Wendi in ROP399: Learning How the Machine Learns…and Improve It!
Hi everyone! My name is Wendi Qu and I’m finishing my third year in U of T, majoring in Statistics and Molecular Genetics. I did a ROP399 research project with Dr. Pascal Tyrrell from September 2018 – April 2019 and I would love to share it with you!
his amazing experience, and it has inspired me to delve deeper into machine learning and healthcare!
Rachael Jaffe’s ROP Journey… From the Pool to the Lab!
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https://thevarsity.ca/2019/03/10/what-does-a-scientist-look-like/ |
and I was inclined to put my minor to the test! Little did I know that I was about to embark on a machine learning adventure.
wasn’t going to be a part of the lab for 2018-2019 year. If my background in statistics has taught me anything, nothing truly has a 100% probability. And yet, last April I found myself sitting in the department of medical imaging at my first lab meeting.
should add an investigation of k-fold cross validation because the majority of models use this to validate their estimate of model accuracy. With further help from Ariana’s colleague, Mauro, I was able to gather a ton of data so that I could analyze my results statistically.
Rachael Jaffe
Adam Adli’s ROP399 Journey in Machine Learning and Medical Imaging
costs of its employment, I showed that L2 regularization is a feasible procedure to help prevent over-fitting and improve testing accuracy when developing a machine learning model with limited training data.
machine learning model. I harnessed powerful technologies like Intel AVX2 vectorization instruction set for things like image pre-processing on the CPU and the Nvidia CUDA runtime environment through PyTorch to accelerate tensor operations using multiple GPUs. Overall, the final run of my experiment took about 25 hours to run even with all the high-level optimizations I considered—even on an insane lab machine with an Intel i7-8700 CPU and an Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X!
Adam
Adli
Squeezing in a Little Time for ML this Past Summer: John Valen’s Experience
My name is John Valen. Having recently completed my undergraduate degree in statistics and economics here at U of T, and soon moving on to pursue my Master’s in statistics in Europe, the Medical Imaging Volunteer Internship program seemed almost tailored to my goal of getting valuable research experience within a constrained time window. Over the course of only several months this summer, I’ve had the pleasant and enriching experience of contributing ideas and code to the project that summer ROP student Wenda Zhao undertook for the dentistry department at U of T, along with the guidance and contributions of ML lab leader Hershel Stark.
Wenda’s blog post (see here) neatly summarizes the goal of this project, one whose aim is to determine the likelihood that a misdiagnosis may occur, depending on the degree of damage to the dental plate being used for X-rays. Contributions I’ve helped make in particular include:
– Creating sparse matrix representations of the grey scale X-ray images themselves in order to economize on memory and run-time performance
– Hand-engineering features: once the artifacts (damage such as scratches, dents,
blotches, etc) were segmented out via DBSCAN, they were characterized by a variety of different metrics: size (pixel count), average pixel intensity (images are grey scale), location (relative to the center of the plate image), etc.
– Training a K-Means algorithm to cluster segmented artifacts from the dental plate images based on these hand-engineered features, whereby clustering them in this unsupervised manner gave us insight on their properties;
And much more. If you are not familiar with this machine learning lingo, then do not worry; I was hardly exposed to it myself before I started working in this lab. I went in knowing close to nothing practical and a whole lot theoretical, and came out knowing quite a little more in the way of the first one. Fine, a lot more: or
so I like to think. It may not seem clear how my contributions can be used in the future to help answer the ultimate question. The truth is, nothing is really clear at the moment. The project is still on-going and I intend to keep up with it, making contributions remotely to it while I am away in Belgium pursuing my Master’s degree. This is the greatness of it all, the amount of flexibility we have in answering these questions leaves a lot of room for creativity and contemplation.
All in all, from my own perspective (which has been greatly expanded over the course of the summer), the volunteer program was a perfect means to experience the sheer amount of work that is enthusiastically undertaken by serious students in answering these important questions. I hope that I too can now consider myself at the very least climbing to their ranks while I move on to other and more numerous serious pursuits in my life.
Good luck to you all, and do not underestimate yourselves.
John Valen
Summer 2018 ROP: Wenda’s in the house!
X-ray artifacts. And now, looking back, it was one of the best learning experiences I have ever had, through an enormous amount of self-teaching, practicing, troubleshooting, discussing and debating. As with all learning experiences, the process can be long and bewildering, sometimes even tedious; yet rewarding in the end.
office, waiting for him to print out my ROP application and start off the interview. At that point, I just ended my one-year research at a plant lab and was clueless of what I was going to do for the following summer. Coming from a life science background, I went into this interview for a machine learning project in medical imaging knowing that I wasn’t the most competitive candidate nor the most suitable person to do the job. Although I tried presenting myself as someone who had had some experience dealing with statistics by showing Dr. Tyrrell some clumsy work I did for my previous lab, the flaws were immediately noticed by him. I then found myself facing a series of questions which I had no answers to and the interview quickly turned into what I thought to be a disaster for me. I was therefore very shocked when I received an email a week later from Dr. Tyrrell informing me that I had been accepted. I happily went onboard, but joys aside, part of me also had this big uncertainty and doubt that later followed me even to my first few weeks at the lab.
gradually went away. But it was never going to be easy. There were times when
we hit the bottleneck; when our attempts have failed miserably; when we had to give up on a brilliant idea because it didn’t go our ways. But after stumbling through all the challenges and pitfalls, we found ourselves new. I was a bit lost at the beginning of this summer. But over the summer I learned a lot about the very cool and growingly crucial field of machine learning; I grew a newfound appreciation for statistics and methodology; I picked up the programming language python, which I had been wanting to do for years and, most importantly, I did more thinking than I ever would if I were to just follow instructions blindly. And in the end, I believe that science is all about thinking. So for you guys out there reading the blog, if you’re coming to this lab from a totally different background and not entirely sure about the future, don’t be afraid. And I hope you find what you come here looking for, just like I did.
MiVIP meets AI…
Well, I think it was inevitable. My data science lab has slowly crossed over to the dark side into the world of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
Let me apologize for being MIA for so long. Life has been pretty hectic these past months as I have been building the MiDATA program here in the Department of Medical Imaging at the University of Toronto. The good news is that the MiVIP program will now be inviting students to participate in machine learning and artificial intelligence in medical image research.
This summer will include the launch our our MiStats+ML program where we will have students from the department of statistical sciences, computer sciences, and life sciences all work together on ML/AI projects in the MiDATA lab.
Stay tuned as we ramp up and get back to some our previous threads like MiWORD of the day…
See you in the blogosphere,
Pascal
Lessons Along the Way
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https://betakit.com/startupcfo-explains-the-long-windy-road-to-a-closed-funding-round/ |
review articles – all until I was confident enough to evaluate articles on my own. For me, the key to learning a complex subject was to build on foundational concepts and keep things as clear as possible. As Einstein once said: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.
Fund grant. The lessons for me here? The importance of seeking expert help where appropriate, and that being resourceful can pay off (literally)! Finally, I valued our strong team culture, without which none of this would have been possible.
blogosphere,
Afsaneh Amirabadi & Team