The medical data science group carries out research at the intersection of machine learning and medicine with the ultimate goal of improving diagnosis and treatment outcome to the benefit of the care and wellbeing of patients. As medical and health data is heterogenous and multimodal, our research deals with the advancement of machine learning models and methodologies to address the specific challenges of the medical domain. Specifically, we work in the areas of multimodal data integration, structure detection, and trustworthy (or transparent) models. The challenge lies not only in developing fast, robust and reliable systems but also in systems that are easy to interpret and usable in clinical practice.


NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Deep Generative Models for Health

The MDS group is organizing a workshop on Deep Generative Models for Health at NeurIPS 2023

Read more

MDS at ICML

Several members of the MDS group attended ICML 2023. Congratulations to everyone who presented work, including one main conference paper, and many…

Read more

ICLR 2023 Workshop on Time Series Representation Learning for Health

MDS organizing Workshop on Time Series Representation Learning for Health at ICLR 2023

Read more


Abstract

Early detection of cardiac dysfunction through routine screening is vital for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases. An important metric of cardiac function is the left ventricular ejection fraction (EF), where lower EF is associated with cardiomyopathy. Echocardiography is a popular diagnostic tool in cardiology, with ultrasound being a low-cost, real-time, and non-ionizing technology. However, human assessment of echocardiograms for calculating EF is time-consuming and expertise-demanding, raising the need for an automated approach. In this work, we propose using the M(otion)-mode of echocardiograms for estimating the EF and classifying cardiomyopathy. We generate multiple artificial M-mode images from a single echocardiogram and combine them using off-the-shelf model architectures. Additionally, we extend contrastive learning (CL) to cardiac imaging to learn meaningful representations from exploiting structures in unlabeled data allowing the model to achieve high accuracy, even with limited annotations. Our experiments show that the supervised setting converges with only ten modes and is comparable to the baseline method while bypassing its cumbersome training process and being computationally much more efficient. Furthermore, CL using M-mode images is helpful for limited data scenarios, such as having labels for only 200 patients, which is common in medical applications.

Authors

Ece Özkan Elsen and Thomas M. Sutter, Yurong Hu, Sebastian Balzer, Julia E. Vogt

Submitted

GCPR 2023

Date

01.09.2023

LinkCode

Abstract

Appendicitis is among the most frequent reasons for pediatric abdominal surgeries. With recent advances in machine learning, data-driven decision support could help clinicians diagnose and manage patients while reducing the number of non-critical surgeries. However, previous decision support systems for appendicitis have focused on clinical, laboratory, scoring, and computed tomography data and have ignored the use of abdominal ultrasound, despite its noninvasive nature and widespread availability. In this work, we present interpretable machine learning models for predicting the diagnosis, management and severity of suspected appendicitis using ultrasound images. To this end, our approach utilizes concept bottleneck models (CBM) that facilitate interpretation and interaction with high-level concepts that are understandable to clinicians. Furthermore, we extend CBMs to prediction problems with multiple views and incomplete concept sets. Our models were trained on a dataset comprising 579 pediatric patients with 1709 ultrasound images accompanied by clinical and laboratory data. Results show that our proposed method enables clinicians to utilize a human-understandable and intervenable predictive model without compromising performance or requiring time-consuming image annotation when deployed.

Authors

Ricards Marcinkevics, Patricia Reis Wolfertstetter, Ugne Klimiene, Kieran Chin-Cheong, Alyssia Paschke, Julia Zerres, Markus Denzinger, David Niederberger, Sven Wellmann, Ece Özkan Elsen, Christian Knorr, Julia E. Vogt

Submitted

Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Healthcare Data, Co-located with ICML 2023

Date

29.07.2023

Abstract

Abstract Ante-hoc interpretability has become the holy grail of explainable artificial intelligence for high-stakes domains such as healthcare; however, this notion is elusive, lacks a widely-accepted definition and depends on the operational context. It can refer to predictive models whose structure adheres to domain-specific constraints, or ones that are inherently transparent. The latter conceptualisation assumes observers who judge this quality, whereas the former presupposes them to have technical and domain expertise (thus alienating other groups of explainees). Additionally, the distinction between ante-hoc interpretability and the less desirable post-hoc explainability, which refers to methods that construct a separate explanatory model, is vague given that transparent predictive models may still require (post-)processing to yield suitable explanatory insights. Ante-hoc interpretability is thus an overloaded concept that comprises a range of implicit properties, which we unpack in this paper to better understand what is needed for its safe deployment across high-stakes domains. To this end, we outline modelling and explaining desiderata that allow us to navigate its distinct realisations in view of the envisaged application and audience.

Authors

Kacper Sokol, Julia E. Vogt

Submitted

Workshop on Interpretable ML in Healthcare at 2023 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

Date

28.07.2023

LinkDOI

Abstract

Counterfactual explanations are the de facto standard when tasked with interpreting decisions of (opaque) predictive models. Their generation is often subject to algorithmic and domain-specific constraints – such as density-based feasibility for the former and attribute (im)mutability or directionality of change for the latter – that aim to maximise their real-life utility. In addition to desiderata with respect to the counterfactual instance itself, the existence of a viable path connecting it with the factual data point, known as algorithmic recourse, has become an important technical consideration. While both of these requirements ensure that the steps of the journey as well as its destination are admissible, current literature neglects the multiplicity of such counterfactual paths. To address this shortcoming we introduce the novel concept of explanatory multiverse that encompasses all the possible counterfactual journeys and shows how to navigate, reason about and compare the geometry of these paths – their affinity, branching, divergence and possible future convergence – with two methods: vector spaces and graphs. Implementing this (interactive) explanatory process grants explainees more agency by allowing them to select counterfactuals based on the properties of the journey leading to them in addition to their absolute differences.

Authors

Kacper Sokol, Edward Small, Yueqing Xuan

Submitted

Workshop on Counterfactuals in Minds and Machines at 2023 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

Date

28.07.2023

LinkDOI

Authors

Alexander Immer, Christoph Schultheiss, Julia E. Vogt, Bernhard Schölkopf, Peter Bühlmann, Alexander Marx

Submitted

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2023

Date

04.07.2023

LinkCode