arXiv AI

Spending Scarce Confirmatory PET Measurements: Target-Aligned Validation in A4/LEARN

The paper investigates how to allocate limited amyloid PET scans in Alzheimer’s research by comparing simple target‑aligned validation strategies to more complex uncertainty‑based sampling. Using the A4/LEARN PET archive, it shows that for the APOE4 carrier versus non‑carrier contrast, balancing scans by APOE4 status nearly matches the performance of a target‑specific scoring approach, while generic uncertainty sampling performs worse. For other analyses, such as age‑slope or cutoff‑indexed PET positivity, target‑specific scoring yields greater gains, underscoring that measurement allocation should align with the specific claim being validated.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Modality Contribution Score - A Per-Patient Framework for Quantifying the Relative Diagnostic Contribution of Structural MRI and Amyloid PET in Alzheimer's Disease

The paper introduces MCNet, a neural network that assigns a Modality Contribution Score (MCS) to each patient, indicating how much structural MRI versus amyloid PET drives the diagnostic decision for Alzheimer’s disease. Across 327 ADNI-3 participants, MCNet achieved strong three‑class staging (AUC = 0.881) and the MCS showed a clear, statistically significant increase in PET dominance from cognitively normal to AD. The method was validated on an independent OASIS‑3 cohort and compared favorably to SHAP, suggesting it can guide personalized imaging and clinical trial decisions.

By Dawa Chyophel Lepcha, Aaliya Ali, Sophie A. Martin, Deepika Koundal, Pierrick Coupe, Shabbir Syed-Abdul
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Held-out evidence resolves follow-up measurement decisions in biological screens

The paper introduces OPAL, a held‑out decision test that evaluates follow‑up measurement rules in biological screens by freezing a rule and assessing unnecessary measurement, coverage, and value after cost against pre‑defined archive‑specific criteria. Using a six‑rule Cell Painting battery, the authors show that a high‑value rule would re‑image 96.01% of the library with a 97.14% false‑activation upper bound, illustrating that predicted value alone cannot justify replacing a fixed plan. In development, a sparse Cell Painting rule reduced added‑well burden 18.2‑fold but had a false‑discovery bound above 35%, leading the fixed plan to remain; similar analyses for LINCS–LJP and CTRP highlighted the need for fallback strategies and the importance of separating optimization from evidence. "whyItMatters":"OPAL provides a systematic way to determine whether a new measurement strategy truly improves experimental efficiency without compromising data quality, as demonstrated across multiple biological screening datasets."

By Jia Bi, Samuel Pinilla, Chenyang Zhu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Observation-Anchored Selective Assimilation for Longitudinal Tumor-State Proxy Forecasting in Post-Treatment Glioma

The paper introduces Observation‑Anchored Selective Assimilation (OASA) for forecasting tumor‑state proxies in post‑treatment glioma patients using serial MRI observations. OASA anchors the patient‑specific state with an intermediate observation and selectively updates it via a tiered rule and voxel‑wise soft gate, outperforming baseline methods in Dice score at certain thresholds. The approach is validated on 120 patient triplets and the code is publicly released.

By Yeonjae Jung, Minwoo Shin
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Conditional Validity for Adaptive Modality Acquisition: When the Policy Chooses Its Own Calibration Group

The paper introduces RouteCert, a method for ensuring risk control in multimodal systems that acquire inputs adaptively. It shows that conditional calibration can remain valid even when the acquisition policy determines the calibration group, and provides two finite‑sample constructions: threshold‑free routing with terminal‑pattern calibration and simultaneous validation of policy‑pattern pairs. Experiments on a clinical ECG task and masked multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that RouteCert achieves low disagreement rates and competitive answered fractions while validating each acquisition stage separately.

By Melika Baghi
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

NeuronSifter: Intervention Planning in CNS Microenvironments

NeuronSifter is a framework for planning interventions in central nervous system microenvironments by converting treatment regimens into state‑conditional target‑occupancy fields and propagating them through microenvironment dynamics. It selects measurements based on their expected reduction in intervention loss, integrating typed outcomes into a unified posterior. In synthetic Alzheimer’s disease scenarios, occupancy conditioning improves trajectory probability scores and intervention ordering accuracy, and decision‑directed acquisition reduces terminal risk compared to a Bayesian experimental design planner.

By Haowei Xu, Wanyi Fu, Hongbin Han, Zhaoheng Xie
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Interpretable-by-Design Descriptor Portfolios Match a 2048-Dimensional Foundation Embedding on Low-Data Molecular Assays

The study evaluates whether a portfolio of compact, semantically named descriptor blocks can match the performance of a 2048‑dimensional CheMeleon embedding in low‑data molecular assays. Using a fixed 11‑dimensional physicochemical base and greedily adding provenance‑screened blocks, the portfolio achieves a mean test AUC of 0.762 across nine ADME/Tox assays, comparable to CheMeleon’s 0.764 and better than Mordred’s 0.756. The results meet a predeclared pooled parity threshold but not all per‑assay thresholds, and further analysis confirms the competitiveness of the auditable representation while highlighting unresolved assay‑level differences.

By Yiqi Yao, Miquel Duran-Frigola