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Jose Seabra, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, J. Mauri, Petia Radeva, & Joao Sanchez. (2011). Rayleigh Mixture Model for Plaque Characterization in Intravascular Ultrasound. TBME - IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 58(5), 1314–1324.
Abstract: Vulnerable plaques are the major cause of carotid and coronary vascular problems, such as heart attack or stroke. A correct modeling of plaque echomorphology and composition can help the identification of such lesions. The Rayleigh distribution is widely used to describe (nearly) homogeneous areas in ultrasound images. Since plaques may contain tissues with heterogeneous regions, more complex distributions depending on multiple parameters are usually needed, such as Rice, K or Nakagami distributions. In such cases, the problem formulation becomes more complex, and the optimization procedure to estimate the plaque echomorphology is more difficult. Here, we propose to model the tissue echomorphology by means of a mixture of Rayleigh distributions, known as the Rayleigh mixture model (RMM). The problem formulation is still simple, but its ability to describe complex textural patterns is very powerful. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic estimation of the RMM mixture parameters by means of the expectation maximization algorithm, which aims at characterizing tissue echomorphology in ultrasound (US). The performance of the proposed model is evaluated with a database of in vitro intravascular US cases. We show that the mixture coefficients and Rayleigh parameters explicitly derived from the mixture model are able to accurately describe different plaque types and to significantly improve the characterization performance of an already existing methodology.
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Sergio Escalera, Alicia Fornes, Oriol Pujol, Josep Llados, & Petia Radeva. (2011). Circular Blurred Shape Model for Multiclass Symbol Recognition. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (Part B) (IEEE), 41(2), 497–506.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a circular blurred shape model descriptor to deal with the problem of symbol detection and classification as a particular case of object recognition. The feature extraction is performed by capturing the spatial arrangement of significant object characteristics in a correlogram structure. The shape information from objects is shared among correlogram regions, where a prior blurring degree defines the level of distortion allowed in the symbol, making the descriptor tolerant to irregular deformations. Moreover, the descriptor is rotation invariant by definition. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed descriptor in both the multiclass symbol recognition and symbol detection domains. In order to perform the symbol detection, the descriptors are learned using a cascade of classifiers. In the case of multiclass categorization, the new feature space is learned using a set of binary classifiers which are embedded in an error-correcting output code design. The results over four symbol data sets show the significant improvements of the proposed descriptor compared to the state-of-the-art descriptors. In particular, the results are even more significant in those cases where the symbols suffer from elastic deformations.
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Sergio Escalera. (2013). Multi-Modal Human Behaviour Analysis from Visual Data Sources. ERCIM - ERCIM News journal, 21–22.
Abstract: The Human Pose Recovery and Behaviour Analysis group (HuPBA), University of Barcelona, is developing a line of research on multi-modal analysis of humans in visual data. The novel technology is being applied in several scenarios with high social impact, including sign language recognition, assisted technology and supported diagnosis for the elderly and people with mental/physical disabilities, fitness conditioning, and Human Computer Interaction.
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Xavier Carrillo, E Fernandez-Nofrerias, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, Petia Radeva, Neus Salvatella, et al. (2011). Changes in Radial Artery Volume Assessed Using Intravascular Ultrasound: A Comparison of Two Vasodilator Regimens in Transradial Coronary Intervention. JOIC - Journal of Invasive Cardiology, 23(10), 401–404.
Abstract: OBJECTIVES:
This study used intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) to evaluate radial artery volume changes after intraarterial administration of nitroglycerin and/or verapamil.
BACKGROUND:
Radial artery spasm, which is associated with radial artery size, is the main limitation of the transradial approach in percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI).
METHODS:
This prospective, randomized study compared the effect of two intra-arterial vasodilator regimens on radial artery volume: 0.2 mg of nitroglycerin plus 2.5 mg of verapamil (Group 1; n = 15) versus 2.5 mg of verapamil alone (Group 2; n = 15). Radial artery lumen volume was assessed using IVUS at two time points: at baseline (5 minutes after sheath insertion) and post-vasodilator (1 minute after drug administration). The luminal volume of the radial artery was computed using ECOC Random Fields (ECOC-RF), a technique used for automatic segmentation of luminal borders in longitudinal cut images from IVUS sequences.
RESULTS:
There was a significant increase in arterial lumen volume in both groups, with an increase from 451 ± 177 mm³ to 508 ± 192 mm³ (p = 0.001) in Group 1 and from 456 ± 188 mm³ to 509 ± 170 mm³ (p = 0.001) in Group 2. There were no significant differences between the groups in terms of absolute volume increase (58 mm³ versus 53 mm³, respectively; p = 0.65) or in relative volume increase (14% versus 20%, respectively; p = 0.69).
CONCLUSIONS:
Administration of nitroglycerin plus verapamil or verapamil alone to the radial artery resulted in similar increases in arterial lumen volume according to ECOC-RF IVUS measurements.
Keywords: radial; vasodilator treatment; percutaneous coronary intervention; IVUS; volumetric IVUS analysis
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Sergio Escalera, Ana Puig, Oscar Amoros, & Maria Salamo. (2011). Intelligent GPGPU Classification in Volume Visualization: a framework based on Error-Correcting Output Codes. CGF - Computer Graphics Forum, 30(7), 2107–2115.
Abstract: IF JCR 1.455 2010 25/99
In volume visualization, the definition of the regions of interest is inherently an iterative trial-and-error process finding out the best parameters to classify and render the final image. Generally, the user requires a lot of expertise to analyze and edit these parameters through multi-dimensional transfer functions. In this paper, we present a framework of intelligent methods to label on-demand multiple regions of interest. These methods can be split into a two-level GPU-based labelling algorithm that computes in time of rendering a set of labelled structures using the Machine Learning Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. In a pre-processing step, ECOC trains a set of Adaboost binary classifiers from a reduced pre-labelled data set. Then, at the testing stage, each classifier is independently applied on the features of a set of unlabelled samples and combined to perform multi-class labelling. We also propose an alternative representation of these classifiers that allows to highly parallelize the testing stage. To exploit that parallelism we implemented the testing stage in GPU-OpenCL. The empirical results on different data sets for several volume structures shows high computational performance and classification accuracy.
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