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Background- Mediastinal staging is the rate-limiting step prior to initiation of lung cancer treatment and is essential in identifying the most appropriate treatment for the patient. However, this process is often complex and involves multiple imaging modalities including invasive and non-invasive methods for the assessment of lymph nodes in the mediastinum which are error prone. The use of Artificial Intelligence may be able to provide more accurate and precise measurements and eliminate error associated with medical imaging. Methods-This thesis was conducted in three parts. In Part 1, we synthesized and critically appraised the methodological quality of existing studies that use Artificial Intelligence to diagnosis and stage lung cancer from thoracic imaging based on lymph node features. In Part 2, we determined the inter-rater reliability of segmentation of the ultrasonographic lymph node features performed by an experienced endoscopist (manually) compared to NeuralSeg (automatically). In Part 3, we developed and validated a deep neural network through a clinical prediction model to determine if NeuralSeg could learn and identify ultrasonographic lymph node features from endobronchial ultrasound images in patients undergoing lung cancer staging. Results- In Part 1, there were few studies in the Artificial Intelligence literature that provided a complete and detailed description of the design, Artificial Intelligence architecture, validation strategies and performance measures. In Part 2, NeuralSeg and the experienced endosonographer possessed excellent inter-rater correlation (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient = 0.76, 95% CI= 0.70 – 0.80, p<0.0001). In Part 3, NeuralSeg’s algorithm had an accuracy of 73.78% (95% CI: 68.40% to 78.68%), a sensitivity of 18.37% (95% CI: 8.76% to 32.02%) and specificity of 84.34% (95% CI: 79.22% to 88.62%). Conclusions- Analysis of staging modalities for lung cancer using Artificial Intelligence may be useful for when results are inconclusive or uninterpretable by a human reader. NeuralSeg’s high specificity may inform decision-making regarding biopsy if results are benign. Prospective external validation of algorithms and direct comparisons through cut-off thresholds are required to determine their true predictive capability. Future work with a larger dataset will be required to improve and refine the algorithm prior to trials in clinical practice. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Before deciding on treatment for patients with lung cancer, a critical step in the investigation is finding out whether the lymph nodes in the chest contain cancer cells. This is accomplished through medical imaging of the lymph nodes or taking a biopsy of the lymph node tissue using a needle attached to a scope that is entered through the airway wall. The purpose of these tests is to ensure that lung cancer patients receive the optimal treatment option. However, imaging of the lymph nodes is heavily reliant on human interpretation, which can be error prone. We aimed to critically analyze and investigate the use of Artificial Intelligence to enhance clinician performance for image interpretation. We performed a search of the medical literature for the use of Artificial Intelligence to diagnosis lung cancer from medical imaging. We also taught a computer program, known as NeuralSeg, to learn and identify cancerous lymph nodes from ultrasound imaging. This thesis provides a significant contribution to the Artificial Intelligence literature and provides recommendations for future research.

Despite facing technical issues (e.g., overfitting, vanishing and exploding gradients), deep neural networks have the potential to capture complex patterns in data. Understanding how depth impacts neural networks performance is vital to the advancement of novel deep learning architectures. By varying hyperparameters on two sets of architectures with different depths, this thesis aims to examine if there are any potential benefits from developing deep networks for segmenting intracranial aneurysms from 3D TOF-MRA scans in the ADAM dataset. / Master of Science / With the technologies we have today, people are constantly generating data. In this pool of information, gaining insight into the data proves to be extremely valuable. Deep learning is one method that allows for automatic pattern recognition by iteratively improving the disparity between its prediction and the ground truth. Complex models can learn complex patterns, and such models introduce challenges. This thesis explores the potential benefits of deep neural networks whether they stand to gain improvement despite the challenges. The models will be trained to segment intracranial aneurysms from volumetric images.

The increased competition among charity sport events (CSEs) require charity organizations to utilize more sophisticated marketing programs - segmenting and targeting diverse participants more effectively. The study examines the effectiveness of demographic, psychographic, behavioral segmentation variables. In-depths interviews with 14 participants were conducted to obtain profiles of the four segments of survivor-centered teams, family and friends, company-sponsored teams, and other organization teams. The distinct profile of each segment had a combination of psychological, behavioral and demographic characteristics. Participation mode was identified as a proxy segmentation variable that can be easily obtained by event organizers at the time of participant registration Management of participant segments was discussed. / text

Cette thèse porte sur la segmentation d'images OCT cutanées. Cette modalité d'imagerie permet de visualiser les structures superficielles avec une profondeur de l'ordre du millimètre. En dermatologie, elle permet d'explorer l'épiderme et sa jonction avec le derme. Cependant, les images OCT sont sévèrement affectées par le bruit speckle. Ce phénomène conjugué à la complexité inhérente aux structures de la peau rend l'interprétation des images difficile même pour des experts. L'approche classique consiste à filtrer le speckle avant de faire des traitements de segmentation. A l'inverse, dans cette thèse nous exploitons exclusivement le bruit comme information pour segmenter. Notre approche repose sur la modélisation statistique du speckle. La segmentation se fait par classification des paramètres de ce modèle probabiliste. Ainsi, - On montre que le speckle ne suit pas une loi Rayleigh, comme cela est établi analytiquement. - On ajuste plusieurs lois de probabilité à l'amplitude OCT; et on montre que celle-ci est distribuée selon la loi Gamma généralisée. - On établit que les paramètres de cette loi discriminent statistiquement les couches de la peau. - On conçoit une méthode de segmentation par classification des paramètres locaux du speckle. Les nombreuses expérimentations faites sur plusieurs corpus d'images in-vivo confirment la validité de notre approche. / This thesis deals with the segmentation of skin OCT images. This modality provides the means to visualize superficial structures down to a millimeter depth. In dermatology, it is used to examine the epidermis and its junction with the dermis. However, OCT images are severely affected by the speckle noise. This random phenomenon added to the complexity of human skin structures makes the visual interpretation of images very difficult. Classical image processing techniques filter this noise prior to any segmentation step. In this thesis, we rely exclusively on the properties of the speckle to perform segmentation. Our approach is based on the statistical modeling of the speckle. Images are segmented by classifying parameters of the statistical model. Therefore, - We show that speckle does not follow the Rayleigh distribution, as developed analytically in the literature. - We fit various probability laws to model OCT signal amplitude ; we show that Generalized Gamma has the best goodness of fit. - We establish that statistical parameters of this distribution discriminate skin layers with good variability. - We develop a segmentation method based on the classification of local statistical parameters. The various experimental results with a number of in-vivo images reported in the thesis confirm the validity of our approach

A computer vision system consists of many stages, depending on its application. Feature extraction and segmentation are two key stages of a typical computer vision system and hence developments in feature extraction and segmentation are significant in improving the overall performance of a computer vision system. There are many inherent problems associated with feature extraction and segmentation processes of a computer vision system. In this thesis, I propose novel solutions to some of these problems in feature extraction and segmentation. First, I explore manifold learning, which is a non-linear dimensionality reduction technique for feature extraction in high dimensional data. The classical manifold learning techniques perform dimensionality reduction assuming that original data lie on a single low dimensional manifold. However, in reality, data sets often consist of data belonging to multiple classes, which lie on their own manifolds. Thus, I propose a multi-manifold learning technique to simultaneously learn multiple manifolds present in a data set, which cannot be achieved through classical single manifold learning techniques. Secondly, in image segmentation, when the number of segments of the image is not known, automatically determining the number of segments becomes a challenging problem. In this thesis, I propose an adaptive unsupervised image segmentation technique based on spatial and feature space Dirichlet tessellation as a solution to this problem. Skin segmentation is an important as well as a challenging problem in computer vision applications. Thus, thirdly, I propose a novel skin segmentation technique by combining the multi-manifold learning-based feature extraction and Vorono\"{i} region-based image segmentation. Finally, I explore hand gesture recognition, which is a prevalent topic in intelligent human computer interaction and demonstrate that the proposed improvements in the feature extraction and segmentation stages improve the overall recognition rates of the proposed hand gesture recognition framework. I use the proposed skin segmentation technique to segment the hand, the object of interest in hand gesture recognition and manifold learning for feature extraction to automatically extract the salient features. Furthermore, in this thesis, I show that different instances of the same dynamic hand gesture have similar underlying manifolds, which allows manifold-matching based hand gesture recognition. / February 2017