Relevant publications

Non-linear dynamical systems describe numerous real-world phenomena, ranging from the weather, to financial markets and disease progression. Individual systems may share substantial common information, for example patients’ anatomy. Lately, deep-learning has emerged as a leading method for data-driven modeling of non-linear dynamical systems. Yet, despite recent breakthroughs, prior works largely ignored the existence of shared information between different systems. However, such cases are quite common, for example, in medicine: we may wish to have a patient-specific model for some disease, but the data collected from a single patient is usually too small to train a deep-learning model. Hence, we must properly utilize data gathered from other patients. Here, we explicitly consider such cases by jointly modeling multiple systems. We show that the current single-system models consistently fail when trying to learn simultaneously from multiple systems. We suggest a framework for jointly approximating the Koopman operators of multiple systems, while intrinsically exploiting common information. We demonstrate how we can adapt to a new system using order-of-magnitude less new data and show the superiority of our model over competing methods, in terms of both forecasting ability and statistical fidelity, across chaotic, cardiac, and climate systems.

Despite their great promise, artificial intelligence (AI) systems have yet to become ubiquitous in the daily practice of medicine largely due to several crucial unmet needs of healthcare practitioners. These include lack of explanations in clinically meaningful terms, handling the presence of unknown medical conditions, and transparency regarding the system’s limitations, both in terms of statistical performance as well as recognizing situations for which the system’s predictions are irrelevant. We articulate these unmet clinical needs as machine-learning (ML) problems and systematically address them with cutting-edge ML techniques. We focus on electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis as an example domain in which AI has great potential and tackle two challenging tasks: the detection of a heterogeneous mix of known and unknown arrhythmias from ECG and the identification of underlying cardio-pathology from segments annotated as normal sinus rhythm recorded in patients with an intermittent arrhythmia. We validate our methods by simulating a screening for arrhythmias in a large-scale population while adhering to statistical significance requirements. Specifically, our system 1) visualizes the relative importance of each part of an ECG segment for the final model decision; 2) upholds specified statistical constraints on its out-of-sample performance and provides uncertainty estimation for its predictions; 3) handles inputs containing unknown rhythm types; and 4) handles data from unseen patients while also flagging cases in which the model’s outputs are not usable for a specific patient. This work represents a significant step toward overcoming the limitations currently impeding the integration of AI into clinical practice in cardiology and medicine in general.