Predicting COVID-19 pandemic waves including vaccination data with deep learning.

Introduction: During the recent COVID-19 pandemics, many models were developed to predict the number of new infections. After almost a year, models had also the challenge to include information about the waning effect of vaccines and by infection, and also how this effect start to disappear. Methods: We present a deep learning-based approach to predict the number of daily COVID-19 cases in 30 countries, considering the non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) applied in those countries and including vaccination data of the most used vaccines. Results: We empirically validate the proposed approach for 4 months between January and April 2021, once vaccination was available and applied to the population and the COVID-19 variants were closer to the one considered for developing the vaccines. With the predictions of new cases, we can prescribe NPIs plans that present the best trade-off between the expected number of COVID-19 cases and the social and economic cost of applying such interventions. Discussion: Whereas, mathematical models which include the effect of vaccines in the spread of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic are available, to the best of our knowledge we are the first to propose a data driven method based on recurrent neural networks that considers the waning effect of the immunization acquired either by vaccine administration or by recovering from the illness. This work contributes with an accurate, scalable, data-driven approach to modeling the pandemic curves of cases when vaccination data is available.

Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease: Detecting Asymmetries with a Return Random Walk Link Predictor.

Alzheimer's disease has been extensively studied using undirected graphs to represent the correlations of BOLD signals in different anatomical regions through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, there has been relatively little analysis of this kind of data using directed graphs, which potentially offer the potential to capture asymmetries in the interactions between different anatomical brain regions. The detection of these asymmetries is relevant to detect the disease in an early stage. For this reason, in this paper, we analyze data extracted from fMRI images using the net4Lap algorithm to infer a directed graph from the available BOLD signals, and then seek to determine asymmetries between the left and right hemispheres of the brain using a directed version of the Return Random Walk (RRW). Experimental evaluation of this method reveals that it leads to the identification of anatomical brain regions known to be implicated in the early development of Alzheimer's disease in clinical studies.

Compresión medular por tumor óseo pardo en paciente en hemodiálisis / Spinal cord compression due to a brown bone tumour in a patient on haemodialysis

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Aerial obstacle detection with 3-D mobile devices.

In this paper, we present a novel approach for aerial obstacle detection (e.g., branches or awnings) using a 3-D smartphone in the context of the visually impaired (VI) people assistance. This kind of obstacles are especially challenging because they cannot be detected by the walking stick or the guide dog.The algorithm captures the 3-D data of the scene through stereo vision. To our knowledge, this is the first work that presents a technology able to obtain real 3-D measures with smartphones in real time. The orientation sensors of the device (magnetometer and accelerometer) are used to approximate the walking direction of the user, in order to look for the obstacles only in such a direction. The obtained 3-D data are compressed and then linearized for detecting the potential obstacles. Potential obstacles are tracked in order to accumulate enough evidence to alert the user only when a real obstacle is found.In the experimental section, we show the results of the algorithm in several situations using real data and helped by VI users.

Heat diffusion: thermodynamic depth complexity of networks.

In this paper we use the Birkhoff-von Neumann decomposition of the diffusion kernel to compute a polytopal measure of graph complexity. We decompose the diffusion kernel into a series of weighted Birkhoff combinations and compute the entropy associated with the weighting proportions (polytopal complexity). The maximum entropy Birkhoff combination can be expressed in terms of matrix permanents. This allows us to introduce a phase-transition principle that links our definition of polytopal complexity to the heat flowing through the network at a given diffusion time. The result is an efficiently computed complexity measure, which we refer to as flow complexity. Moreover, the flow complexity measure allows us to analyze graphs and networks in terms of the thermodynamic depth. We compare our method with three alternative methods described in the literature (Estrada's heterogeneity index, the Laplacian energy, and the von Neumann entropy). Our study is based on 217 protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks including histidine kinases from several species of bacteria. We find a correlation between structural complexity and phylogeny (more evolved species have statistically more complex PPIs). Although our methods outperform the alternatives, we find similarities with Estrada's heterogeneity index in terms of network size independence and predictive power.

Entropy-based incremental variational Bayes learning of Gaussian mixtures.

Variational approaches to density estimation and pattern recognition using Gaussian mixture models can be used to learn the model and optimize its complexity simultaneously. In this brief, we develop an incremental entropy-based variational learning scheme that does not require any kind of initialization. The key element of the proposal is to exploit the incremental learning approach to perform model selection through efficient iteration over the variational Bayes optimization step in a way that the number of splits is minimized. The method starts with just one component and adds new components iteratively by splitting the worst fitted kernel in terms of evaluating its entropy. Our experimental results, on synthetic and real data sets show the effectiveness of the approach outperforming other state-of-the-art incremental component learners.

Two Bayesian methods for junction classification.

We propose two Bayesian methods for junction classification which evolve from the Kona method: a region-based method and an edge-based method. Our region-based method computes a one-dimensional (1-D) profile where wedges are mapped to intervals with homogeneous intensity. These intervals are found through a growing-and-merging algorithm driven by a greedy rule. On the other hand, our edge-based method computes a different profile which maps wedge limits to peaks of contrast, and these peaks are found through thresholding followed by nonmaximum suppression. Experimental results show that both methods are more robust and efficient than the Kona method, and also that the edge-based method outperforms the region-based one.