In RadarCat we present a small, versatile radar-based system for material and object classification which enables new forms of everyday proximate interaction with digital devices. We demonstrate that we can train and classify different types of materials and objects which we can then recognize in real time. Based on established research designs, we report on the results of three studies, first with 26 materials (including complex composite objects), next with 16 transparent materials (with different thickness and varying dyes) and finally 10 body parts from 6 participants. Both leave one-out and 10-fold cross-validation demonstrate that our approach of classification of radar signals using random forest classifier is robust and accurate. We further demonstrate four working examples including a physical object dictionary, painting and photo editing application, body shortcuts and automatic refill based on RadarCat. We conclude with a discussion of our results, limitations and outline future directions.

Training medical image analysis models traditionally requires large amounts of expertly annotated imaging data which is time-consuming and expensive to obtain. One solution is to automatically extract scan-level labels from radiology reports. Previously, we showed that, by extending BERT with a per-label attention mechanism, we can train a single model to perform automatic extraction of many labels in parallel. However, if we rely on pure data-driven learning, the model sometimes fails to learn critical features or learns the correct answer via simplistic heuristics (e.g., that “likely” indicates positivity), and thus fails to generalise to rarer cases which have not been learned or where the heuristics break down (e.g., “likely represents prominent VR space or lacunar infarct” which indicates uncertainty over two differential diagnoses). In this work, we propose template creation for data synthesis, which enables us to inject expert knowledge about unseen entities from medical ontologies, and to teach the model rules on how to label difficult cases, by producing relevant training examples. Using this technique alongside domain-specific pre-training for our underlying BERT architecture i.e., PubMedBERT, we improve F1 micro from 0.903 to 0.939 and F1 macro from 0.512 to 0.737 on an independent test set for 33 labels in head CT reports for stroke patients. Our methodology offers a practical way to combine domain knowledge with machine learning for text classification tasks.

Training medical image analysis models requires large amounts of expertly annotated data which is time-consuming and expensive to obtain. Images are often accompanied by free-text radiology reports which are a rich source of information. In this paper, we tackle the automated extraction of structured labels from head CT reports for imaging of suspected stroke patients, using deep learning. Firstly, we propose a set of 31 labels which correspond to radiographic findings (e.g. hyperdensity) and clinical impressions (e.g. haemorrhage) related to neurological abnormalities. Secondly, inspired by previous work, we extend existing state-of-the-art neural network models with a label-dependent attention mechanism. Using this mechanism and simple synthetic data augmentation, we are able to robustly extract many labels with a single model, classified according to the radiologist's reporting (positive, uncertain, negative). This approach can be used in further research to effectively extract many labels from medical text.