Abstract: Background Reliable predictive imaging markers of response to immune checkpoint inhibitors are needed. Purpose To develop and validate a pretreatment CT-based radiomics signature to predict response to immune checkpoint inhibitors in advanced solid tumors. Materials and Methods In this retrospective study, a radiomics signature was developed in patients with advanced solid tumors (including breast, cervix, gastrointestinal) treated with anti-programmed cell death-1 or programmed cell death ligand-1 monotherapy from August 2012 to May 2018 (cohort 1). This was tested in patients with bladder and lung cancer (cohorts 2 and 3). Radiomics variables were extracted from all metastases delineated at pretreatment CT and selected by using an elastic-net model. A regression model combined radiomics and clinical variables with response as the end point. Biologic validation of the radiomics score with RNA profiling of cytotoxic cells (cohort 4) was assessed with Mann-Whitney analysis. Results The radiomics signature was developed in 85 patients (cohort 1: mean age, 58 years ± 13 [standard deviation]; 43 men) and tested on 46 patients (cohort 2: mean age, 70 years ± 12; 37 men) and 47 patients (cohort 3: mean age, 64 years ± 11; 40 men). Biologic validation was performed in a further cohort of 20 patients (cohort 4: mean age, 60 years ± 13; 14 men). The radiomics signature was associated with clinical response to immune checkpoint inhibitors (area under the curve [AUC], 0.70; 95% CI: 0.64, 0.77; P < .001). In cohorts 2 and 3, the AUC was 0.67 (95% CI: 0.58, 0.76) and 0.67 (95% CI: 0.56, 0.77; P < .001), respectively. A radiomics-clinical signature (including baseline albumin level and lymphocyte count) improved on radiomics-only performance (AUC, 0.74 [95% CI: 0.63, 0.84; P < .001]; Akaike information criterion, 107.00 and 109.90, respectively). Conclusion A pretreatment CT-based radiomics signature is associated with response to immune checkpoint inhibitors, likely reflecting the tumor immunophenotype. © RSNA, 2021 Online supplemental material is available for this article. See also the editorial by Summers in this issue.

Abstract: The efficiency of lung cancer screening for reducing mortality is hindered by the high rate of false positives. Artificial intelligence applied to radiomics could help to early discard benign cases from the analysis of CT scans. The available amount of data and the fact that benign cases are a minority, constitutes a main challenge for the successful use of state of the art methods (like deep learning), which can be biased, over-fitted and lack of clinical reproducibility. We present an hybrid approach combining the potential of radiomic features to characterize nodules in CT scans and the generalization of the feed forward networks. In order to obtain maximal reproducibility with minimal training data, we propose an embedding of nodules based on the statistical significance of radiomic features for malignancy detection. This representation space of lesions is the input to a feed
forward network, which architecture and hyperparameters are optimized using own-defined metrics of the diagnostic power of the whole system. Results of the best model on an independent set of patients achieve 100% of sensitivity and 83% of specificity (AUC = 0.94) for malignancy detection.

Abstract: In most eukaryotes, pairing of homologous chromosomes is an essential feature of meiosis that ensures homologous recombination and segregation. However, when the pairing process begins, it is still under investigation. Contrasting data exists in Mus musculus, since both leptotene DSB-dependent and preleptotene DSB-independent mechanisms have been described. To unravel this contention, we examined homologous pairing in pre-meiotic and meiotic Mus musculus cells using a threedimensional fuorescence in situ hybridization-based protocol, which enables the analysis of the entire karyotype using DNA painting probes. Our data establishes in an unambiguously manner that 73.83% of homologous chromosomes are already paired at premeiotic stages (spermatogonia-early preleptotene spermatocytes). The percentage of paired homologous chromosomes increases to 84.60% at mid-preleptotene-zygotene stage, reaching 100% at pachytene stage. Importantly, our results demonstrate a high percentage of homologous pairing observed before the onset of meiosis; this pairing does not occur randomly, as the percentage was higher than that observed in somatic cells (19.47%) and between nonhomologous chromosomes (41.1%). Finally, we have also observed that premeiotic homologous pairing is asynchronous and independent of the chromosome size, GC content, or presence of NOR regions.

Abstract: More than half of all commercial aircraft operation accidents could have been prevented by executing a go-around. Making timely decision to execute a go-around manoeuvre can potentially reduce overall aviation industry accident rate. In this paper, we describe a cockpit-deployable machine learning system to support flight crew go-around decision-making based on the prediction of a hard landing event.
This work presents a hybrid approach for hard landing prediction that uses features modelling temporal dependencies of aircraft variables as inputs to a neural network. Based on a large dataset of 58177 commercial flights, the results show that our approach has 85% of average sensitivity with 74% of average specificity at the go-around point. It follows that our approach is a cockpit-deployable recommendation system that outperforms existing approaches.

Abstract: The study of mental workload becomes essential for human work efficiency, health conditions and to avoid accidents, since workload compromises both performance and awareness. Although workload has been widely studied using several physiological measures, minimising the sensor network as much as possible remains both a challenge and a requirement.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have shown a high correlation to specific cognitive and mental states like workload. However, there is not enough evidence in the literature to validate how well models generalize in case of new subjects performing tasks of a workload similar to the ones included during model’s training.
In this paper we propose a binary neural network to classify EEG features across different mental workloads. Two workloads, low and medium, are induced using two variants of the N-Back Test. The proposed model was validated in a dataset collected from 16 subjects and shown a high level of generalization capability: model reported an average recall of 81.81% in a leave-one-out subject evaluation.