Assessment of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) after neoadjuvant chemoradiation therapy (nCRT) is essential in rectal cancer staging and treatment planning. However, when predicting the pathologic complete response (pCR) after nCRT for rectal cancer, existing works either rely on simple quantitative evaluation based on radiomics features or partially analyze multi-parametric MRI. We propose an effective pCR prediction method based on novel multi-parametric MRI embedding. We first seek to extract volumetric features of tumors that can be found only by analyzing multiple MRI sequences jointly. Specifically, we encapsulate multiple MRI sequences into multi-sequence fusion images (MSFI) and generate MSFI embedding. We merge radiomics features, which capture important characteristics of tumors, with MSFI embedding to generate multi-parametric MRI embedding and then use it to predict pCR using a random forest classifier. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that using all given MRI sequences is the most effective regardless of the dimension reduction method. The proposed method outperformed any variants with different combinations of feature vectors and dimension reduction methods or different classification models. Comparative experiments demonstrate that it outperformed four competing baselines in terms of the AUC and F1-score. We use MRI sequences from 912 patients with rectal cancer, a much larger sample than in any existing work.

Finding the k-nearest neighbours of every node in a dataset is one of the most important data operations with wide application in various areas such as recommendation and information retrieval. However, a major challenge is that the execution time of existing approaches grows rapidly as the number of nodes or dimensions increases. In this paper, we present greedy filtering, an efficient and scalable algorithm for finding an approximate k-nearest neighbour graph. It selects a fixed number of nodes as candidates for every node by filtering out node pairs that do not have any matching dimensions with large values. Greedy filtering achieves consistent approximation accuracy across nodes in linear execution time. We also present a faster version of greedy filtering that uses inverted indices on the node prefixes. Through theoretical analysis, we show that greedy filtering is effective for datasets whose features have Zipfian distribution, a characteristic observed in majority of large datasets. We also conduct extensive comparative experiments against (a) three state-of-the-art algorithms, and (b) three algorithms in related research domains. Our experimental results show that greedy filtering consistently outperforms other algorithms in various types of high-dimensional datasets.

Finding k-nearest neighbours (k-NN) is one of the most important primitives of many applications such as search engines and recommendation systems. However, its computational cost is extremely high when searching for k-NN points in a huge collection of high-dimensional points. Locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) has been introduced for an efficient k-NN approximation, but none of the existing LSH approaches clearly outperforms others. We propose a novel LSH approach, Signature Selection LSH (S2LSH), which finds approximate k-NN points very efficiently in various datasets. It first constructs a large pool of highly diversified signature regions with various sizes. Given a query point, it dynamically generates a query-specific signature region by merging highly effective signature regions selected from the signature pool. We also suggest S2LSH-M, a variant of S2LSH, which processes multiple queries more efficiently by using query-specific features and optimization techniques. Extensive experiments show the performance superiority of our approaches in diverse settings.