Data-level Linkage of Multiple Surveys for Improved Understanding of Global Health Challenges.

Data-driven approaches can provide more enhanced insights for domain experts in addressing critical global health challenges, such as newborn and child health, using surveys (e.g., Demographic Health Survey). Though there are multiple surveys on the topic, data-driven insight extraction and analysis are often applied on these surveys separately, with limited efforts to exploit them jointly, and hence results in poor prediction performance of critical events, such as neonatal death. Existing machine learning approaches to utilise multiple data sources are not directly applicable to surveys that are disjoint on collection time and locations. In this paper, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first detailed work that automatically links multiple surveys for the improved predictive performance of newborn and child mortality and achieves cross-study impact analysis of covariates.

DeepMI: Deep multi-lead ECG fusion for identifying myocardial infarction and its occurrence-time.

Myocardial Infarction (MI) has the highest mortality of all cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Detection of MI and information regarding its occurrence-time in particular, would enable timely interventions that may improve patient outcomes, thereby reducing the global rise in CVD deaths. Electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings are currently used to screen MI patients. However, manual inspection of ECGs is time-consuming and prone to subjective bias. Machine learning methods have been adopted for automated ECG diagnosis, but most approaches require extraction of ECG beats or consider leads independently of one another. We propose an end-to-end deep learning approach, DeepMI, to classify MI from Normal cases as well as identifying the time-occurrence of MI (defined as Acute, Recent and Old), using a collection of fusion strategies on 12 ECG leads at data-, feature-, and decision-level. In order to minimise computational overhead, we employ transfer learning using existing computer vision networks. Moreover, we use recurrent neural networks to encode the longitudinal information inherent in ECGs. We validated DeepMI on a dataset collected from 17,381 patients, in which over 323,000 samples were extracted per ECG lead. We were able to classify Normal cases as well as Acute, Recent and Old onset cases of MI, with AUROCs of 96.7%, 82.9%, 68.6% and 73.8%, respectively. We have demonstrated a multi-lead fusion approach to detect the presence and occurrence-time of MI. Our end-to-end framework provides flexibility for different levels of multi-lead ECG fusion and performs feature extraction via transfer learning.

Data-Driven Sequential Uptake Pattern Discovery for Family Planning Studies.

Family planning is a crucial component of sustainable global development and is essential for achieving universal health coverage. Specifically, contraceptive use improves the health of women and children in several ways, including reducing maternal mortality risks, increasing child survival rates through birth spacing, and improving the nutritional status of both mother and children. This paper presents a data-driven approach to study the dynamics of contraceptive use and discontinuation in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. We aim to provide policymakers with discriminating contraceptive use patterns under different discontinuation reasons, contraceptive uptake distributions, and transition information across contraceptive types. We used Demographic Health Survey (DHS) Calendar data from five SSA countries. One recurrent pattern found was that continuous usage of injectables resulted in discontinuation due to health concerns in four out of five countries studied. This type of temporal analysis can aid intervention development to support sustainable development goals in Family Planning.

A Spectral-longitudinal Model for Detection of Heart Attack from 12-lead Electrocardiogram Waveforms.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) remain responsible for millions of deaths annually. Myocardial infarction (MI) is the most prevalent condition among CVDs. Although datadriven approaches have been applied to predict CVDs from ECG signals, comparatively little work has been done on the use of multiple-lead ECG traces and their efficient integration to diagnose CVDs. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end trainable and joint spectral-longitudinal model to predict heart attack using data-level fusion of multiple ECG leads. The spectral stage transforms the time-series waveforms to stacked spectrograms and encodes the frequency-time characteristics, whilst the longitudinal model helps to utilise the temporal dependency that exists in these waveforms using recurrent networks. We validate the proposed approach using a public MI dataset. Our results show that the proposed spectrallongitudinal model achieves the highest performance compared to the baseline methods.

Identifying Factors Associated with Neonatal Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa using Machine Learning.

This study aimed at identifying the factors associated with neonatal mortality. We analyzed the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) datasets from 10 Sub-Saharan countries. For each survey, we trained machine learning models to identify women who had experienced a neonatal death within the 5 years prior to the survey being administered. We then inspected the models by visualizing the features that were important for each model, and how, on average, changing the values of the features affected the risk of neonatal mortality. We confirmed the known positive correlation between birth frequency and neonatal mortality and identified an unexpected negative correlation between household size and neonatal mortality. We further established that mothers living in smaller households have a higher risk of neonatal mortality compared to mothers living in larger households; and that factors such as the age and gender of the head of the household may influence the association between household size and neonatal mortality.