Abstract: Clinical studies on atherosclerosis regression/progression performed by intravascular ultrasound analysis would benefit from accurate alignment of sequences of the same patient before and after clinical interventions and at follow-up. In this article, a methodology for automatic alignment of intravascular ultrasound sequences based on the dynamic time warping technique is proposed. The non-rigid alignment is adapted to the specific task by applying it to multidimensional signals describing the morphologic content of the vessel. Moreover, dynamic time warping is embedded into a framework comprising a strategy to address partial overlapping between acquisitions and a term that regularizes non-physiologic temporal compression/expansion of the sequences. Extensive validation is performed on both synthetic and in vivo data. The proposed method reaches alignment errors of approximately 0.43 mm for pairs of sequences acquired during the same intervention phase and 0.77 mm for pairs of sequences acquired at successive intervention stages.

Abstract: Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a device that allows the direct visualization of gastrointestinal tract with minimal discomfort for the patient, but at the price of a large amount of time for screening. In order to reduce this time, several works have proposed to automatically remove all the frames showing intestinal content. These methods label frames as {intestinal content – clear} without discriminating between types of content (with different physiological meaning) or the portion of image covered. In addition, since the presence of intestinal content has been identified as an indicator of intestinal motility, its accurate quantification can show a potential clinical relevance. In this paper, we present a method for the robust detection and segmentation of intestinal content in WCE images, together with its further discrimination between turbid liquid and bubbles. Our proposal is based on a twofold system. First, frames presenting intestinal content are detected by a support vector machine classifier using color and textural information. Second, intestinal content frames are segmented into {turbid, bubbles, and clear} regions. We show a detailed validation using a large dataset. Our system outperforms previous methods and, for the first time, discriminates between turbid from bubbles media.

Abstract: We present a fully automatic diagnostic imaging test for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder diagnosis assistance based on previously found evidences of caudate nucleus volumetric abnormalities. The proposed method consists of different steps: a new automatic method for external and internal segmentation of caudate based on Machine Learning methodologies; the definition of a set of new volume relation features, 3D Dissociated Dipoles, used for caudate representation and classification. We separately validate the contributions using real data from a pediatric population and show precise internal caudate segmentation and discrimination power of the diagnostic test, showing significant performance improvements in comparison to other state-of-the-art methods.