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Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Carlo Gatta, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Fusing in-vitro and in-vivo intravascular ultrasound data for plaque characterization. IJCI - International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, 26(7), 763–779.
Abstract: Accurate detection of in-vivo vulnerable plaque in coronary arteries is still an open problem. Recent studies show that it is highly related to tissue structure and composition. Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is a powerful imaging technique that gives a detailed cross-sectional image of the vessel, allowing to explore arteries morphology. IVUS data validation is usually performed by comparing post-mortem (in-vitro) IVUS data and corresponding histological analysis of the tissue. The main drawback of this method is the few number of available case studies and validated data due to the complex procedure of histological analysis of the tissue. On the other hand, IVUS data from in-vivo cases is easy to obtain but it can not be histologically validated. In this work, we propose to enhance the in-vitro training data set by selectively including examples from in-vivo plaques. For this purpose, a Sequential Floating Forward Selection method is reformulated in the context of plaque characterization. The enhanced classifier performance is validated on in-vitro data set, yielding an overall accuracy of 91.59% in discriminating among fibrotic, lipidic and calcified plaques, while reducing the gap between in-vivo and in-vitro data analysis. Experimental results suggest that the obtained classifier could be properly applied on in-vivo plaque characterization and also demonstrate that the common hypothesis of assuming the difference between in-vivo and in-vitro as negligible is incorrect.
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G.Blasco, Simone Balocco, J.Puig, J.Sanchez-Gonzalez, W.Ricart, J.Daunis-I-Estadella, et al. (2015). Carotid pulse wave velocity by magnetic resonance imaging is increased in middle-aged subjects with the metabolic syndrome. ICJI - International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, 31(3), 603–612.
Abstract: Arterial pulse wave velocity (PWV), an independent predictor of cardiovascular disease, physiologically increases with age; however, growing evidence suggests metabolic syndrome (MetS) accelerates this increase. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables reliable noninvasive assessment of arterial stiffness by measuring arterial PWV in specific vascular segments. We investigated the association between the presence of MetS and its components with carotid PWV (cPWV) in asymptomatic subjects without diabetes. We assessed cPWV by MRI in 61 individuals (mean age, 55.3 ± 14.1 years; median age, 55 years): 30 with MetS and 31 controls with similar age, sex, body mass index, and LDL-cholesterol levels. The study population was dichotomized by the median age. To remove the physiological association between PWV and age, unpaired t tests and multiple regression analyses were performed using the residuals of the regression between PWV and age. cPWV was higher in middle-aged subjects with MetS than in those without (p = 0.001), but no differences were found in elder subjects (p = 0.313). cPWV was associated with diastolic blood pressure (r = 0.276, p = 0.033) and waist circumference (r = 0.268, p = 0.038). The presence of MetS was associated with increased cPWV regardless of age, sex, blood pressure, and waist (p = 0.007). The MetS components contributing independently to an increased cPWV were hypertension (p = 0.018) and hypertriglyceridemia (p = 0.002). The presence of MetS is associated with an increased cPWV in middle-aged subjects. In particular, hypertension and hypertriglyceridemia may contribute to early progression of carotid stiffness.
Keywords: Metabolic syndrome; Arterial stiffness; Pulse wave velocity; Carotid artery; Magnetic resonance
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Sergio Escalera, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Error-Correcting Output Codes Library. JMLR - Journal of Machine Learning Research, 11, 661–664.
Abstract: (Feb):661−664
In this paper, we present an open source Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) library. The ECOC framework is a powerful tool to deal with multi-class categorization problems. This library contains both state-of-the-art coding (one-versus-one, one-versus-all, dense random, sparse random, DECOC, forest-ECOC, and ECOC-ONE) and decoding designs (hamming, euclidean, inverse hamming, laplacian, β-density, attenuated, loss-based, probabilistic kernel-based, and loss-weighted) with the parameters defined by the authors, as well as the option to include your own coding, decoding, and base classifier.
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Xavier Baro, Sergio Escalera, Jordi Vitria, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Traffic Sign Recognition Using Evolutionary Adaboost Detection and Forest-ECOC Classification. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 10(1), 113–126.
Abstract: The high variability of sign appearance in uncontrolled environments has made the detection and classification of road signs a challenging problem in computer vision. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for the detection and classification of traffic signs. Detection is based on a boosted detectors cascade, trained with a novel evolutionary version of Adaboost, which allows the use of large feature spaces. Classification is defined as a multiclass categorization problem. A battery of classifiers is trained to split classes in an Error-Correcting Output Code (ECOC) framework. We propose an ECOC design through a forest of optimal tree structures that are embedded in the ECOC matrix. The novel system offers high performance and better accuracy than the state-of-the-art strategies and is potentially better in terms of noise, affine deformation, partial occlusions, and reduced illumination.
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Laura Igual, Joan Carles Soliva, Antonio Hernandez, Sergio Escalera, Xavier Jimenez, Oscar Vilarroya, et al. (2011). A fully-automatic caudate nucleus segmentation of brain MRI: Application in volumetric analysis of pediatric attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. BEO - BioMedical Engineering Online, 10(105), 1–23.
Abstract: Background
Accurate automatic segmentation of the caudate nucleus in magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the brain is of great interest in the analysis of developmental disorders. Segmentation methods based on a single atlas or on multiple atlases have been shown to suitably localize caudate structure. However, the atlas prior information may not represent the structure of interest correctly. It may therefore be useful to introduce a more flexible technique for accurate segmentations.
Method
We present Cau-dateCut: a new fully-automatic method of segmenting the caudate nucleus in MRI. CaudateCut combines an atlas-based segmentation strategy with the Graph Cut energy-minimization framework. We adapt the Graph Cut model to make it suitable for segmenting small, low-contrast structures, such as the caudate nucleus, by defining new energy function data and boundary potentials. In particular, we exploit information concerning the intensity and geometry, and we add supervised energies based on contextual brain structures. Furthermore, we reinforce boundary detection using a new multi-scale edgeness measure.
Results
We apply the novel CaudateCut method to the segmentation of the caudate nucleus to a new set of 39 pediatric attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) patients and 40 control children, as well as to a public database of 18 subjects. We evaluate the quality of the segmentation using several volumetric and voxel by voxel measures. Our results show improved performance in terms of segmentation compared to state-of-the-art approaches, obtaining a mean overlap of 80.75%. Moreover, we present a quantitative volumetric analysis of caudate abnormalities in pediatric ADHD, the results of which show strong correlation with expert manual analysis.
Conclusion
CaudateCut generates segmentation results that are comparable to gold-standard segmentations and which are reliable in the analysis of differentiating neuroanatomical abnormalities between healthy controls and pediatric ADHD.
Keywords: Brain caudate nucleus; segmentation; MRI; atlas-based strategy; Graph Cut framework
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