Background and Objective: The early identification of malignant pulmonary nodules is critical for a better lung cancer prognosis and a less invasive chemo or radio therapies. Nodule malignancy assessment done by radiologists is extremely useful for planning a preventive intervention but is, unfortunately, a complex, time-consuming and error-prone task. This explains the lack of large datasets containing radiologists malignancy characterization of nodules; Methods: In this article, we propose to assess nodule malignancy through 3D convolutional neural networks and to integrate it in an automated end-to-end existing pipeline of lung cancer detection. For training and testing purposes we used independent subsets of the LIDC dataset; Results: Adding the probabilities of nodules malignity in a baseline lung cancer pipeline improved its F1-weighted score by 14.7 %, whereas integrating the malignancy model itself using transfer learning outperformed the baseline prediction by 11.8 % of F1-weighted score;Conclusions: Despite the limited size of the lung cancer datasets, integrating predictive models of nodule malignancy improves prediction of lung cancer.

No abstract

This paper presents an approach to the shared task HaSpeeDe within Evalita 2018. We followed a standard machine learning procedure with training, validation, and testing phases. We considered word embedding as features and deep learning for classification. We tested the effect of merging two datasets in the classification of messages from Facebook and Twitter. We concluded that using data for training and testing from the same social network was a requirement to achieve a good performance. Moreover, adding data from a different social network allowed to improve the results, indicating that more generalized models can be an advantage.

This paper presents the components and integrated outcome of a system that aims to achieve early detection, monitoring and mitigation of pandemic outbreaks. The architecture of the platform aims at providing a number of pandemic-response-related services, on a modular basis, that allows for the easy customization of the platform to address user’s needs per case. This customization is achieved through its ability to deploy only the necessary, loosely coupled services and tools for each case, and by providing a common authentication, data storage and data exchange infrastructure. This way, the platform can provide the necessary services without the burden of additional services that are not of use in the current deployment (e.g., predictive models for pathogens that are not endemic to the deployment area). All the decisions taken for the communication and integration of the tools that compose the platform adhere to this basic principle. The tools presented here as well as their integration is part of the project STAMINA.

Lung cancer follow-up is a complex, error prone, and time consuming task for clinical radiologists. Several lung CT scan images taken at different time points of a given patient need to be individually inspected, looking for possible cancerogenous nodules. Radiologists mainly focus their attention in nodule size, density, and growth to assess the existence of malignancy. In this study, we present a novel method based on a 3D siamese neural network, for the re-identification of nodules in a pair of CT scans of the same patient without the need for image registration. The network was integrated into a two-stage automatic pipeline to detect, match, and predict nodule growth given pairs of CT scans. Results on an independent test set reported a nodule detection sensitivity of 94.7%, an accuracy for temporal nodule matching of 88.8%, and a sensitivity of 92.0% with a precision of 88.4% for nodule growth detection.