Autoencoded deep features for semi-automatic, weakly supervised physiological signal labelling.

Janis M Nolde; Revathy Carnagarin; Leslie Marisol Lugo-Gavidia; Omar Azzam; Márcio Galindo Kiuchi; Sandi Robinson; Ajmal Mian; Markus P Schlaich
Abstract
Machine Learning is transforming data processing in medical research and clinical practice. Missing data labels are a common limitation to training Machine Learning models. To overcome missing labels in a large dataset of microneurography recordings, a novel autoencoder based semi-supervised, iterative group-labelling methodology was developed.Autoencoders were systematically optimised to extract features from a dataset of 478621 signal excerpts from human microneurography recordings. Selected features were clusters with k-means and randomly selected representations of the corresponding original signals labelled as valid or non-valid muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA) bursts in an iterative, purifying procedure by an expert rater. A deep neural network was trained based on the fully labelled dataset.Three autoencoders, two based on fully connected neural networks and one based on convolutional neural network, were chosen for feature learning. Iterative clustering followed by labelling of complete clusters resulted in all 478621 signal peak excerpts being labelled as valid or non-valid within 13 iterations. Neural networks trained with the labelled dataset achieved, in a cross validation step with a testing dataset not included in training, on average 93.13% accuracy and 91% area under the receiver operating curve (AUC ROC).The described labelling procedure enabled efficient labelling of a large dataset of physiological signal based on expert ratings. The procedure based on autoencoders may be broadly applicable to a wide range of datasets without labels that require expert input and may be utilised for Machine Learning applications if weak-labels were available.
Journal COMPUTERS IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
ISSN 1879-0534
Published 17 Feb 2022
Volume 143
Issue
Pages 105294
DOI 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2022.105294
Type Journal Article
Sponsorship