In this work we explore the use of quantum computers in solving the NP-hard placement problem of the Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) implementation phase and introduce a novel approach suited for current quantum hardware sizes. Adiabatic quantum computing (AQC), with its capability to traverse expansive solution spaces, is a good fit for addressing this combinatorial problem with its exponentially large solution space. Instead of solving a single the whole problem at once, we re-formulate the placement problem as a series of so called quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems which are subsequently solved via AQC. Our novel formulation facilitates a straight-forward integration of design constraints. Moreover, the size of the sub-problems can be conveniently adapted to the available hardware capabilities. Beside the sole proposal of a novel method, we ask whether contemporary quantum hardware is resilient enough to find placements for real-world-sized FPGAs. A numerical evaluation on a D-Wave Advantage 5.4 quantum annealer suggests that the answer is in the affirmative.

Understanding the dynamics of blood flow is crucial in the context of cardiovascular health and disease. The dynamics of the blood flow can be a significant parameter for the development of decision support systems to enable early detection and accurate diagnosis of coronary artery diseases. Uncovering the underlying dynamics from high-dimensional data generated from experiments is a highly complex problem at the intersection of artificial intelligence and applied mathematics. Deep Hidden Physics Models can be used to learn the underlying dynamics without additional physical knowledge.In this work, the potential of Deep Hidden Physics Models to model the clinically relevant dynamics of blood flow is investigated. The experiments consider the use case of stenosis in two-dimensional spatial space. Based on the learned dynamics, the concentration field can be approximated accurately, indicating that the dynamics are learned correctly. Additionally, we examine the capability of the model to extrapolate the learned dynamics for unknown time intervals.

Deep Learning is proving its immense potential in medical image processing. However, noisy label data can weaken the generalization ability of the model and cause significant performance degradation. This issue can be more prevalent in multi-label classification tasks, since their annotation is more challenging. With too many labels, human annotators may have difficulties mentioning all possible classes, which leads to an increased number of false negative labels. Single Positive Multi-Label (SPML) training deals with the most severe version of this problem, in which for each sample only one positive label is available. All other labels are not observed, i.e. not confirmed as positive or negative. While SPML has already achieved good results for the multi-label detection of objects, its impact on the extremely pertinent medical imaging use case has not yet been explored. In this work, we therefore investigate the performance of state-of-the-art SPML loss functions in the analysis of chest X-rays, both on the public CheXpert and on an in-house data set of the University Hospital Bonn. In addition, we propose our new SPML loss functions, the Generalized Assume Negative and Implicit Weighting Assume Negative loss, which increase the mean average precision by up to 4.6% compared to the popular binary cross-entropy loss.

This paper investigates a data-and knowledge-driven approach to automatically analyze lumbar MRI scans.The dataset used is an in-house dataset of 142 sagital lumbar spine images from German radiology practices of the evidia GmbH.We implement state-of-the-art deep learning methods to segment the individual vertebral bodies.Overall, a very accurate segmentation performance of 97% Dice Score was achieved.Based on this segmentation, pathologically relevant distances are calculated using rule-based computer vision methods.We focus on the anterior, posterior and middle height of a vertebra and the anterior and posterior distances between two lumbar vertebrae.We demonstrate the clinical value of this approach through a quantitative and qualitative result analysis.

Password generation techniques have recently been explored by leveraging deep-learning natural language processing (NLP) algorithms. Previous work has raised the state of the art for password guessing algorithms significantly, by approaching the problem using either variational autoencoders with CNN-based encoder and decoder architectures or transformer-based architectures (namely GPT2) for text generation. In this work we aim to combine both paradigms, introducing a novel architecture that leverages the expressive power of transformers with the natural sampling approach to text generation of variational autoencoders. We show how our architecture generates state-of-the-art results in password matching performance across multiple benchmark datasets.

Radiologists commonly conduct chest X-rays for the diagnosis of pathologies or the evaluation of extrathoracic material positions in intensive care unit (ICU) patients.Automated assessments of radiographs have the potential to assist physicians by detecting pathologies that pose an emergency, leading to faster initiation of treatment and optimization of clinical workflows.The amount and quality of training data is a key aspect for developing deep learning models with reliable performance.This work investigates the effects of transfer learning on public data, automatically generated data labels and manual data annotation on the classification of ICU chest X-rays of the University Hospital Bonn.

Many applications in automated auditing and the analysis and consistency check of financial documents can be formulated in part as the subset sum problem: Given a set of numbers and a target sum, find the subset of numbers that sums up to the target. The problem is NP-hard and classical solving algorithms are therefore not practical to use in many real applications.We tackle the problem as a QUBO (quadratic unconstrained binary optimization) problem and show how gradient descent on Hopfield Networks reliably finds solutions for both artificial and real data. We outline how this algorithm can be applied by adiabatic quantum computers (quantum annealers) and specialized hardware (field programmable gate arrays) for digital annealing and run experiments on quantum annealing hardware.

Natural language processing methods have several applications in automated auditing, including document or passage classification, information retrieval, and question answering. However, training such models requires a large amount of annotated data which is scarce in industrial settings. At the same time, techniques like zero-shot and unsupervised learning allow for application of models pre-trained using general domain data to unseen domains.In this work, we study the efficiency of unsupervised text matching using Sentence-Bert, a transformer-based model, by applying it to the semantic similarity of financial passages. Experimental results show that this model is robust to documents from in- and out-of-domain data.

Chest X-Ray imaging is one of the most common radiological tools for detection of various pathologies related to the chest area and lung function. In a clinical setting, automated assessment of chest radiographs has the potential of assisting physicians in their decision making process and optimize clinical workflows, for example by prioritizing emergency patients.Most work analyzing the potential of machine learning models to classify chest X-ray images focuses on vision methods processing and predicting pathologies for one image at a time. However, many patients undergo such a procedure multiple times during course of a treatment or during a single hospital stay. The patient history, that is previous images and especially the corresponding diagnosis contain useful information that can aid a classification system in its prediction.In this study, we analyze how information about diagnosis can improve CNN-based image classification models by constructing a novel dataset from the well studied CheXpert dataset of chest X-rays. We show that a model trained on additional patient history information outperforms a model trained without the information by a significant margin.We provide code to replicate the dataset creation and model training.

Natural Language Inference, and specifically Contradiction Detection, is still an unexplored topic with respect to German text. In this paper, we apply Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) methods to learn contradiction-specific sentence embeddings. Our data set for evaluation is a machine-translated version of the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) corpus. The results are compared to a baseline using unsupervised vectorization techniques, namely tf-idf and Flair, as well as state-of-the art transformer-based (MBERT) methods. We find that the end-to-end models outperform the models trained on unsupervised embeddings, which makes them the better choice in an empirical use case. The RNN methods also perform superior to MBERT on the translated data set.

We present the Automated List Inspection (ALI) tool that utilizes methods from machine learning, natural language processing, combined with domain expert knowledge to automate financial statement auditing. ALI is a content based context-aware recommender system, that matches relevant text passages from the notes to the financial statement to specific law regulations. In this paper, we present the architecture of the recommender tool which includes text mining, language modeling, unsupervised and supervised methods that range from binary classification models to deep recurrent neural networks. Next to our main findings, we present quantitative and qualitative comparisons of the algorithms as well as concepts for how to further extend the functionality of the tool.