Unit Of Interest Research Articles

Automatic whole slide pathology image diagnosis framework via unit stochastic selection and attention fusion

Pathology tissue slides are taken as the gold standard for the diagnosis of most cancer diseases. Automatic pathology slide diagnosis is still a challenging task for researchers because of the high-resolution, significant morphological variation, and ambiguity between malignant and benign regions in whole slide images (WSIs). In this study, we introduce a general framework to automatically diagnose different types of WSIs via unit stochastic selection and attention fusion. For example, a unit can denote a patch in a histopathology slide or a cell in a cytopathology slide. To be specific, we first train a unit-level convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform two tasks: constructing feature extractors for the units and for estimating a unit’s non-benign probability. Then we use our novel stochastic selection algorithm to choose a small subset of units that are most likely to be non-benign, referred to as the Units Of Interest (UOI), as determined by CNN. Next, we use the attention mechanism to fuse the representations of the UOI to form a fixed-length descriptor for the WSI’s diagnosis. We evaluate the proposed framework on three datasets: histological thyroid frozen sections, histological colonoscopy tissue slides, and cytological cervical pap smear slides. The framework achieves diagnosis accuracies higher than 0.8 and AUC values higher than 0.85 in all three applications. Experiments demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of the proposed framework and its potentiality for clinical applications.

Does descriptive text change how people look at art? A novel analysis of eye - movements using data -driven Units of Interest.

Does reading a description of an artwork affect how a person subsequently views it? In a controlled study, we show that in most cases, textual description does not influence how people subsequently view paintings, contrary to participants' self-report that they believed it did. To examine whether the description affected transition behaviour, we devised a novel analysis method that systematically determines Units of Interest (UOIs), and calculates transitions between these, to quantify the effect of an external factor (a descriptive text) on the viewing pattern of a naturalistic stimulus (a painting). UOIs are defined using a grid-based system, where the cell-size is determined by a clustering algorithm (DBSCAN). The Hellinger distance is computed for the distance between two Markov chains using a permutation test, constructed from the transition matrices (visual shifts between UOIs) of the two groups for each painting. Results show that the description does not affect the way in which people transition between UOIs for all but one of the paintings -- an abstract work -- suggesting that description may play more of a role in determining transition behaviour when a lack of semantic cues means it is unclear how the painting should be interpreted. The contribution is twofold: to the domain of art/curation, we provide evidence that descriptive texts do not effect how people view paintings, with the possible exception of some abstract paintings; to the domain of eye-movement research, we provide a method with the potential to answer questions across multiple research areas, where the goal is to determine whether a particular factor or condition consistently affects viewing behaviour of naturalistic stimuli.

Suitability of the manta tow technique for estimating relative and absolute abundances of crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci L. ) and corals

The manta tow technique has been used mainly for broad-scale surveys of large coral reef systems. The present study comprised two separate investigations of the technique. One involved investigating its repeatability by comparing the performance of three observers towed together along a reef. The other compared the counts of crown-of-thorns starfish from manta tow and SCUBA swim surveys undertaken within 30 large areas on eight reefs. Overall, the technique was found to be highly repeatable, particularly for crown-of-thorns starfish and live coral cover. It was less repeatable for assessing the cover of dead coral, although this was still within acceptable limits. A strong statistical relationship (r2adj = 0.91) was found between the starfish counts obtained from manta tows and those obtained from SCUBA swim surveys. Consequently, the former can be calibrated to predict the latter. The crown-of-thorns starfish is known to be cryptic and to have an aggregated distribution. However, the present study showed that the manta tow technique is a reasonably accurate and cost-effective option for determining relative changes in the distribution and abundance of noncryptic starfish where the unit of interest is a whole reef (or a large part thereof). As a comparison, approximately 14 manta tows (each lasting 2 min) will give the same level of accuracy as 10 SCUBA swim surveys of the same fixed area. The sensitivity of the manta tow technique in detecting relative changes in abundance will depend on the number of tows that are conducted. As a guide, however, a typical manta tow survey (involving approximately 50-60 tows) is capable of detecting a 20% change in the abundance of an out-breaking population of crown-of-thorns starfish. Given these findings, the manta tow technique also may be useful for assessing relative changes in the distribution and abundance of other organisms.