Browsing by Author "Atkinson, E. Neely"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    A statistical model for removing inter-device differences in spectroscopy
    (Optical Society of America, 2014) Wang, Lu; Lee, Jong Soo; Lane, Pierre; Atkinson, E. Neely; Zuluaga, Andres; Follen, Michele; MacAulay, Calum; Cox, Dennis D.
    We are investigating spectroscopic devices designed to make in vivo cervical tissue measurements to detect pre-cancerous and cancerous lesions. All devices have the same design and ideally should record identical measurements. However, we observed consistent differences among them. An experiment was designed to study the sources of variation in the measurements recorded. Here we present a log additive statistical model that incorporates the sources of variability we identified. Based on this model, we estimated correction factors from the experimental data needed to eliminate the inter-device variability and other sources of variation. These correction factors are intended to improve the accuracy and repeatability of such devices when making future measurements on patient tissue.
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    Accuracy of optical spectroscopy for the detection of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia without colposcopic tissue information; a step toward automation for low resource settings
    (Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, 2012-04) Yamal, Jose-Miguel; Zewdie, Getie A.; Cox, Dennis D.; Atkinson, E. Neely; Cantor, Scott B.; MacAulay, Calum; Davies, Kalatu; Adewole, Isaac; Buys, Timon P. H.; Follen, Michele
    Optical spectroscopy has been proposed as an accurate and low-cost alternative for detection of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia. We previously published an algorithm using optical spectroscopy as an adjunct to colposcopy and found good accuracy (sensitivity ¼ 1.00 [95% confidence interval ðCIÞ ¼ 0.92 to 1.00], specificity ¼ 0.71 [95% CI ¼ 0.62 to 0.79]). Those results used measurements taken by expert colposcopists as well as the colposcopy diagnosis. In this study, we trained and tested an algorithm for the detection of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (i.e., identifying those patients who had histology reading CIN 2 or worse) that did not include the colposcopic diagnosis. Furthermore, we explored the interaction between spectroscopy and colposcopy, examining the importance of probe placement expertise. The colposcopic diagnosis-independent spectroscopy algorithm had a sensitivity of 0.98 (95% CI ¼ 0.89 to 1.00) and a specificity of 0.62 (95% CI ¼ 0.52 to 0.71). The difference in the partial area under the ROC curves between spectroscopy with and without the colposcopic diagnosis was statistically significant at the patient level (p ¼ 0.05) but not the site level (p ¼ 0.13). The results suggest that the device has high accuracy over a wide range of provider accuracy and hence could plausibly be implemented by providers with limited training.
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    Prediction using hierarchical data: Applications for automated detection of cervical cancer
    (Wiley, 2015) Yamal, Jose-Miguel; Guillaud, Martial; Atkinson, E. Neely; Follen, Michele; MacAulay, Calum; Cantor, Scott B.; Cox, Dennis D.
    Although the Papanicolaou smear has been successful in decreasing cervical cancer incidence in the developed world, there exist many challenges for implementation in the developing world. Quantitative cytology, a semi-automated method that quantifies cellular image features, is a promising screening test candidate. The nested structure of its data (measurements of multiple cells within a patient) provides challenges to the usual classification problem. Here we perform a comparative study of three main approaches for problems with this general data structure: (i) extract patient-level features from the cell-level data, (ii) use a statistical model that accounts for the hierarchical data structure, and (iii) classify at the cellular level and use an ad hoc approach to classify at the patient level. We apply these methods to a dataset of 1728 patients, with an average of 2600 cells collected per patient and 133 features measured per cell, predicting whether a patient had a positive biopsy result. The best approach we found was to classify at the cellular level and count the number of cells that had a posterior probability greater than a threshold value, with estimated 61% sensitivity and 89% specificity on independent data. Recent statistical learning developments allowed us to achieve high accuracy.
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    SIMEST: An Algorithm for Simulation Based Estimation of Parameters Characterizing a Stochastic Process
    (1986-08) Thompson, James R.; Atkinson, E. Neely; Brown, Barry
    The axioms defining stochastic processes are generally simple. However, estimation of the parameters of a process from data is extremely difficult if customary techniques are used. This is due to the complexities involved in obtaining closed forms of likelihoods and evaluating them. The authors develop an estimation technique which selects those parameters which produce simulations that best mimic the data. SIMEST makes stochastic process modelling in oncology (and other fields) an attractive alternative to such currently popular alternatives as ad hoc regression models.