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Michal Drozdzal, Santiago Segui, Petia Radeva, Carolina Malagelada, Fernando Azpiroz, & Jordi Vitria. (2015). Motility bar: a new tool for motility analysis of endoluminal videos. CBM - Computers in Biology and Medicine, 65, 320–330.
Abstract: Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) provides a new perspective of the small intestine, since it enables, for the first time, visualization of the entire organ. However, the long visual video analysis time, due to the large number of data in a single WCE study, was an important factor impeding the widespread use of the capsule as a tool for intestinal abnormalities detection. Therefore, the introduction of WCE triggered a new field for the application of computational methods, and in particular, of computer vision. In this paper, we follow the computational approach and come up with a new perspective on the small intestine motility problem. Our approach consists of three steps: first, we review a tool for the visualization of the motility information contained in WCE video; second, we propose algorithms for the characterization of two motility building-blocks: contraction detector and lumen size estimation; finally, we introduce an approach to detect segments of stable motility behavior. Our claims are supported by an evaluation performed with 10 WCE videos, suggesting that our methods ably capture the intestinal motility information.
Keywords: Small intestine; Motility; WCE; Computer vision; Image classification
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Xavier Perez Sala, Fernando De la Torre, Laura Igual, Sergio Escalera, & Cecilio Angulo. (2017). Subspace Procrustes Analysis. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 121(3), 327–343.
Abstract: Procrustes Analysis (PA) has been a popular technique to align and build 2-D statistical models of shapes. Given a set of 2-D shapes PA is applied to remove rigid transformations. Then, a non-rigid 2-D model is computed by modeling (e.g., PCA) the residual. Although PA has been widely used, it has several limitations for modeling 2-D shapes: occluded landmarks and missing data can result in local minima solutions, and there is no guarantee that the 2-D shapes provide a uniform sampling of the 3-D space of rotations for the object. To address previous issues, this paper proposes Subspace PA (SPA). Given several
instances of a 3-D object, SPA computes the mean and a 2-D subspace that can simultaneously model all rigid and non-rigid deformations of the 3-D object. We propose a discrete (DSPA) and continuous (CSPA) formulation for SPA, assuming that 3-D samples of an object are provided. DSPA extends the traditional PA, and produces unbiased 2-D models by uniformly sampling different views of the 3-D object. CSPA provides a continuous approach to uniformly sample the space of 3-D rotations, being more efficient in space and time. Experiments using SPA to learn 2-D models of bodies from motion capture data illustrate the benefits of our approach.
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Frederic Sampedro, Anna Domenech, Sergio Escalera, & Ignasi Carrio. (2015). Deriving global quantitative tumor response parameters from 18F-FDG PET-CT scans in patients with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. NMC - Nuclear Medicine Communications, 36(4), 328–333.
Abstract: OBJECTIVES:
The aim of the study was to address the need for quantifying the global cancer time evolution magnitude from a pair of time-consecutive positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) scans. In particular, we focus on the computation of indicators using image-processing techniques that seek to model non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) progression or response severity.
MATERIALS AND METHODS:
A total of 89 pairs of time-consecutive PET-CT scans from NHL patients were stored in a nuclear medicine station for subsequent analysis. These were classified by a consensus of nuclear medicine physicians into progressions, partial responses, mixed responses, complete responses, and relapses. The cases of each group were ordered by magnitude following visual analysis. Thereafter, a set of quantitative indicators designed to model the cancer evolution magnitude within each group were computed using semiautomatic and automatic image-processing techniques. Performance evaluation of the proposed indicators was measured by a correlation analysis with the expert-based visual analysis.
RESULTS:
The set of proposed indicators achieved Pearson's correlation results in each group with respect to the expert-based visual analysis: 80.2% in progressions, 77.1% in partial response, 68.3% in mixed response, 88.5% in complete response, and 100% in relapse. In the progression and mixed response groups, the proposed indicators outperformed the common indicators used in clinical practice [changes in metabolic tumor volume, mean, maximum, peak standardized uptake value (SUV mean, SUV max, SUV peak), and total lesion glycolysis] by more than 40%.
CONCLUSION:
Computing global indicators of NHL response using PET-CT imaging techniques offers a strong correlation with the associated expert-based visual analysis, motivating the future incorporation of such quantitative and highly observer-independent indicators in oncological decision making or treatment response evaluation scenarios.
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Pedro Martins, Paulo Carvalho, & Carlo Gatta. (2014). Context-aware features and robust image representations. JVCIR - Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 25(2), 339–348.
Abstract: Local image features are often used to efficiently represent image content. The limited number of types of features that a local feature extractor responds to might be insufficient to provide a robust image representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a context-aware feature extraction formulated under an information theoretic framework. The algorithm does not respond to a specific type of features; the idea is to retrieve complementary features which are relevant within the image context. We empirically validate the method by investigating the repeatability, the completeness, and the complementarity of context-aware features on standard benchmarks. In a comparison with strictly local features, we show that our context-aware features produce more robust image representations. Furthermore, we study the complementarity between strictly local features and context-aware ones to produce an even more robust representation.
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G. Zahnd, Simone Balocco, A. Serusclat, P. Moulin, M. Orkisz, & D. Vray. (2015). Progressive attenuation of the longitudinal kinetics in the common carotid artery: preliminary in vivo assessment Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology. UMB - Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, 41(1), 339–345.
Abstract: Longitudinal kinetics (LOKI) of the arterial wall consists of the shearing motion of the intima-media complex over the adventitia layer in the direction parallel to the blood flow during the cardiac cycle. The aim of this study was to investigate the local variability of LOKI amplitude along the length of the vessel. By use of a previously validated motion-estimation framework, 35 in vivo longitudinal B-mode ultrasound cine loops of healthy common carotid arteries were analyzed. Results indicated that LOKI amplitude is progressively attenuated along the length of the artery, as it is larger in regions located on the proximal side of the image (i.e., toward the heart) and smaller in regions located on the distal side of the image (i.e., toward the head), with an average attenuation coefficient of -2.5 ± 2.0%/mm. Reported for the first time in this study, this phenomenon is likely to be of great importance in improving understanding of atherosclerosis mechanisms, and has the potential to be a novel index of arterial stiffness.
Keywords: Arterial stiffness; Atherosclerosis; Common carotid artery; Longitudinal kinetics; Motion tracking; Ultrasound imaging
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