Ashkan Ebadi

National Research Council Canada | NRC · Digital Technologies

Funding has been viewed in the literature as one of the main determinants of scientific activities. Also, at an individual level, securing funding is one of the most important factors for a researcher, enabling him/her to carry out research projects. However, not everyone is successful in obtaining the necessary funds. The main objective of this wo...

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a devastating effect on the health and well-being of the global population. Apart from the global health crises, the pandemic has also caused significant economic and financial difficulties and socio-physiological implications. Effective screening, triage, treatment planning, and prognostication of outcome pl...

COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed our lives. Chest radiographyhas been used to detect COVID-19. However, the numberof publicly available COVID-19 x-ray images is extremely limited,resulting in a highly imbalanced dataset. This is a challenge whenusing deep learning for classification and detection. In this work, wepropose the use of pre-tra...

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been continuously affecting human lives and communities around the world in many ways, from cities under lockdown to new social experiences. Although in most cases COVID-19 results in mild illness, it has dra...

Research and development activities are regarded as one of the most influencing factors of the future of a country. Large investments in research can yield a tremendous outcome in terms of a country’s overall wealth and strength. However, public financial resources of countries are often limited which calls for a wise and targeted investment. Scien...

Detecting emerging research trends is crucial as it allows for the proactive identification and monitoring of novel and influential topics in the scientific community. Monitoring research trends aids researchers, institutions, and policymakers in allocating resources, fostering innovation, and staying competitive in rapidly changing scientific land...

The landscape of science and technology is characterized by its dynamic and evolving nature, constantly reshaped by new discoveries, innovations, and paradigm shifts. Moreover, science is undergoing a remarkable shift towards increasing interdisciplinary collaboration, where the convergence of diverse fields fosters innovative solutions to complex...

Star scientists are highly influential researchers who have made significant contributions to their field, gained widespread recognition, and often attracted substantial research funding. They are critical for the advancement of science and innovation, and they have a significant influence on the transfer of knowledge and technology to industry. Id...

The role of geographical proximity in facilitating inter-regional or inter-organizational collaborations has been studied thoroughly in recent years. However, the effect of geographical proximity on forming scientific collaborations at the individual level still needs to be addressed. Using publication data in the field of artificial intelligence f...

While no longer a public health emergency of international concern, COVID-19 remains an established and ongoing global health threat. As the global population continues to face significant negative impacts of the pandemic, there has been an increased usage of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) imaging as a low-cost, portable, and effective modality o...

In recent years, the field of hypersonics has witnessed substantial growth in research and development activities, driven by its diverse range of applications spanning both military and commercial sectors. Governments and private companies in several countries have made substantial investments in hypersonic technologies to gain a competitive edge,...

Computer vision and deep learning have the potential to improve medical artificial intelligence (AI) by assisting in diagnosis, prediction, and prognosis. However, the application of deep learning to medical image analysis is challenging due to limited data availability and imbalanced data. While model performance is undoubtedly essential for medic...

As the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to impact many aspects of life and the global healthcare systems, the adoption of rapid and effective screening methods to prevent the further spread of the virus and lessen the burden on healthcare providers is a necessity. As a cheap and widely accessible medical image modality, point-of-care u...

As the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to impact many aspects of life and the global healthcare systems, the adoption of rapid and effective screening methods to prevent further spread of the virus and lessen the burden on healthcare providers is a necessity. As a cheap and widely accessible medical image modality, point-of-care ultra...

Scientific collaboration in almost every discipline is mainly driven by the need of sharing knowledge, expertise, and pooled resources. Science is becoming more complex which has encouraged scientists to involve more in collaborative research projects in order to better address the challenges. As a highly interdisciplinary field with a rapidly evol...

Computer vision and machine learning are playing an increasingly important role in computer-assisted diagnosis; however, the application of deep learning to medical imaging has challenges in data availability and data imbalance, and it is especially important that models for medical imaging are built to be trustworthy. Therefore, we propose TRUDLMI...

Emerging technologies can have major economic impacts and affect strategic stability. Yet, early identification of emerging technologies remains challenging. In order to identify emerging technologies in a timely and reliable manner, a comprehensive examination of relevant scientific and technological (S&T) trends and their related references is re...

Early identification of emergent topics is of eminent importance due to their potential impacts on society. There are many methods for detecting emerging terms and topics, all with advantages and drawbacks. However, there is no consensus about the attributes and indicators of emergence. In this study, we evaluate emerging topic detection in the fie...

Research and development in hypersonics have progressed significantly in recent years, with various military and commercial applications being demonstrated increasingly. Public and private organizations in several countries have been investing in hypersonics, with the aim to overtake their competitors and secure/improve strategic advantage and dete...

Building AI models with trustworthiness is important especially in regulated areas such as healthcare. In tackling COVID-19, previous work uses convolutional neural networks as the backbone architecture, which has shown to be prone to over-caution and overconfidence in making decisions, rendering them less trustworthy -- a crucial flaw in the conte...

Building AI models with trustworthiness is important especially in regulated areas such as health-care. In tackling COVID-19, previous work uses convolutional neural networks as the backbone architecture, which has shown to be prone to over-caution and overconfidence in making decisions, rendering them less trustworthy-a crucial flaw in the context...

Background: The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to have a devastating effect on the health and well-being of the global population. Apart from the global health crises, the pandemic has also caused significant economic and financial difficulties and socio-physiological implications. Effective screening, triage, treatment pla...

Scientific collaboration in almost every discipline is mainly driven by the need of sharing knowledge, expertise, and pooled resources. Science is becoming more complex which has encouraged scientists to involve more in collaborative research projects in order to better address the challenges. As a highly interdisciplinary field with a rapidly evol...

Besides vaccination, as an effective way to mitigate the further spread of COVID-19, fast and accurate screening of individuals to test for the disease is yet necessary to ensure public health safety. We propose COVID-Net UV, an end-to-end hybrid spatio-temporal deep neural network architecture, to detect COVID-19 infection from lung point-of-care...

Emerging technologies can have major economic impacts and affect strategic stability. Yet, early identification of emerging technologies remains challenging. In order to identify emerging technologies in a timely and reliable manner, a comprehensive examination of relevant scientific and technological (S&T) trends and their related references is re...

Gender disparity in science is one of the most focused debating points among authorities and the scientific community. Over the last few decades, numerous initiatives have endeavored to accelerate gender equity in academia and research society. However, despite the ongoing efforts, gaps persist across the world, and more measures need to be taken....

Chest radiography is an effective screening tool for diagnosing pulmonary diseases. In computer-aided diagnosis, extracting the relevant region of interest, i.e., isolating the lung region of each radiography image, can be an essential step towards improved performance in diagnosing pulmonary disorders. Methods: In this work, we propose a deep lear...

Effective representation learning is the key in improving model performance for medical image analysis. In training deep learning models, a compromise often must be made between performance and trust, both of which are essential for medical applications. Moreover, models optimized with cross-entropy loss tend to suffer from unwarranted overconfiden...

Automatic meter reading technology is not yet widespread. Gas, electricity, or water accumulation meters reading is mostly done manually on-site either by an operator or by the homeowner. In some countries, the operator takes a picture as reading proof to confirm the reading by checking offline with another operator and/or using it as evidence in c...

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted many aspects of life globally, and a critical factor in mitigating its effects is screening individuals for infections, thereby allowing for both proper treatment for those individuals as well as action to be taken to prevent further spread of the virus. Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS)...

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted many aspects of life globally, and a critical factor in mitigating its effects is screening individuals for infections, thereby allowing for both proper treatment for those individuals as well as action to be taken to prevent further spread of the virus. Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS)...

The rapid growth of healthcare data in recent years calls for more advanced and efficient analytic techniques. Artificial intelligence facilitates finding insightful patterns in massive high-dimensional data. Considering the latest movements towards using machine learning and deep learning techniques in the medical domain, in this study, we focused...

Incorporating existing knowledge is vital for innovating, discovering, and generating new ideas. Knowledge production through research and invention is the key to scientific and technological development. As an emerging technology, nanotechnology has already proved its great potential for the global economy, attracting considerable federal investme...

Gender disparity in science is one of the most focused debating points among authorities and the scientific community. Over the last few decades, numerous initiatives have endeavored to accelerate gender equity in academia and research society. However, despite the ongoing efforts, gaps persist across the world, and more measures need to be taken....

The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effects on the well-being of the global population. The pandemic has been so prominent partly due to the high infection rate of the virus and its variants. In response, one of the most effective ways to stop infection is rapid diagnosis. The main-stream screening method, reverse transcription-polymerase cha...

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been continuously affecting human lives and communities around the world in many ways, from cities under lockdown to new social experiences. Although in most cases COVID-19 results in mild illness, it has dra...

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have attracted the attention of many commercial and non-profit organizations aiming to leverage advanced analytics, in order to provide a better service to their customers, increase their revenues through creating new or improving their existing internal processes, and better exploit their data by discov...

We examined the structure of intra- and postoperative case-collaboration networks among the surgical service providers in a quaternary-care academic medical center, using retrospective electronic medical record (EMR) data. We also analyzed the evolution of the network properties over time, as changes in nodes and edges can affect the network struct...

We examined the structure of intra- and postoperative case-collaboration networks among the surgical service providers in a quaternary-care academic medical center, using retrospective electronic medical record (EMR) data. We also analyzed the evolution of the network properties over time, as changes in nodes and edges can affect the network struct...

We analyzed the relation between surgical service providers' network structure and surgical team size with patient outcome during the operation. We did correlation analysis to evaluate the associations among the network structure measures in the intra-operative networks of surgical service providers. We focused on intra-operative networks of surgic...

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a common and serious complication after a surgery which is associated with morbidity and mortality. The majority of existing perioperative AKI risk score prediction models are limited in their generalizability and do not fully utilize the physiological intraoperative time-series data. Thus, there is a need for intellige...

We examined the structure of intra- and postoperative case-collaboration networks among the surgical service providers in a quaternary-care academic medical center, using retrospective electronic medical record (EMR) data. We also analyzed the evolution of the network properties over time, as changes in nodes and edges can affect the network struct...

Traditional methods for assessing illness severity and predicting in-hospital mortality among critically ill patients require manual, time-consuming, and error-prone calculations that are further hindered by the use of static variable thresholds derived from aggregate patient populations. These coarse frameworks do not capture time-sensitive indivi...

Objective: To accurately calculate the risk for postoperative complications and death after surgery in the preoperative period using machine-learning modeling of clinical data. Background: Postoperative complications cause a 2-fold increase in the 30-day mortality and cost, and are associated with long-term consequences. The ability to precisely...

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are mainly designed to record relevant patient information during their stay in the hospital for administrative purposes. They additionally provide an efficient and inexpensive source of data for medical research, such as patient outcome prediction. In this study, we used preoperative Electronic Health Records to pre...

The human brain is a complex network of interacting regions. The gray matter regions of brain are interconnected by white matter tracts, together forming one integrative complex network. In this article, we report our investigation about the potential of applying brain connectivity patterns as an aid in diagnosing Alzheimer's disease and Mild Cogni...

Objective: Surgical service providers play a crucial role in the healthcare system. Amongst all the influencing factors, surgical team selection might affect the patients' outcome significantly. The performance of a surgical team not only can depend on the individual members, but it can also depend on the synergy among team members, and could poss...

Despite recent efforts toward gender equality in scientific communities, female researchers are still underrepresented in some scientific areas/careers. Several factors can explain this gender disparity including different scientific activities patterns. This paper investigates the possibility of predicting the gender of a researcher based on scien...

Big Data, as an evolving topic, has recently not only attracted the information technology scientists' attention but also other researchers' of different backgrounds and in a diverse set of the scientific domains. Thanks to the recent progress in information technology and data storage, large-scale data is available about various research problems...

The importance of collaboration and teamwork has been widely acknowledged in various scientific fields. Although network analysis has been applied in many scientific domains to study the structure of collaboration networks, to the best of our knowledge, no study has thus far considered perioperative teams at the enterprise scale. Due to the specifi...

Funding is one of the crucial drivers of scientific activities. The increasing number of researchers and the limited financial resources have caused a tight competition among scientists to secure research funding. On the other side, it is now even harder for funding allocation organizations to select the most proper researchers. Number of publicati...

This paper analyzes the impact of several influencing factors on scientific production of researchers. Time related statistical models for the period of 1996 to 2010 are estimated to assess the impact of research funding and other determinant factors on the quantity and quality of the scientific output of individual funded researchers in Canadian n...

As self-directed online anxiety treatment and e-mental health programs become more prevalent and begin to rapidly scale to a large number of users, the need to develop automated techniques for monitoring patient progress and detecting early warning signs is at an alltime high. While current online therapy systems work based on explicit quantitative...

Recommender systems, also known as recommender engines, have become an important research area and are now being applied in various fields. In addition, the techniques behind the recommender systems have been improved over the time. In general, such systems help users to find their required products or services (e.g. books, music) through analyzing...

Techniques behind the recommender systems have been improved over time. Recommenders help users to find their required products or services through analysing and aggregating other users’ activities and behavior. In this paper, we propose an accurate multi-layer hybrid hotel recommender system that uses multi-aspect rating. We used large-scale data...

It was after the Second World War (WWII) when several developed countries started to devote more financial resources to research and development (R&D). Nowadays, large amount of money is being invested annually in R&D activities to foster scientific development. Scientists publish their results in the form of scientific papers to secure their prior...

Novelty of nanotechnology and its invaluable application in almost all fields makes innovation in this sector an interest for many countries, including Canada and the United States. The collaboration between academia and industry is considered to be particularly beneficial in nanotechnology, as it is an emerging field where the science is interdisc...

The increasing number of researchers and the limited financial resources has caused a tight competition among scientists to secure research funding. On the other side, it has become even harder for funding allocation organizations to evaluate the performance of researchers and select the best candidates. However, it seems that the current evaluatio...

The modern science has become more complex and interdisciplinary in its nature which might encourage researchers to be more collaborative and get engaged in larger collaboration networks. Various aspects of collaboration networks have been examined so far to detect the most determinant factors in knowledge creation and scientific production. One of...

The export volume can be regarded as one of the important macroeconomic measures of a country development. Although the international trade volume has been increased significantly during the past years, the share of developing countries is still not comparable with the developed ones. This paper analyzes the inter-relations among export and some qu...

This paper investigates the impact of funding on scientific production of the researchers affiliated with the top Ten Canadian Universities. NSERC funding data in the period of 1996-2010 is considered, and the numbers of published articles in one-year and three-year time windows are counted as the proxy for the scientific production. In addition, w...

Every year, a considerable amount of money is being invested on research, mainly in the form of funding allocated to universities and research institutes. To better distribute the available funds and to set the most proper R&D investment strategies for the future, evaluation of the productivity of the funded researchers and the impact of such fundi...

Scientific collaboration is one of the substantial drivers of research progress that may lead researchers to generate novel ideas. Scientists may present such new thoughts in high quality journal publications or in the form of technology advances. There are several studies that examined collaboration networks or impact of network variables on scien...