The consideration of diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI) is an important part of promoting a robust and respectful workforce, and is critical to the continued success of organisations, including healthcare providers, academic institutions and professional societies. Many professional bodies representing medical physicists have made commitments to DEI principles in the form of mission statements, policies, steering groups, frameworks and workforce surveys. In the Australian and New Zealand medical physics community, DEI work has included reflecting on the impact of stereotypes, surveys on workforce experiences, and capturing workforce diversity metrics (including gender, nationality, age and professional background). These projects have been conducted with the support of the Australasian College of Physical Sciences and Engineering in Medicine (ACPSEM) and have contributed to the enhancement of DEI in the ACPSEM workforce. Most of this work has been focused on gender diversity, reflecting increasing involvement in the Australian and New Zealand workforce: women accounted for 41\% of medical physics trainees and 32\% of registered medical physicists in a 2020 survey. In 2021, the
Access to diverse, well-annotated medical images with interactive learning tools is fundamental for training practitioners in medicine and related fields to improve their diagnostic skills and understanding of anatomical structures. While medical atlases are valuable, they are often impractical due to their size and lack of interactivity, whereas online image search may provide mislabeled or incomplete material. To address this, we propose MIRAGE, a multimodal medical text and image retrieval and generation system that allows users to find and generate clinically relevant images from trustworthy sources by mapping both text and images to a shared latent space, enabling semantically meaningful queries. The system is based on a fine-tuned medical version of CLIP (MedICaT-ROCO), trained with the ROCO dataset, obtained from PubMed Central. MIRAGE allows users to give prompts to retrieve images, generate synthetic ones through a medical diffusion model (Prompt2MedImage) and receive enriched descriptions from a large language model (Dolly-v2-3b). It also supports a dual search option, enabling the visual comparison of different medical conditions. A key advantage of the system is that it
One of the most noticeable trends in healthcare over the last years is the continuous growth of data volume produced and its heterogeneity. In the medical imaging field, the evolution of digital systems is supported by the PACS concept and the DICOM standard. These technologies are deeply grounded in medical laboratories, supporting the production and providing healthcare practitioners with the ability to set up collaborative work environments with researchers and academia to study and improve healthcare practice. However, the complexity of those systems and protocols makes difficult and time-consuming to prototype new ideas or develop applied research, even for skilled users with training in those environments. Dicoogle emerges as a reference tool to achieve those objectives through a set of resources aggregated in the form of a learning pack. It is an open-source PACS archive that, on the one hand, provides a comprehensive view of the PACS and DICOM technologies and, on the other hand, provides the user with tools to easily expand its core functionalities. This paper describes the Dicoogle framework, with particular emphasis in its Learning Pack package, the resources available a
The proliferation of public networks has enabled instantaneous and interactive communication that transcends temporal and spatial constraints. The vast amount of textual data on the Web has facilitated the study of quantitative analysis of public opinion, which could not be visualized before. In this paper, we propose a new theory of opinion dynamics. This theory is designed to explain consensus building and opinion splitting in opinion exchanges on social media such as Twitter. With the spread of public networks, immediate and interactive communication that transcends temporal and spatial constraints has become possible, and research is underway to quantitatively analyze the distribution of public opinion, which has not been visualized until now, using vast amounts of text data. In this paper, we propose a model based on the Like Bounded Confidence Model, which represents opinions as continuous quantities. However, the Bounded Confidence mModel assumes that people with different opinions move without regard to their opinions, rather than ignoring them. Furthermore, our theory modeled the phenomenon in such a way that it can incorporate and represent the effects of external externa
Recent research has developed the Ising model from physics, especially statistical mechanics, and it plays an important role in quantum computing, especially quantum annealing and quantum Monte Carlo methods. The model has also been used in opinion dynamics as a powerful tool for simulating social interactions and opinion formation processes. Individual opinions and preferences correspond to spin states, and social pressure and communication dynamics are modeled through interactions between spins. Quantum computing makes it possible to efficiently simulate these interactions and analyze more complex social networks.Recent research has incorporated concepts from quantum information theory such as Graph State, Stabilizer State, and Surface Code (or Toric Code) into models of opinion dynamics. The incorporation of these concepts allows for a more detailed analysis of the process of opinion formation and the dynamics of social networks. The concepts lie at the intersection of graph theory and quantum theory, and the use of Graph State in opinion dynamics can represent the interdependence of opinions and networks of influence among individuals. It helps to represent the local stability
Deterministic dynamics is a mathematical model used to describe the temporal evolution of a system, generally expressed as dx/dt = F(x), where x represents the system's state, and F(x) determines its dynamics. It is employed to understand long-term system behavior, including opinion formation and polarization in online communities. Opinion dynamics models, like the Katz model and the logistic map, help analyze how individual opinions are influenced within social networks and exhibit chaotic behavior. These models are crucial for studying opinion formation and collective behavior on social media, especially in conjunction with branching theory. For instance, Galam's Ising model applies principles from physics to social sciences, representing individual opinions as "spins" and illustrating how local interactions influence consensus formation. The Bounding Confidence model considers opinions within a confidence interval, showing how opinions converge or polarize. These models effectively analyze opinion dynamics in online communities, aiding in understanding trends and viral phenomena on social media. This research aims to analyze discourse flow and opinion evolution, predicting futur
Opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key influencers of our behaviors. In current times due to growth of social networking website and increase in number of e-commerce site huge amount of opinions are now available on web. Given a set of evaluative statements that contain opinions (or sentiments) about an Entity, opinion mining aims to extract attributes and components of the object that have been commented on in each statement and to determine whether the comments are positive, negative or neutral. While lot of research recently has been done in field of opinion mining and some of it dealing with ranking of entities based on review or opinion set, classifying opinions into finer granularity level and then ranking entities has never been done before. In this paper method for opinion mining from statements at a deeper level of granularity is proposed. This is done by using fuzzy logic reasoning, after which entities are ranked as per this information.
The study of Opinion Dynamics, which explores how individual opinions and beliefs evolve and how societal consensus is formed, has been examined across social science, physics, and mathematics. Historically based on statistical physics models like the Ising model, recent research integrates quantum information theory concepts, such as Graph States, Stabilizer States, and Toric Codes. These quantum approaches offer fresh perspectives for analyzing complex relationships and interactions in opinion formation, such as modeling local interactions, using topological features for error resistance, and applying quantum mechanics for deeper insights into opinion polarization and entanglement. However, these applications face challenges in complexity, interpretation, and empirical validation. Quantum concepts are abstract and not easily translated into social science contexts, and direct observation of social opinion processes differs significantly from quantum experiments, leading to a gap between theoretical models and real-world applicability. Despite its potential, the practical use of the Toric Code Hamiltonian in Opinion Dynamics requires further exploration and research.
The field of opinion dynamics has its roots in early research that applied methods from magnetic physics to gain insights into the formation of social opinions. A central challenge in this field lies in modeling how diverse opinions coexist and exert influence on each other. In the realm of social issues, it's In this study, we leverage the dimer construct and the dimer model to establish a theoretical framework. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate how this proposed model can be applied to real-world scenarios of social opinion formation. The model involves the computation of the Castellain matrix (K), the distribution function (Z), and the probability of dimer configuration (P(D)) for convex regions with varying positions and distances. It explores how alterations in convex regions impact the probability of dimer configuration. Furthermore, our model takes into account two critical factors: "dependence" and "forgetting" in the process of opinion formation. It also delves into the concepts of "distance" and "location" of opinions. The results of numerical simulations shed light on how our model effectively captures the processes involved in real-world social opinion forma
This study introduces a new numerical model to simulate how information is comprehended and processed on social networks, using continuous "Phase Field Modeling" variables (phiA, phiB, phiC) to represent individual users' opinions. It captures the immediate and two-way nature of social media interactions, reproducing the spread and feedback of information. The model incorporates psychological and social factors like confirmation bias and opinion rigidity to analyze information processing and opinion development among users. It also explores the dynamics of opinion segregation and interaction in and out of filter bubbles, offering a quantitative view of opinion dynamics on platforms like social networking services (SNS). This approach combines theoretical models with real-world social network data to study the effects of information concentration on opinion formation and the phenome Phase Field Modeling of opinion polarization and echo chamber effects on SNS. This paper is partially an attempt to utilize "Generative AI" and was written with educational intent. There are currently no plans for it to become a peer-reviewed paper.
The diagnosis and treatment of various diseases had been expedited with the help of medical imaging. Different medical imaging modalities, including X-ray, Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Nuclear Imaging, Ultrasound, Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), and Emerging Technologies for in vivo imaging modalities is presented in this chapter, in addition to these modalities, some advanced techniques such as contrast-enhanced MRI, MR approaches for osteoarthritis, Cardiovascular Imaging, and Medical Imaging data mining and search. Despite its important role and potential effectiveness as a diagnostic tool, reading and interpreting medical images by radiologists is often tedious and difficult due to the large heterogeneity of diseases and the limitation of image quality or resolution. Besides the introduction and discussion of the basic principles, typical clinical applications, advantages, and limitations of each modality used in current clinical practice, this chapter also highlights the importance of emerging technologies in medical imaging and the role of data mining and search aiming to support translational clinical research, improve patient care, and
The field of opinion dynamics has evolved steadily since the earliest studies applying magnetic physics methods to better understand social opinion formation. However, in the real world, complete agreement of opinions is rare, and biaxial consensus, especially on social issues, is rare. To address this challenge, Ishii and Kawabata (2018) proposed an extended version of the Bounded Confidence Model that introduces new parameters indicating dissent and distrust, as well as the influence of mass media. Their model aimed to capture more realistic social opinion dynamics by introducing coefficients representing the degree of trust and distrust, rather than assuming convergence of opinions. In this paper, we propose a new approach to opinion dynamics based on this Trust-Distrust Model (TDM), applying the dimer allocation and Ising model. Our goal is to explore how the interaction between trust and distrust affects social opinion formation. In particular, we analyze through mathematical models how various external stimuli, such as mass media, third-party opinions, and economic and political factors, affect people's opinions. Our approach is to mathematically represent the dynamics of tru
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated outstanding performance in global image understanding and zero-shot transfer through large-scale text-image alignment. However, the core of medical image analysis often lies in the fine-grained understanding of specific anatomical structures or lesion regions. Therefore, precisely comprehending region-of-interest (RoI) information provided by medical professionals or perception models becomes crucial. To address this need, we propose MedP-CLIP, a region-aware medical vision-language model (VLM). MedP-CLIP innovatively integrates medical prior knowledge and designs a feature-level region prompt integration mechanism, enabling it to flexibly respond to various prompt forms (e.g., points, bounding boxes, masks) while maintaining global contextual awareness when focusing on local regions. We pre-train the model on a meticulously constructed large-scale dataset (containing over 6.4 million medical images and 97.3 million region-level annotations), equipping it with cross-disease and cross-modality fine-grained spatial semantic understanding capabilities. Experiments demonstrate that MedP-CLIP significantly outperforms basel
Medical image segmentation plays an important role in computer-aided diagnosis. Attention mechanisms that distinguish important parts from irrelevant parts have been widely used in medical image segmentation tasks. This paper systematically reviews the basic principles of attention mechanisms and their applications in medical image segmentation. First, we review the basic concepts of attention mechanism and formulation. Second, we surveyed over 300 articles related to medical image segmentation, and divided them into two groups based on their attention mechanisms, non-Transformer attention and Transformer attention. In each group, we deeply analyze the attention mechanisms from three aspects based on the current literature work, i.e., the principle of the mechanism (what to use), implementation methods (how to use), and application tasks (where to use). We also thoroughly analyzed the advantages and limitations of their applications to different tasks. Finally, we summarize the current state of research and shortcomings in the field, and discuss the potential challenges in the future, including task specificity, robustness, standard evaluation, etc. We hope that this review can sho
Purpose: The Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC) open data commons was launched to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to help address the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study was to quantify longitudinal representativeness of the demographic characteristics of the primary imaging dataset compared to the United States general population (US Census) and COVID-19 positive case counts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Approach: The Jensen Shannon distance (JSD) was used to longitudinally measure the similarity of the distribution of (1) all unique patients in the MIDRC data to the 2020 US Census and (2) all unique COVID-19 positive patients in the MIDRC data to the case counts reported by the CDC. The distributions were evaluated in the demographic categories of age at index, sex, race, ethnicity, and the intersection of race and ethnicity. Results: Representativeness the MIDRC data by ethnicity and the intersection of race and ethnicity was impacted by the percentage of CDC case counts for which data in these categories is not reported. The distributions by sex and race have retained their level of repres
In this study, we propose a fast and accurate method to automatically localize anatomical landmarks in medical images. We employ a global-to-local localization approach using fully convolutional neural networks (FCNNs). First, a global FCNN localizes multiple landmarks through the analysis of image patches, performing regression and classification simultaneously. In regression, displacement vectors pointing from the center of image patches towards landmark locations are determined. In classification, presence of landmarks of interest in the patch is established. Global landmark locations are obtained by averaging the predicted displacement vectors, where the contribution of each displacement vector is weighted by the posterior classification probability of the patch that it is pointing from. Subsequently, for each landmark localized with global localization, local analysis is performed. Specialized FCNNs refine the global landmark locations by analyzing local sub-images in a similar manner, i.e. by performing regression and classification simultaneously and combining the results. Evaluation was performed through localization of 8 anatomical landmarks in CCTA scans, 2 landmarks in o
Opinion formation in the population has attracted extensive research interest. Various models have been introduced and studied, including the ones with individuals' free will allowing them to change their opinions. Such models, however, have not taken into account the fact that individuals with different opinions may have different levels of loyalty, and consequently, different probabilities of changing their opinions. In this work, we study on how the non-uniform distribution of the opinion changing probability may affect the final state of opinion distribution. By simulating a few different cases with different symmetric and asymmetric non-uniform patterns of opinion changing probabilities, we demonstrate the significant effects that the different loyalty levels of different opinions have on the final state of the opinion distribution.
Recently, the state space model Mamba has demonstrated efficient long-sequence modeling capabilities, particularly for addressing long-sequence visual tasks in 3D medical imaging. However, existing generative self-supervised learning methods have not yet fully unleashed Mamba's potential for handling long-range dependencies because they overlook the inherent causal properties of state space sequences in masked modeling. To address this challenge, we propose a general-purpose pre-training framework called MambaMIM, a masked image modeling method based on a novel TOKen-Interpolation strategy (TOKI) for the selective structure state space sequence, which learns causal relationships of state space within the masked sequence. Further, MambaMIM introduces a bottom-up 3D hybrid masking strategy to maintain a masking consistency across different architectures and can be used on any single or hybrid Mamba architecture to enhance its multi-scale and long-range representation capability. We pre-train MambaMIM on a large-scale dataset of 6.8K CT scans and evaluate its performance across eight public medical segmentation benchmarks. Extensive downstream experiments reveal the feasibility and ad
Artificial intelligence (AI) models trained using medical images for clinical tasks often exhibit bias in the form of disparities in performance between subgroups. Since not all sources of biases in real-world medical imaging data are easily identifiable, it is challenging to comprehensively assess how those biases are encoded in models, and how capable bias mitigation methods are at ameliorating performance disparities. In this article, we introduce a novel analysis framework for systematically and objectively investigating the impact of biases in medical images on AI models. We developed and tested this framework for conducting controlled in silico trials to assess bias in medical imaging AI using a tool for generating synthetic magnetic resonance images with known disease effects and sources of bias. The feasibility is showcased by using three counterfactual bias scenarios to measure the impact of simulated bias effects on a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier and the efficacy of three bias mitigation strategies. The analysis revealed that the simulated biases resulted in expected subgroup performance disparities when the CNN was trained on the synthetic datasets. More
News website comment sections are spaces where potentially conflicting opinions and beliefs are voiced. Addressing questions of how to study such cultural and societal conflicts through technological means, the present article critically examines possibilities and limitations of machine-guided exploration and potential facilitation of on-line opinion dynamics. These investigations are guided by a discussion of an experimental observatory for mining and analyzing opinions from climate change-related user comments on news articles from the TheGuardian.com. This observatory combines causal mapping methods with computational text analysis in order to mine beliefs and visualize opinion landscapes based on expressions of causation. By (1) introducing digital methods and open infrastructures for data exploration and analysis and (2) engaging in debates about the implications of such methods and infrastructures, notably in terms of the leap from opinion observation to debate facilitation, the article aims to make a practical and theoretical contribution to the study of opinion dynamics and conflict in new media environments.