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Shekhar S. Chandra

Shekhar S. Chandra contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Von Neumann Networks

In the mid-twentieth century, mathematician and polymath John von Neumann created a computational system on an array of cells as a simple model of the human brain, where each cell had one of a finite set of roles or states that he predicted would be modelled by a diffusion process. In this work, we show that such a system, when developed in a modern deep learning setting, enables the construction of an artificial neuron having specialized roles that can be learnt. We refer to this neuron as the Von Neumann neuron, and the resulting neural network from such neurons result in a self-engineered design whose architecture is only dependent on the structure and locations of its inputs and outputs on this cellular array. The mathematical framework for these Von Neumann Networks (VNNs) is also constructed and shows that they are based on the extension of neural operators and the learning of Green's functions with convolutions on a cellular topology having a diffusion signature. We also prove that these VNNs are part of a more general computational system called Cellular Machines that are computationally universal. Initial experiments show that VNN based multi-layered perceptrons outperform their equivalent deep learning variant on basic tasks, while being more parameter efficient and are capable of learning new types of tasks. This includes the ability to solve for and construct an extension of the Von Neumann (hardware) architecture common to all modern computers to cells and suggests new opportunities that could be explored.

preprint2024arXiv

Fractal Compressive Sensing

This paper introduces a sparse projection matrix composed of discrete (digital) periodic lines that create a pseudo-random (p.frac) sampling scheme. Our approach enables random Cartesian sampling whilst employing deterministic and one-dimensional (1D) trajectories derived from the discrete Radon transform (DRT). Unlike radial trajectories, DRT projections can be back-projected without interpolation. Thus, we also propose a novel reconstruction method based on the exact projections of the DRT called finite Fourier reconstruction (FFR). We term this combined p.frac and FFR strategy, finite compressive sensing (FCS), with image recovery demonstrated on experimental and simulated data; image quality comparisons are made with Cartesian random sampling in 1D and two-dimensional (2D), as well as radial under-sampling in a more constrained experiment. Our experiments indicate FCS enables 3-5dB gain in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) for 2-, 4- and 8-fold under-sampling compared to 1D Cartesian random sampling. This paper aims to: Review common sampling strategies for compressed sensing (CS)-magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to inform the motivation of a projective and Cartesian sampling scheme. Compare the incoherence of these sampling strategies and the proposed p.frac. Compare reconstruction quality of the sampling schemes under various reconstruction strategies to determine the suitability of p.frac for CS-MRI. It is hypothesised that because p.frac is a highly incoherent sampling scheme, that reconstructions will be of high quality compared to 1D Cartesian phase-encode under-sampling.

preprint2022arXiv

SCGC : Self-Supervised Contrastive Graph Clustering

Graph clustering discovers groups or communities within networks. Deep learning methods such as autoencoders (AE) extract effective clustering and downstream representations but cannot incorporate rich structural information. While Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have shown great success in encoding graph structure, typical GNNs based on convolution or attention variants suffer from over-smoothing, noise, heterophily, are computationally expensive and typically require the complete graph being present. Instead, we propose Self-Supervised Contrastive Graph Clustering (SCGC), which imposes graph-structure via contrastive loss signals to learn discriminative node representations and iteratively refined soft cluster labels. We also propose SCGC*, with a more effective, novel, Influence Augmented Contrastive (IAC) loss to fuse richer structural information, and half the original model parameters. SCGC(*) is faster with simple linear units, completely eliminate convolutions and attention of traditional GNNs, yet efficiently incorporates structure. It is impervious to layer depth and robust to over-smoothing, incorrect edges and heterophily. It is scalable by batching, a limitation in many prior GNN models, and trivially parallelizable. We obtain significant improvements over state-of-the-art on a wide range of benchmark graph datasets, including images, sensor data, text, and citation networks efficiently. Specifically, 20% on ARI and 18% on NMI for DBLP; overall 55% reduction in training time and overall, 81% reduction on inference time. Our code is available at : https://github.com/gayanku/SCGC

preprint2022arXiv

Skin Lesion Recognition with Class-Hierarchy Regularized Hyperbolic Embeddings

In practice, many medical datasets have an underlying taxonomy defined over the disease label space. However, existing classification algorithms for medical diagnoses often assume semantically independent labels. In this study, we aim to leverage class hierarchy with deep learning algorithms for more accurate and reliable skin lesion recognition. We propose a hyperbolic network to learn image embeddings and class prototypes jointly. The hyperbola provably provides a space for modeling hierarchical relations better than Euclidean geometry. Meanwhile, we restrict the distribution of hyperbolic prototypes with a distance matrix that is encoded from the class hierarchy. Accordingly, the learned prototypes preserve the semantic class relations in the embedding space and we can predict the label of an image by assigning its feature to the nearest hyperbolic class prototype. We use an in-house skin lesion dataset which consists of around 230k dermoscopic images on 65 skin diseases to verify our method. Extensive experiments provide evidence that our model can achieve higher accuracy with less severe classification errors than models without considering class relations.

preprint2022arXiv

Undersampled MRI Reconstruction with Side Information-Guided Normalisation

Magnetic resonance (MR) images exhibit various contrasts and appearances based on factors such as different acquisition protocols, views, manufacturers, scanning parameters, etc. This generally accessible appearance-related side information affects deep learning-based undersampled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction frameworks, but has been overlooked in the majority of current works. In this paper, we investigate the use of such side information as normalisation parameters in a convolutional neural network (CNN) to improve undersampled MRI reconstruction. Specifically, a Side Information-Guided Normalisation (SIGN) module, containing only few layers, is proposed to efficiently encode the side information and output the normalisation parameters. We examine the effectiveness of such a module on two popular reconstruction architectures, D5C5 and OUCR. The experimental results on both brain and knee images under various acceleration rates demonstrate that the proposed method improves on its corresponding baseline architectures with a significant margin.

preprint2021arXiv

Bespoke Fractal Sampling Patterns for Discrete Fourier Space via the Kaleidoscope Transform

Sampling strategies are important for sparse imaging methodologies, especially those employing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Chaotic sensing is one such methodology that employs deterministic, fractal sampling in conjunction with finite, iterative reconstruction schemes to form an image from limited samples. Using a sampling pattern constructed entirely from periodic lines in DFT space, chaotic sensing was found to outperform traditional compressed sensing for magnetic resonance imaging; however, only one such sampling pattern was presented and the reason for its fractal nature was not proven. Through the introduction of a novel image transform known as the kaleidoscope transform, which formalises and extends upon the concept of downsampling and concatenating an image with itself, this paper: (1) demonstrates a fundamental relationship between multiplication in modular arithmetic and downsampling; (2) provides a rigorous mathematical explanation for the fractal nature of the sampling pattern in the DFT; and (3) leverages this understanding to develop a collection of novel fractal sampling patterns for the 2D DFT with customisable properties. The ability to design tailor-made fractal sampling patterns expands the utility of the DFT in chaotic imaging and may form the basis for a bespoke chaotic sensing methodology, in which the fractal sampling matches the imaging task for improved reconstruction.

preprint2020arXiv

Automatic lesion detection, segmentation and characterization via 3D multiscale morphological sifting in breast MRI

Previous studies on computer aided detection/diagnosis (CAD) in 4D breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) regard lesion detection, segmentation and characterization as separate tasks, and typically require users to manually select 2D MRI slices or regions of interest as the input. In this work, we present a breast MRI CAD system that can handle 4D multimodal breast MRI data, and integrate lesion detection, segmentation and characterization with no user intervention. The proposed CAD system consists of three major stages: region candidate generation, feature extraction and region candidate classification. Breast lesions are firstly extracted as region candidates using the novel 3D multiscale morphological sifting (MMS). The 3D MMS, which uses linear structuring elements to extract lesion-like patterns, can segment lesions from breast images accurately and efficiently. Analytical features are then extracted from all available 4D multimodal breast MRI sequences, including T1-, T2-weighted and DCE sequences, to represent the signal intensity, texture, morphological and enhancement kinetic characteristics of the region candidates. The region candidates are lastly classified as lesion or normal tissue by the random under-sampling boost (RUSboost), and as malignant or benign lesion by the random forest. Evaluated on a breast MRI dataset which contains a total of 117 cases with 95 malignant and 46 benign lesions, the proposed system achieves a true positive rate (TPR) of 0.90 at 3.19 false positives per patient (FPP) for lesion detection and a TPR of 0.91 at a FPP of 2.95 for identifying malignant lesions without any user intervention. The average dice similarity index (DSI) is 0.72 for lesion segmentation. Compared with previously proposed systems evaluated on the same breast MRI dataset, the proposed CAD system achieves a favourable performance in breast lesion detection and characterization.