Lauren Harrell
Lauren Harrell is a Data Scientist in Google Research, focused on societally beneficial AI applications, including bioacoustics and species distribution models.
Authored Publications
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Predicting Cardiovascular Disease Risk using Photoplethysmography and Deep Learning
Sebastien Baur
Christina Chen
Mariam Jabara
Babak Behsaz
Shravya Shetty
Goodarz Danaei
Diego Ardila
PLOS Global Public Health, 4(6) (2024), e0003204
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Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are responsible for a large proportion of premature deaths in low- and middle-income countries. Early CVD detection and intervention is critical in these populations, yet many existing CVD risk scores require a physical examination or lab measurements, which can be challenging in such health systems due to limited accessibility. We investigated the potential to use photoplethysmography (PPG), a sensing technology available on most smartphones that can potentially enable large-scale screening at low cost, for CVD risk prediction. We developed a deep learning PPG-based CVD risk score (DLS) to predict the probability of having major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE: non-fatal myocardial infarction, stroke, and cardiovascular death) within ten years, given only age, sex, smoking status and PPG as predictors. We compare the DLS with the office-based refit-WHO score, which adopts the shared predictors from WHO and Globorisk scores (age, sex, smoking status, height, weight and systolic blood pressure) but refitted on the UK Biobank (UKB) cohort. All models were trained on a development dataset (141,509 participants) and evaluated on a geographically separate test (54,856 participants) dataset, both from UKB. DLS’s C-statistic (71.1%, 95% CI 69.9–72.4) is non-inferior to office-based refit-WHO score (70.9%, 95% CI 69.7–72.2; non-inferiority margin of 2.5%, p<0.01) in the test dataset. The calibration of the DLS is satisfactory, with a 1.8% mean absolute calibration error. Adding DLS features to the office-based score increases the C-statistic by 1.0% (95% CI 0.6–1.4). DLS predicts ten-year MACE risk comparable with the office-based refit-WHO score. Interpretability analyses suggest that the DLS-extracted features are related to PPG waveform morphology and are independent of heart rate. Our study provides a proof-of-concept and suggests the potential of a PPG-based approach strategies for community-based primary prevention in resource-limited regions.
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Although personalized automatic speech recognition (ASR) models have recently been improved to recognize even severely impaired speech, model performance may degrade over time for persons with degenerating speech. The aims of this study were to (1) analyze the change of performance of ASR over time in individuals with degrading speech, and (2) explore mitigation strategies to optimize recognition throughout disease progression. Speech was recorded by four individuals with degrading speech due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Word error rates (WER) across recording sessions were computed for three ASR models: Unadapted Speaker Independent (U-SI), Adapted Speaker Independent (A-SI), and Adapted Speaker Dependent (A-SD or personalized). The performance of all models degraded significantly over time as speech became more impaired, but the A-SD model improved markedly when updated with recordings from the severe stages of speech progression. Recording additional utterances early in the disease before significant speech degradation did not improve the performance of A-SD models. This emphasizes the importance of continuous recording (and model retraining) when providing personalized models for individuals with progressive speech impairments.
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A Convolutional Neural Network for Automated Detection of Humpback Whale Song in a Diverse, Long-Term Passive Acoustic Dataset
Ann N. Allen
Matt Harvey
Karlina P. Merkens
Carrie C. Wall
Erin M. Oleson
Frontiers in Marine Science, 8 (2021), pp. 165
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Passive acoustic monitoring is a well-established tool for researching the occurrence, movements, and ecology of a wide variety of marine mammal species. Advances in hardware and data collection have exponentially increased the volumes of passive acoustic data collected, such that discoveries are now limited by the time required to analyze rather than collect the data. In order to address this limitation, we trained a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify humpback whale song in over 187,000 h of acoustic data collected at 13 different monitoring sites in the North Pacific over a 14-year period. The model successfully detected 75 s audio segments containing humpback song with an average precision of 0.97 and average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) of 0.992. The model output was used to analyze spatial and temporal patterns of humpback song, corroborating known seasonal patterns in the Hawaiian and Mariana Islands, including occurrence at remote monitoring sites beyond well-studied aggregations, as well as novel discovery of humpback whale song at Kingman Reef, at 5∘ North latitude. This study demonstrates the ability of a CNN trained on a small dataset to generalize well to a highly variable signal type across a diverse range of recording and noise conditions. We demonstrate the utility of active learning approaches for creating high-quality models in specialized domains where annotations are rare. These results validate the feasibility of applying deep learning models to identify highly variable signals across broad spatial and temporal scales, enabling new discoveries through combining large datasets with cutting edge tools.
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