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Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Oriol Pujol, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2010). SRBF: Speckle Reducing Bilateral Filtering. UMB - Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, 36(8), 1353–1363.
Abstract: Speckle noise negatively affects medical ultrasound image shape interpretation and boundary detection. Speckle removal filters are widely used to selectively remove speckle noise without destroying important image features to enhance object boundaries. In this article, a fully automatic bilateral filter tailored to ultrasound images is proposed. The edge preservation property is obtained by embedding noise statistics in the filter framework. Consequently, the filter is able to tackle the multiplicative behavior modulating the smoothing strength with respect to local statistics. The in silico experiments clearly showed that the speckle reducing bilateral filter (SRBF) has superior performances to most of the state of the art filtering methods. The filter is tested on 50 in vivo US images and its influence on a segmentation task is quantified. The results using SRBF filtered data sets show a superior performance to using oriented anisotropic diffusion filtered images. This improvement is due to the adaptive support of SRBF and the embedded noise statistics, yielding a more homogeneous smoothing. SRBF results in a fully automatic, fast and flexible algorithm potentially suitable in wide ranges of speckle noise sizes, for different medical applications (IVUS, B-mode, 3-D matrix array US).
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Sergio Escalera, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Re-coding ECOCs without retraining. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 31(7), 555–562.
Abstract: A standard way to deal with multi-class categorization problems is by the combination of binary classifiers in a pairwise voting procedure. Recently, this classical approach has been formalized in the Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. In the ECOC framework, the one-versus-one coding demonstrates to achieve higher performance than the rest of coding designs. The binary problems that we train in the one-versus-one strategy are significantly smaller than in the rest of designs, and usually easier to be learnt, taking into account the smaller overlapping between classes. However, a high percentage of the positions coded by zero of the coding matrix, which implies a high sparseness degree, does not codify meta-class membership information. In this paper, we show that using the training data we can redefine without re-training, in a problem-dependent way, the one-versus-one coding matrix so that the new coded information helps the system to increase its generalization capability. Moreover, the new re-coding strategy is generalized to be applied over any binary code. The results over several UCI Machine Learning repository data sets and two real multi-class problems show that performance improvements can be obtained re-coding the classical one-versus-one and Sparse random designs compared to different state-of-the-art ECOC configurations.
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Neus Salvatella, E Fernandez-Nofrerias, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, H. Tizon, Xavier Carrillo, et al. (2010). Radial Artery Volume Changes After Administration Of Two Different Intra-arterial Drug Regimens. Assessment by Intravascular Ultrasound. JACC - Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 56(13s1), B119.
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Debora Gil, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Oriol Rodriguez, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2006). Statistical Strategy for Anisotropic Adventitia Modelling in IVUS. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 25(6), 768–778.
Abstract: Vessel plaque assessment by analysis of intravascular ultrasound sequences is a useful tool for cardiac disease diagnosis and intervention. Manual detection of luminal (inner) and mediaadventitia (external) vessel borders is the main activity of physicians in the process of lumen narrowing (plaque) quantification. Difficult definition of vessel border descriptors, as well as, shades, artifacts, and blurred signal response due to ultrasound physical properties trouble automated adventitia segmentation. In order to efficiently approach such a complex problem, we propose blending advanced anisotropic filtering operators and statistical classification techniques into a vessel border modelling strategy. Our systematic statistical analysis shows that the reported adventitia detection achieves an accuracy in the range of interobserver variability regardless of plaque nature, vessel geometry, and incomplete vessel borders. Index Terms–-Anisotropic processing, intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), vessel border segmentation, vessel structure classification.
Keywords: Corners; T-junctions; Wavelets
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Debora Gil, & Petia Radeva. (2004). Shape Restoration via a Regularized Curvature Flow. Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 21(3), 205–223.
Abstract: Any image filtering operator designed for automatic shape restoration should satisfy robustness (whatever the nature and degree of noise is) as well as non-trivial smooth asymptotic behavior. Moreover, a stopping criterion should be determined by characteristics of the evolved image rather than dependent on the number of iterations. Among the several PDE based techniques, curvature flows appear to be highly reliable for strongly noisy images compared to image diffusion processes.
In the present paper, we introduce a regularized curvature flow (RCF) that admits non-trivial steady states. It is based on a measure of the local curve smoothness that takes into account regularity of the curve curvature and serves as stopping term in the mean curvature flow. We prove that this measure decreases over the orbits of RCF, which endows the method with a natural stop criterion in terms of the magnitude of this measure. Further, in its discrete version it produces steady states consisting of piece-wise regular curves. Numerical experiments made on synthetic shapes corrupted with different kinds of noise show the abilities and limitations of each of the current geometric flows and the benefits of RCF. Finally, we present results on real images that illustrate the usefulness of the present approach in practical applications.
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