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At least 145 records · Page 8

Enhancement of antigen-specific CD4 + and CD8 + T cell responses using a self-assembled biologic nanolipoprotein particle vaccine

To address the need for vaccine platforms that induce robust cell-mediated immunity, we investigated the potential of utilizing self-assembling biologic nanolipoprotein particles (NLPs) as an antigen and adjuvant delivery system to induce antigen-specific murine T cell responses. Here, we utilized OT-I and OT-II TCR-transgenic mice to investigate the effects of NLP-mediated delivery of the model antigen ovalbumin (OVA) on T cell activation. Delivery of OVA with the TLR4 agonist monophosphoryl lipid A (MPLA) in the context of NLPs significantly enhanced the activation of both CD4 + and CD8 + T cells in vitro compared to co-administration of free OVA and MPLA. Upon intranasal immunization of mice harboring TCR-transgenic cells, NLPs enhanced the adjuvant effects of MPLA and the in vivo delivery of OVA, leading to significantly increased expansion of CD4 + and CD8 + T cells in lung-draining lymph nodes. Therefore, NLPs are a promising vaccine platform for inducing T cell responses following intranasal administration.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

KETCHUP: Parameterizing of large-scale kinetic models using multiple datasets with different reference states

Large-scale kinetic models provide the computational means to dynamically link metabolic reaction fluxes to metabolite concentrations and enzyme levels while also conforming to substrate level regulation. However, the development of broadly applicable frameworks for efficiently and robustly parameterizing models remains a challenge. Challenges arise due to both the heterogeneity, paucity, and difficulty in obtaining flux and/or concentration data but also due to the computational difficulties of the underlying parameter identification problem. Both the computational demands for parameterization, degeneracy of obtained parameter solutions and interpretability of results has so far limited widespread adoption of large-scale kinetic models despite their potential. Herein, we introduce the Kinetic Estimation Tool Capturing Heterogeneous Datasets Using Pyomo (KETCHUP), a flexible parameter estimation tool that leverages a primal-dual interior-point algorithm to solve a nonlinear programming (NLP) problem that identifies a set of parameters capable of recapitulating the (non)steady-state fluxes and concentrations in wild-type and perturbed metabolic networks. KETCHUP is benchmarked against previously parameterized large-scale kinetic models demonstrating an at least an order of magnitude faster convergence than the tool K-FIT while at the same time attaining better data fits. Finally, this versatile toolbox accepts different kinetic descriptions, metabolic fluxes, enzyme levels and metabolite concentrations, under either steady-state or instationary conditions to enable robust kinetic model construction and parameterization. KETCHUP supports the SBML format and can be accessed at https://github.com/maranasgroup/KETCHUP.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Crowding-induced mixing behavior of lipid bilayers: Examination of mixing energy, phase, packing geometry, and reversibility

In an effort to develop a general thermodynamic model from first-principles to describe the mixing behavior of lipid membranes, we examined lipid mixing induced by targeted binding of small (Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP)) and large (nanolipoprotein particles (NLPs)) structures to specific phases of phase-separated lipid bilayers. Phases were targeted by incorporation of phase-partitioning iminodiacetic acid (IDA)-functionalized lipids into ternary lipid mixtures consisting of DPPC, DOPC, and cholesterol. GFP and NLPs, containing histidine tags, bound the IDA portion of these lipids via a metal, Cu 2+ , chelating mechanism. In giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs), GFP and NLPs bound to the Lo domains of bilayers containing DPIDA, and bound to the Ld region of bilayers containing DOIDA. At sufficiently large concentrations of DPIDA or DOIDA, lipid mixing was induced by bound GFP and NLPs. The validity of the thermodynamic model was confirmed when it was found that the statistical mixing distribution as a function of crowding energy for smaller GFP and larger NLPs collapsed to the same trend line for each GUV composition. Moreover, results of this analysis show that the free energy of mixing for a ternary lipid bilayer consisting of DOPC, DPPC, and cholesterol varied from 7.9 × 10 –22 to 1.5 × 10 –20 J/lipid at the compositions observed, decreasing as the relative cholesterol concentration was increased. It was discovered that there appears to be a maximum packing density, and associated maximum crowding pressure, of the NLPs, suggestive of circular packing. A similarity in mixing induced by NLP1 and NLP3 despite large difference in projected areas was analytically consistent with monovalent (one histidine tag) versus divalent (two histidine tags) surface interactions, respectively. In addition to GUVs, binding and induced mixing behavior of NLPs was also observed on planar, supported lipid multibilayers. Furthermore, the mixing process was reversible, with Lo domains reappearing after addition of EDTA for NLP removal.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

A Database of Stress-Strain Properties Auto-generated from the Scientific Literature using ChemDataExtractor

Abstract There has been an ongoing need for information-rich databases in the mechanical-engineering domain to aid in data-driven materials science. To address the lack of suitable property databases, this study employs the latest version of the chemistry-aware natural-language-processing (NLP) toolkit, ChemDataExtractor, to automatically curate a comprehensive materials database of key stress-strain properties. The database contains information about materials and their cognate properties: ultimate tensile strength, yield strength, fracture strength, Young’s modulus, and ductility values. 720,308 data records were extracted from the scientific literature and organized into machine-readable databases formats. The extracted data have an overall precision, recall and F-score of 82.03%, 92.13% and 86.79%, respectively. The resulting database has been made publicly available, aiming to facilitate data-driven research and accelerate advancements within the mechanical-engineering domain.

Kumar, Pankaj↗

Decoding substance use disorder severity from clinical notes using a large language model

Substance use disorder (SUD) poses a major concern due to its detrimental effects on health and society. SUD identification and treatment depend on a variety of factors such as severity, co-determinants (e.g., withdrawal symptoms), and social determinants of health. Existing diagnostic coding systems used by insurance providers, like the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), lack granularity for certain diagnoses, but American clinicians will add this granularity (as that found within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classification or DSM-5) as supplemental unstructured text in clinical notes. Traditional natural language processing (NLP) methods face limitations in accurately parsing such diverse clinical language. Large language models (LLMs) offer promise in overcoming these challenges by adapting to diverse language patterns. This study investigates the application of LLMs for extracting severity-related information for various SUD diagnoses from clinical notes. We propose a workflow employing zero-shot learning of LLMs with carefully crafted prompts and post-processing techniques. Through experimentation with Flan-T5, an open-source LLM, we demonstrate its superior recall compared to the rule-based approach. Focusing on 11 categories of SUD diagnoses, we show the effectiveness of LLMs in extracting severity information, contributing to improved risk assessment and treatment planning for SUD patients.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Lipid composition dictates serum stability of reconstituted high-density lipoproteins: implications for in vivo applications

Nanolipoprotein particles (NLPs) are reconstituted high-density lipoproteins, consisting of a phospholipid bilayer stabilized by an apolipoprotein scaffold protein. This class of nanoparticle has been a vital tool in the study of membrane proteins, and in recent years has been increasingly used for in vivo applications. Previous studies demonstrated that the composition of the lipid bilayer component affects the stability of these particles in serum solutions. In the current study, NLPs assembled with phosphatidylcholine lipids featuring different acyl chain structures were systematically tested to understand the effect that lipid composition has on NLP stability in both neat serum and cell culture media supplemented with 10% serum by volume. The time at which 50% of the particles dissociate, as well as the fraction of the initial population that remains resistant to dissociation, were correlated to key parameters obtained from all-atom simulations of the corresponding lipid bilayers. A significant correlation was observed between the compressibility modulus of the lipid bilayer and particle stability in these complex biological milieu. These results can be used as a reference to tune the stability of these versatile biological nanoparticles for in vitro and in vivo applications.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

EXFOR-NSR PDF database: a system for nuclear knowledge preservation and data curation

Current needs of nuclear science and technology include complete, well-documented, and easily verifiable nuclear data. The complete data records require supporting nuclear bibliography, presently stored in dedicated libraries, in addition, to actual data. Additionally, experimental nuclear reaction data (EXFOR) and Nuclear Science References (NSR) databases contain compilations based on primary (journals) and secondary (conference proceedings, theses, preprints, etc.) publications, and data received from authors via private communications. The secondary library materials and private communications often represent a bottleneck for nuclear data verification, compilation, evaluation, and dissemination activities. To address this issue, bibliographic materials were scanned into PDF (Portable Document Format) files and uploaded in a relational database. The traditional scope of nuclear databases that includes meta-data and numbers derived from data in specialized formats was broadened to accommodate the large volumes of original nuclear data publications. The complete PDF publication files were stored in a relational database as Binary Large OBjects (BLOB). This unique collection of nuclear data compilations and supporting publications generate many opportunities for machine learning applications. The Web interfaces for authorized and public access to the EXFOR-NSR nuclear publications database were implemented at the U.S. National Nuclear Data Center, https://www.nndc.bnl.gov/ and IAEA Nuclear Data Section, https://www-nds.iaea.org/ . The current system is complementary to major nuclear libraries and narrowly focused on nuclear data compilation and evaluation procedures. The contents of the PDF database, details of implementation, and Web interface are described. New capabilities for data curation, knowledge preservation, worldwide dissemination, and natural language processing (NLP) applications are given.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Unified Medical Language System resources improve sieve-based generation and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)–based ranking for concept normalization

Concept normalization, the task of linking phrases in text to concepts in an ontology, is useful for many downstream tasks including relation extraction, information retrieval, etc. We present a generate-and-rank concept normalization system based on our participation in the 2019 National NLP Clinical Challenges Shared Task Track 3 Concept Normalization. The shared task provided 13 609 concept mentions drawn from 100 discharge summaries. We first design a sieve-based system that uses Lucene indices over the training data, Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) preferred terms, and UMLS synonyms to generate a list of possible concepts for each mention. We then design a listwise classifier based on the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) neural network to rank the candidate concepts, integrating UMLS semantic types through a regularizer. Our generate-and-rank system was third of 33 in the competition, outperforming the candidate generator alone (81.66% vs 79.44%) and the previous state of the art (76.35%). During postevaluation, the model’s accuracy was increased to 83.56% via improvements to how training data are generated from UMLS and incorporation of our UMLS semantic type regularizer. Analysis of the model shows that prioritizing UMLS preferred terms yields better performance, that the UMLS semantic type regularizer results in qualitatively better concept predictions, and that the model performs well even on concepts not seen during training. Our generate-and-rank framework for UMLS concept normalization integrates key UMLS features like preferred terms and semantic types with a neural network–based ranking model to accurately link phrases in text to UMLS concepts.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Radio galaxy zoo EMU: towards a semantic radio galaxy morphology taxonomy

We present a novel natural language processing (NLP) approach to deriving plain English descriptors for science cases otherwise restricted by obfuscating technical terminology. We address the limitations of common radio galaxy morphology classifications by applying this approach. We experimentally derive a set of semantic tags for the Radio Galaxy Zoo EMU (Evolutionary Map of the Universe) project and the wider astronomical community. We collect 8486 plain English annotations of radio galaxy morphology, from which we derive a taxonomy of tags. The tags are plain English. The result is an extensible framework, which is more flexible, more easily communicated, and more sensitive to rare feature combinations, which are indescribable using the current framework of radio astronomy classifications.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Energy Efficient Stochastic-Based Deep Spiking Neural Networks for Sparse Datasets

With large deep neural networks (DNNs) neces- sary to solve complex and data-intensive problems, energy efficiency is a key bottleneck for effectively deploying DL in the real world. Deep spiking NNs have gained much research at- tention recently due to the interest in building biological neural networks and the availability of neuromorphic platforms, which can be orders of magnitude more energy efficient compared to CPUs and GPUs. Although spiking NNs have proven to be an efficient technique for solving many machine learning and computer vision problems, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to adapt spiking NNs to sparse datasets. In this paper, we study the behaviour of spiking NNs in handling NLP datasets and the sparsity in their data representation. Then, we propose a novel framework for spiking NN using the concept of stochastic computing. Specifically, instead of generating spike trains with firing rates proportional to the intensity of each value in the feature set separately, the whole feature set is treated as a distribution function and a stochastic spiking train that follow this distribution is generated. This framework reduces the connectivity between NN layers from O(N) to O(logN). Also, it encodes input data differently and make suitable to handle sparse datasets. Finally, the framework achieves high energy efficiency since it uses Integrate and Fire neurons same as conventional spiking NNs. The results show that our proposed stochastic-based SNN achieves nearly the same accuracy as the original DNN on MNIST dataset, and it has better performance than state- of-the-art SNN. Besides that stochastic-based SNN is energy efficient, where the fully connected DNN, the conventional SNN, and the data normalized SNN consume 38.24, 1.83, and 1.85 -times more energy than the stochastic-based SNN, respectively. For sparse datasets, including IMDb and In-House clinical datasets, stochastic-based SNN achieves performance comparable to that of the conventional DNN. However, the conventional spiking NN has a significant decline in classification accuracy.

Alawad, Mohammed↗

Adversarial Training for Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning Model Distribution

Collaboration among cancer registries is essential to develop accurate, robust, and generalizable deep learning models for automated information extraction from cancer pathology reports. Sharing data presents a serious privacy issue, especially in biomedical research and healthcare delivery domains. Distributing pretrained deep learning (DL) models has been proposed to avoid critical data sharing. However, there is growing recognition that collaboration among clinical institutes through DL model distribution exposes new security and privacy vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities increase in natural language processing (NLP) applications, in which the dataset vocabulary with word vector representations needs to be associated with the other model parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving DL model distribution across cancer registries for information extraction from cancer pathology reports with privacy and confidentiality considerations. The proposed approach exploits the adversarial training framework to distinguish private features from shared features among different datasets. It only shares registry-invariant model parameters, without sharing raw data nor registry-specific model parameters among cancer registries. Thus, it protects both the data and the trained model simultaneously. We compare our proposed approach to single-registry models, and a model trained on centrally hosted data from different cancer registries. The results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the single-registry models and achieves statistically indistinguishable micro and macro F1-score as compared to the centralized model.

Alawad, Mohammed↗

Towards Automatic Mapping of Vulnerabilities to Attack Patterns using Large Language Models

With the advent of new devices and applications, cyber attack surface is continuously evolving due to the emergence of new attack techniques and vulnerabilities. Hence, security management tool must assess the cyber risk of an enterprise at regular interval basis through comprehensively identifying associations among attack techniques, weakness, and vulnerabilities. However, existing repositories providing such associations are incomplete (i.e., missing associations), inducing the likelihood of undermining the risk of particular set of attack techniques. Moreover, such associations still rely on manual interpretation, which is slow compared to attack speed and ineffective for the increasing list of vulnerabilities and attack actions. Therefore, there is an urge to develop methodologies for automatically associating vulnerabilities to all relevant attack techniques. In this paper, we present a framework, named VWC-MAP, that can automatically identify all relevant attack techniques of a vulnerability via weakness based on their text descriptions, applying natural language process (NLP) techniques. To achieve that, we present a novel two-tiered classification approach, where the first tier classifies vulnerabilities to weakness, and the second tier classifies weakness to attack techniques. This research has improved the scalability of the current state-of-the-art tool to make vulnerability to weakness mapping significantly faster. Moreover, this paper presents two novel approaches for weakness to attack technique mapping applying Text-to-Text and link prediction techniques. Our experiment results cross-validated through cyber-security experts show that VWC-MAP can associate vulnerabilities to weakness types with 87% accuracy and to new attack patterns with 80% accuracy.

Das, Siddhartha Shankar↗

Characterizing Quantum Classifier Utility in Natural Language Processing Workflows

Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) develops natural language processing (NLP) models for deployment on quantum computers. We explore feature and data prototype selection techniques to address challenges posed by encoding high dimensional features. Our study builds quantum circuit classifiers that includes classical feature pre-processing, quantum embedding and quantum model training. The quantum models are built on 4 or 6 qubits and the quantum neural network (QNN) uses the established bricklayer design. We compare the dependence of model performance (in terms of accuracy and F1 scores) on feature length, embedding gates and parameterized unitary design. We compare the performance of quantum machine learning models to classical convolution neural network model (CNN) on binary and multi-class classification tasks using two datasets of synthetic features and labels. The first is the ECP-CANDLE P3B3 dataset a corpus of synthetically generated cancer pathology reports. The second dataset is extracted from well-known benchmark dataset (MADELON) - features are generated with a combination of informative, repeated and uninformative features. Both datasets are used for binary classification and multi-class classification with 3 classes. We observe robust, accurate performance from all models on the binary classification tasks, but multiclass classification is a challenge for the quantum models-there is a notable decrease in accuracy when using 3 classes. Overall the performance is comparable in terms of recall and accuracy between QNNs and CNNs, even with large datasets. These results provide a point of comparison between quantum and classical models on real-world datasets.

Hamilton, Kathleen↗

A Length Adaptive Algorithm-Hardware Co-design of Transformer on FPGA Through Sparse Attention and Dynamic Pipelining

Transformers are considered one of the most important deep learning models since 2018, in part because it establishes state-of-the-art (SOTA) records and could potentially replace existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Despite the remarkable triumphs, the prolonged turnaround time of Transformer models is a widely recognized roadblock. The variety of sequence lengths imposes additional computing overhead where inputs need to be zero-padded to the maximum sentence length in the batch to accommodate the parallel computing platforms. This paper targets the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and proposes a coherent sequence length adaptive algorithm–hardware co-design for Transformer acceleration. Particularly, we develop a hardware-friendly sparse attention operator and a length-aware hardware resource scheduling algorithm. The proposed sparse attention operator brings the complexity of attention-based models down to linear complexity and alleviates the off-chip memory traffic. The proposed length-aware resource hardware scheduling algorithm dynamically allocates the hardware resources to fill up the pipeline slots and eliminates bubbles for NLP tasks. Experiments show that our design has very small accuracy loss and has 80.2 × and 2.6 × speedup compared to CPU and GPU implementation, and 4 × higher energy efficiency than state-of-the-art GPU accelerator optimized via CUBLAS GEMM.

Peng, Hongwu↗

Position-Enhanced Gradient Attack (PEGA) on Medical Language Models

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training of language models on sensitive clinical notes without sharing the data. However, this paradigm is vulnerable to gradient inversion attacks that can reconstruct private data from shared gradients. We find that state-of-the-art attacks are less effective in the medical domain, failing to overcome the unique challenges posed by its specialized vocabulary and unstructured format. To address this, we introduce the Position-Enhanced Gradient Attack (PEGA), a novel attack that makes gradients position-aware by optimizing token and position embeddings simultaneously. PEGA employs two key innovations: a periodic sorting of positional embeddings to resolve token order ambiguity and a late-stage embedding replacement strategy to correct hard-to-recover critical tokens. To evaluate the leakage of sensitive data more directly, we also propose the Unified PHI-Recall (UPHI), a new metric measuring the recovery of Protected Health Information. Experiments on the MIMIC-III dataset show that PEGA significantly outperforms leading attacks like TAG and LAMP, particularly in its ability to reconstruct identifiable patient information, exposing a more severe and nuanced privacy risk in federated medical NLP.

Xu, Nuo [University of Minnesota]↗

labquake_future_prediction

The labquake_future_prediction code is a collection of python modules and scripts that serves as supporting information for the article “Predicting future laboratory fault friction through deep learning” for publication in the journal of “Geophysical Research Letters”. It is designed to predict laboratory fault slips in the immediate future by scanning continuous acoustic emission (AE) waveforms recorded in laboratory biaxial shear experiments. The predictions are made with a deep learning model based on convolutional encoder-decoder (CED) models and the Transformer model primarily developed for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The deep learning model is trained with the tensorflow package using publicly available laboratory data sets in standard binary file format in numpy. The utility functions for reading data files, configuring model hyperparameters, constructing the CED and Transformer models, training and testing of the models are defined in python module files. The workflow of training the models for labquake future predictions and the multiple GPU’s rapid model hyperparameter optimization as described in the journal article, are demonstrated in accompanying python script files and Jupyter notebooks.

Wang, Kun↗

FrESCO

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) monitors population level cancer trends as part of its Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program. This program consists of state or regional level cancer registries which collect, analyze, and annotate cancer pathology reports. From these annotated pathology reports, each individual registry aggregates cancer phenotype information and summary statistics about cancer prevalence to facilitate population level monitoring of cancer incidence. Extracting cancer phenotype from these reports is a labor intensive task, requiring specialized knowledge about the reports and cancer. Automating this information extraction process from cancer pathology reports has the potential to improve not only the quality of the data by extracting information in a consistent manner across registries, but to improve the quality of patient outcomes by reducing the time to assimilate new data and enabling time-sensitive applications such as precision medicine. Here we present FrESCO: Framework for Exploring Scalable Computational Oncology, a modular deep-learning natural language processing (NLP) library for extracting pathology information from clinical text documents.

Spannaus, Adam [Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oa↗

maranasgroup/KETCHUP

Repository for Kinetic Estimation Tool Capturing Heterogeneous Datasets Using Pyomo (KETCHUP), a flexible parameter estimation tool that leverages a primal-dual interior-point algorithm to solve a nonlinear programming (NLP) problem that identifies a set of parameters capable of recapitulating the steady-state fluxes and concentrations in wild-type and perturbed metabolic networks.

Suthers, Patrick↗