices in the datasets, the 3D agreement of the fused results with expertly delineated segmentations was on par with the inter-rater reliability observed between experienced raters using traditional 3D tools (approximately 0.85 DSC). The cumulative time spent per tumor patient with the collaborative approach was equivalent to that with an experienced rater, but the collaborative approach could be achieved with less training time, fewer resources, and efficient parallelization. Hence, collaborative labeling is a promising technique with potentially wide applicability to cost-effective manual labeling of medical images.

Improved statistical image fusion method using a continuous-valued blur factor

Considering the reality of image formation as well as the statistical characteristics of contourlet coefficients, we propose a method for statistical image fusion in the contourlet domain. For high-frequency subbands, an image formation model was established that has a continuous-valued blur factor to reflect the actual imaging situation. According to this model, fused contourlet coefficients were estimated by use of an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. During the estimation, a contourlet hidden Markov tree model was adopted to grasp all dependencies among coefficients and aim for better estimation results. Because the blur factor is a continuous variable, we exploited an explicit expression to update the factor in the EM algorithm, which contributed to a decline in the number of iterations for convergence. Experimental results indicated that, especially for multifocus images, the proposed method provides more satisfying fusion results in terms of visual effects and objective evaluations than some typical fusion methods based on multiscale decomposition and some statistical fusion methods using a discrete blur factor.

Robust statistical label fusion through COnsensus Level, Labeler Accuracy, and Truth Estimation (COLLATE).

Segmentation and delineation of structures of interest in medical images is paramount to quantifying and characterizing structural, morphological, and functional correlations with clinically relevant conditions. The established gold standard for performing segmentation has been manual voxel-by-voxel labeling by a neuroanatomist expert. This process can be extremely time consuming, resource intensive and fraught with high inter-observer variability. Hence, studies involving characterizations of novel structures or appearances have been limited in scope (numbers of subjects), scale (extent of regions assessed), and statistical power. Statistical methods to fuse data sets from several different sources (e.g., multiple human observers) have been proposed to simultaneously estimate both rater performance and the ground truth labels. However, with empirical datasets, statistical fusion has been observed to result in visually inconsistent findings. So, despite the ease and elegance of a statistical approach, single observers and/or direct voting are often used in practice. Hence, rater performance is not systematically quantified and exploited during label estimation. To date, statistical fusion methods have relied on characterizations of rater performance that do not intrinsically include spatially varying models of rater performance. Herein, we present a novel, robust statistical label fusion algorithm to estimate and account for spatially varying performance. This algorithm, COnsensus Level, Labeler Accuracy and Truth Estimation (COLLATE), is based on the simple idea that some regions of an image are difficult to label (e.g., confusion regions: boundaries or low contrast areas) while other regions are intrinsically obvious (e.g., consensus regions: centers of large regions or high contrast edges). Unlike its predecessors, COLLATE estimates the consensus level of each voxel and estimates differing models of observer behavior in each region. We show that COLLATE provides significant improvement in label accuracy and rater assessment over previous fusion methods in both simulated and empirical datasets.

A Novel and Simple Statistical Fusion Method for User Authentication through Keystroke Features

This paper utilizes a statistical fusion method to extract the characteristic information for keystrokebased authentication (KA) systems to verify users’ identities. The keystroke data is based on the time instances of pressing and releasing a key, and five features based on the time periods are calculated using these data. In the experiment, nineteen users participated as the legitimate users and each account was attacked by between 62 and 82 impostors. The average false acceptance rate is 1.035% and the false rejection rate is 0%. These rates are both competitive with other researches. The proposed method can be used as the classifier in password-based authentication systems to enhance their security.