Abstract: Whole-body 3D PET/CT tumoral volume segmentation provides relevant diagnostic and prognostic information in clinical oncology and nuclear medicine. Carrying out this procedure manually by a medical expert is time consuming and suffers from inter- and intra-observer variabilities. In this paper, a completely automatic approach to this task is presented. First, the problem is stated and described both in clinical and technological terms. Then, a novel supervised learning segmentation framework is introduced. The segmentation by learning approach is defined within a Cascade of Adaboost classifiers and a 3D contextual proposal of Multiscale Stacked Sequential Learning. Segmentation accuracy results on 200 Breast Cancer whole body PET/CT volumes show mean 49% sensitivity, 99.993% specificity and 39% Jaccard overlap Index, which represent good performance results both at the clinical and technological level.

Abstract: Background:
Suicide risk assessment usually involves an interaction between doctors and patients. However, a significant number of people with mental disorders receive no treatment for their condition due to the limited access to mental health care facilities; the reduced availability of clinicians; the lack of awareness; and stigma, neglect, and discrimination surrounding mental disorders. In contrast, internet access and social media usage have increased significantly, providing experts and patients with a means of communication that may contribute to the development of methods to detect mental health issues among social media users.
Objective:
This paper aimed to describe an approach for the suicide risk assessment of Spanish-speaking users on social media. We aimed to explore behavioral, relational, and multimodal data extracted from multiple social platforms and develop machine learning models to detect users at risk.
Methods:
We characterized users based on their writings, posting patterns, relations with other users, and images posted. We also evaluated statistical and deep learning approaches to handle multimodal data for the detection of users with signs of suicidal ideation (suicidal ideation risk group). Our methods were evaluated over a dataset of 252 users annotated by clinicians. To evaluate the performance of our models, we distinguished 2 control groups: users who make use of suicide-related vocabulary (focused control group) and generic random users (generic control group).
Results:
We identified significant statistical differences between the textual and behavioral attributes of each of the control groups compared with the suicidal ideation risk group. At a 95% CI, when comparing the suicidal ideation risk group and the focused control group, the number of friends (P=.04) and median tweet length (P=.04) were significantly different. The median number of friends for a focused control user (median 578.5) was higher than that for a user at risk (median 372.0). Similarly, the median tweet length was higher for focused control users, with 16 words against 13 words of suicidal ideation risk users. Our findings also show that the combination of textual, visual, relational, and behavioral data outperforms the accuracy of using each modality separately. We defined text-based baseline models based on bag of words and word embeddings, which were outperformed by our models, obtaining an increase in accuracy of up to 8% when distinguishing users at risk from both types of control users.
Conclusions:
The types of attributes analyzed are significant for detecting users at risk, and their combination outperforms the results provided by generic, exclusively text-based baseline models. After evaluating the contribution of image-based predictive models, we believe that our results can be improved by enhancing the models based on textual and relational features. These methods can be extended and applied to different use cases related to other mental disorders.

Abstract: Several techniques have been proposed for tackling the Structure from Motion problem through factorization in the case of missing data. However, when the percentage of unknown data is high, most of them may not perform as well as expected. Focussing on this problem, an iterative multiresolution scheme, which aims at recovering missing entries in the originally given input matrix, is proposed. Information recovered following a coarse-to-fine strategy is used for filling in the missing entries. The objective is to recover, as much as possible, missing data in the given matrix.
Thus, when a factorization technique is applied to the partially or totally filled in matrix, instead of to the originally given input one, better results will be obtained. An evaluation study about the robustness to missing and noisy data is reported.
Experimental results obtained with synthetic and real video sequences are presented to show the viability of the proposed approach.

Abstract: Traditionally, in machine vision images are represented using cartesian coordinates with uniform sampling along the axes. On the contrary, biological vision systems represent images using polar coordinates with non-uniform sampling. For various advantages provided by space-variant representations many researchers are interested in space-variant computer vision. In this direction the current work proposes a novel and simple space variant representation of images. The proposed representation is compared with the classical log-polar mapping. The log-polar representation is motivated by biological vision having the characteristic of higher resolution at the fovea and reduced resolution at the periphery. On the contrary to the log-polar, the proposed new representation has higher resolution at the periphery and lower resolution at the fovea. Our proposal is proved to be a better representation in navigational scenarios such as driver assistance systems and robotics. The experimental results involve analysis of optical flow fields computed on both proposed and log-polar representations. Additionally, an egomotion estimation application is also shown as an illustrative example. The experimental analysis comprises results from synthetic as well as real sequences.

Abstract: This paper presents a supervised subspace learning method called Kernel Generalized Discriminative Common Vectors (KGDCV), as a novel extension of the known Discriminative Common Vectors method with Kernels. Our method combines the advantages of kernel methods to model complex data and solve nonlinear
problems with moderate computational complexity, with the better generalization properties of generalized approaches for large dimensional data. These attractive combination makes KGDCV specially suited for feature extraction and classification in computer vision, image processing and pattern recognition applications. Two different approaches to this generalization are proposed, a first one based on the kernel trick (KT) and a second one based on the nonlinear projection trick (NPT) for even higher efficiency. Both methodologies
have been validated on four different image datasets containing faces, objects and handwritten digits, and compared against well known non-linear state-of-art methods. Results show better discriminant properties than other generalized approaches both linear or kernel. In addition, the KGDCV-NPT approach presents a considerable computational gain, without compromising the accuracy of the model.

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.

Abstract: Supervised training of neural networks requires a large amount of manually annotated data and the resulting networks tend to be sensitive to out-of-distribution (OOD) data.
Self- and semi-supervised training schemes reduce the amount of annotated data required during the training process. However, OOD generalization remains a major challenge for most methods. Strategies that promote smoother decision boundaries play an important role in out-of-distribution generalization. For example, embedding propagation (EP) for manifold smoothing has recently shown to considerably improve the OOD performance for few-shot classification. EP achieves smoother class manifolds by building a graph from sample embeddings and propagating information through the nodes in an unsupervised manner. In this work, we extend the original EP paper providing additional evidence and experiments showing that it attains smoother class embedding manifolds and improves results in settings beyond few-shot classification. Concretely, we show that EP improves the robustness of neural networks against multiple adversarial attacks as well as semi- and
self-supervised learning performance.