Date: January 4th, 2022
Speaker: Dr. Karamatou Yacoubou Djima
Affiliation: Amherst College
Title: Explaining Autism Spectrum Disorder with Placenta via Machine Learning
Abstract: The placenta is the key organ of maternal–fetal interactions, where nutrient, oxygen, and waste transfer occur. Differences in the morphology of the placental chorionic surface vascular network (PCSVN) have been associated with developmental disorders such as autism, hinting that the PCSVN could potentially serve as a biomarker for early diagnosis and treatment of autism. Studying PCSVN features in large cohorts requires a reliable and automated mechanism to extract the vascular networks. I will present two successful methods for PCSVN enhancement and extraction, one based on Laplacian eigenmaps and the other based on a conditional generative adversarial neural network (cGAN).