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Simone Balocco, O. Basset, G. Courbebaisse, E. Boni, Alejandro F. Frangi, P. Tortoli, et al. (2010). Estimation Of Viscoelastic Properties Of Vessel Walls Using a Computational Model and Doppler Ultrasound. PMB - Physics in Medicine and Biology, 55(12), 3557–3575.
Abstract: Human arteries affected by atherosclerosis are characterized by altered wall viscoelastic properties. The possibility of noninvasively assessing arterial viscoelasticity in vivo would significantly contribute to the early diagnosis and prevention of this disease. This paper presents a noniterative technique to estimate the viscoelastic parameters of a vascular wall Zener model. The approach requires the simultaneous measurement of flow variations and wall displacements, which can be provided by suitable ultrasound Doppler instruments. Viscoelastic parameters are estimated by fitting the theoretical constitutive equations to the experimental measurements using an ARMA parameter approach. The accuracy and sensitivity of the proposed method are tested using reference data generated by numerical simulations of arterial pulsation in which the physiological conditions and the viscoelastic parameters of the model can be suitably varied. The estimated values quantitatively agree with the reference values, showing that the only parameter affected by changing the physiological conditions is viscosity, whose relative error was about 27% even when a poor signal-to-noise ratio is simulated. Finally, the feasibility of the method is illustrated through three measurements made at different flow regimes on a cylindrical vessel phantom, yielding a parameter mean estimation error of 25%.
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Simone Balocco, O. Camara, E. Vivas, T. Sola, L. Guimaraens, H. A. van Andel, et al. (2010). Feasibility of Estimating Regional Mechanical Properties of Cerebral Aneurysms In Vivo. MEDPHYS - Medical Physics, 37(4), 1689–1706.
Abstract: PURPOSE:
In this article, the authors studied the feasibility of estimating regional mechanical properties in cerebral aneurysms, integrating information extracted from imaging and physiological data with generic computational models of the arterial wall behavior.
METHODS:
A data assimilation framework was developed to incorporate patient-specific geometries into a given biomechanical model, whereas wall motion estimates were obtained from applying registration techniques to a pair of simulated MR images and guided the mechanical parameter estimation. A simple incompressible linear and isotropic Hookean model coupled with computational fluid-dynamics was employed as a first approximation for computational purposes. Additionally, an automatic clustering technique was developed to reduce the number of parameters to assimilate at the optimization stage and it considerably accelerated the convergence of the simulations. Several in silico experiments were designed to assess the influence of aneurysm geometrical characteristics and the accuracy of wall motion estimates on the mechanical property estimates. Hence, the proposed methodology was applied to six real cerebral aneurysms and tested against a varying number of regions with different elasticity, different mesh discretization, imaging resolution, and registration configurations.
RESULTS:
Several in silico experiments were conducted to investigate the feasibility of the proposed workflow, results found suggesting that the estimation of the mechanical properties was mainly influenced by the image spatial resolution and the chosen registration configuration. According to the in silico experiments, the minimal spatial resolution needed to extract wall pulsation measurements with enough accuracy to guide the proposed data assimilation framework was of 0.1 mm.
CONCLUSIONS:
Current routine imaging modalities do not have such a high spatial resolution and therefore the proposed data assimilation framework cannot currently be used on in vivo data to reliably estimate regional properties in cerebral aneurysms. Besides, it was observed that the incorporation of fluid-structure interaction in a biomechanical model with linear and isotropic material properties did not have a substantial influence in the final results.
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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, R. M. Martinez, Jordi Vitria, Petia Radeva, & Maria Teresa Anguera. (2010). Deteccion automatica de la dominancia en conversaciones diadicas. EP - Escritos de Psicologia, 3(2), 41–45.
Abstract: Dominance is referred to the level of influence that a person has in a conversation. Dominance is an important research area in social psychology, but the problem of its automatic estimation is a very recent topic in the contexts of social and wearable computing. In this paper, we focus on the dominance detection of visual cues. We estimate the correlation among observers by categorizing the dominant people in a set of face-to-face conversations. Different dominance indicators from gestural communication are defined, manually annotated, and compared to the observers' opinion. Moreover, these indicators are automatically extracted from video sequences and learnt by using binary classifiers. Results from the three analyses showed a high correlation and allows the categorization of dominant people in public discussion video sequences.
Keywords: Dominance detection; Non-verbal communication; Visual features
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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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