Background: The increasing development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in medicine driven by researchers and entrepreneurs goes along with enormous expectations for medical care advancement. AI might change the clinical practice of physicians from almost all medical disciplines and in most areas of health care. While expectations for AI in medicine are high, practical implementations of AI for clinical practice are still scarce in Germany. Moreover, physicians’ requirements and expectations of AI in medicine and their opinion on the usage of anonymized patient data for clinical and biomedical research have not been investigated widely in German university hospitals. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate physicians’ requirements and expectations of AI in medicine and their opinion on the secondary usage of patient data for (bio)medical research (eg, for the development of machine learning algorithms) in university hospitals in Germany. Methods: A web-based survey was conducted addressing physicians of all medical disciplines in 8 German university hospitals. Answers were given using Likert scales and general demographic responses. Physicians were asked to participate locally via email in the respective hospitals. Results: The online survey was completed by 303 physicians (female: 121/303, 39.9%; male: 173/303, 57.1%; no response: 9/303, 3.0%) from a wide range of medical disciplines and work experience levels. Most respondents either had a positive (130/303, 42.9%) or a very positive attitude (82/303, 27.1%) towards AI in medicine. There was a significant association between the personal rating of AI in medicine and the self-reported technical affinity level (H4=48.3, P<.001). A vast majority of physicians expected the future of medicine to be a mix of human and artificial intelligence (273/303, 90.1%) but also requested a scientific evaluation before the routine implementation of AI-based systems (276/303, 91.1%). Physicians were most optimistic that AI applications would identify drug interactions (280/303, 92.4%) to improve patient care substantially but were quite reserved regarding AI-supported diagnosis of psychiatric diseases (62/303, 20.5%). Of the respondents, 82.5% (250/303) agreed that there should be open access to anonymized patient databases for medical and biomedical research. Conclusions: Physicians in stationary patient care in German university hospitals show a generally positive attitude towards using most AI applications in medicine. Along with this optimism comes several expectations and hopes that AI will assist physicians in clinical decision making. Especially in fields of medicine where huge amounts of data are processed (eg, imaging procedures in radiology and pathology) or data are collected continuously (eg, cardiology and intensive care medicine), physicians’ expectations of AI to substantially improve future patient care are high. In the study, the greatest potential was seen in the application of AI for the identification of drug interactions, assumedly due to the rising complexity of drug administration to polymorbid, polypharmacy patients. However, for the practical usage of AI in health care, regulatory and organizational challenges still have to be mastered.

Owing to the recent development of sensor resolutions onboard different Earth observation platforms, remote sensing is an important source of information for mapping and monitoring natural and man-made land covers. Of particular importance is the increasing amounts of available hyperspectral data originating from airborne and satellite sensors such as AVIRIS, HyMap, and Hyperion with very high spectral resolution (i.e., high number of spectral channels) containing rich information for a wide range of applications. A relevant example is the separation of different types of land-cover classes using the data in order to understand, e.g., impacts of natural disasters or changing of city buildings over time. More recently, such increases in the data volume, velocity, and variety of data contributed to the term big data that stand for challenges shared with many other scientific disciplines. On one hand, the amount of available data is increasing in a way that raises the demand for automatic data analysis elements since many of the available data collections are massively underutilized lacking experts for manual investigation. On the other hand, proven statistical methods (e.g., dimensionality reduction) driven by manual approaches have a significant impact in reducing the amount of big data toward smaller smart data contributing to the more recently used terms data value and veracity (i.e., less noise, lower dimensions that capture the most important information). This paper aims to take stock of which proven statistical data mining methods in remote sensing are used to contribute to smart data analysis processes in the light of possible automation as well as scalable and parallel processing techniques. We focus on parallel support vector machines (SVMs) as one of the best out-of-the-box classification methods.

In recent years, the development of quantum annealers has enabled experimental demonstrations and has increased research interest in applications of quantum annealing, such as in quantum machine learning and in particular for the popular quantum support vector machine (SVM). Several versions of the quantum SVM have been proposed, and quantum annealing has been shown to be effective in them. Extensions to multiclass problems have also been made, which consist of an ensemble of multiple binary classifiers. This article proposes a novel quantum SVM formulation for direct multiclass classification based on quantum annealing, called quantum multiclass SVM (QMSVM). The multiclass classification problem is formulated as a single quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem solved with quantum annealing. The main objective of this article is to evaluate the feasibility, accuracy, and time performance of this approach. Experiments have been performed on the D-Wave Advantage quantum annealer for a classification problem on remote sensing data. Results indicate that, despite the memory demands of the quantum annealer, QMSVM can achieve an accuracy that is comparable to standard SVM methods, such as the one-versus-one (OVO), depending on the dataset (compared to OVO: 0.8663 versus 0.8598 on Toulouse, 0.8123 versus 0.8521 on Potsdam). More importantly, it scales much more efficiently with the number of training examples, resulting in nearly constant time (compared to OVO: 85.72 versus 248.02 s on Toulouse, 58.89 versus 580.17 s on Potsdam). This article shows an approach for bringing together classical and quantum computation, solving practical problems in remote sensing with current hardware.

Clustering algorithms in the field of data-mining are used to aggregate similar objects into common groups. One of the best-known of these algorithms is called DBSCAN. Its distinct design enables the search for an apriori unknown number of arbitrarily shaped clusters, and at the same time allows to filter out noise. Due to its sequential formulation, the parallelization of DBSCAN renders a challenge. In this paper we present a new parallel approach which we call HPDBSCAN. It employs three major techniques in order to break the sequentiality, empower workload-balancing as well as speed up neighborhood searches in distributed parallel processing environments i) a computation split heuristic for domain decomposition, ii) a data index preprocessing step and iii) a rule-based cluster merging scheme.As a proof-of-concept we implemented HPDBSCAN as an OpenMP/MPI hybrid application. Using real-world data sets, such as a point cloud from the old town of Bremen, Germany, we demonstrate that our implementation is able to achieve a significant speed-up and scale-up in common HPC setups. Moreover, we compare our approach with previous attempts to parallelize DBSCAN showing an order of magnitude improvement in terms of computation time and memory consumption

High-Performance Computing (HPC) has recently been attracting more attention in remote sensing applications due to the challenges posed by the increased amount of open data that are produced daily by Earth Observation (EO) programs. The unique parallel computing environments and programming techniques that are integrated in HPC systems are able to solve large-scale problems such as the training of classification algorithms with large amounts of Remote Sensing (RS) data. This paper shows that the training of state-of-the-art deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be efficiently performed in distributed fashion using parallel implementation techniques on HPC machines containing a large number of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The experimental results confirm that distributed training can drastically reduce the amount of time needed to perform full training, resulting in near linear scaling without loss of test accuracy.