Abstract: Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune, systemic, inflammatory disorder that mainly af- fects bone joints. While there is no cure for this disease, continuous advances on palliative treatments require frequent verification of patient’s illness evolution. Such evolution is mea- sured through several available semi-quantitative methods that require evaluation of hand and foot X-ray images. Accurate assessment is a time consuming task that requires highly trained personnel. This hinders a generalized use in clinical practice for early diagnose and disease follow-up. In the context of the automatization of such evaluation methods we present a method for detection and characterization of finger joints in hand radiography images. Several measures for assessing the reduction of joint space width are proposed. We compare for the first time such measures to the Van der Heijde score, the gold standard method for rheumatoid arthritis assessment. The proposed method outperforms existing strategies with a detection rate above 95%. Our comparison to Van der Heijde index shows a promising correlation that encourages further research.

Abstract: We analyze the feasibility of a cheap eye-tracker where the hardware consists of a single webcam and a Raspberry Pi device. Our aim is to discover the limits of such a system and to see whether it provides an acceptable performance. We base our work on the open source Opengazer (Zielinski, 2013) and we propose several improvements to create a robust, real-time system. After assessing the accuracy of our eye-tracker in elaborated experiments involving 18 subjects under 4 different system setups, we developed a simple game to see how it performs in practice and we also installed it on a Raspberry Pi to create a portable stand-alone eye-tracker which achieves 1.62° horizontal accuracy with 3 fps refresh rate for a building cost of 70 Euros.

Abstract: In real-world problems, it is mandatory to design a termination condition for Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) ensuring stabilization close to the unknown optimum. Distribution-based quantities are good candidates as far as suitable parameters are used. A main limitation for application to real-world problems is that such parameters strongly depend on the topology of the objective function, as well as, the EA paradigm used.
We claim that the termination problem would be fully solved if we had a model measuring to what extent a distribution-based quantity asymptotically behaves like the solution accuracy. We present a regression-prediction model that relates any two given quantities and reports if they can be statistically swapped as termination conditions. Our framework is applied to two issues. First, exploring if the parameters involved in the computation of distribution-based quantities influence their asymptotic behavior. Second, to what extent existing distribution-based quantities can be asymptotically exchanged for the accuracy of the EA solution.

Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for clinical and medical procedures. Although the muscular architecture of the heart has been debated by countless researchers, the controversy is still alive. Diffusion Tensor MRI, DT-MRI, is a unique imaging technique for computational validation of the muscular structure of the heart. By the complex arrangement of myocites, existing techniques can not provide comprehensive descriptions of the global muscular architecture. In this paper we introduce a multiresolution reconstruction technique based on DT-MRI streamlining for simplified global myocardial model generation. Our reconstructions can restore the most complex myocardial structures and indicate a global helical organization

Abstract: Image based human detection is of paramount interest due to its potential applications in fields such as advanced driving assistance, surveillance and media analysis. However, even detecting non-occluded standing humans remains a challenge of intensive research. The most promising human detectors rely on classifiers developed in the discriminative paradigm, i.e., trained with labelled samples. However, labeling is a manual intensive step, especially in cases like human detection where it is necessary to provide at least bounding boxes framing the humans for training. To overcome such problem, some authors have proposed the use of a virtual world where the labels of the different objects are obtained automatically. This means that the human models (classifiers) are learnt using the appearance of rendered images, i.e., using realistic computer graphics. Later, these models are used for human detection in images of the real world. The results of this technique are surprisingly good. However, these are not always as good as the classical approach of training and testing with data coming from the same camera, or similar ones. Accordingly, in this paper we address the challenge of using a virtual world for gathering (while playing a videogame) a large amount of automatically labelled samples (virtual humans and background) and then training a classifier that performs equal, in real-world images, than the one obtained by equally training from manually labelled real-world samples. For doing that, we cast the problem as one of domain adaptation. In doing so, we assume that a small amount of manually labelled samples from real-world images is required. To collect these labelled samples we propose a non-standard active learning technique. Therefore, ultimately our human model is learnt by the combination of virtual and real world labelled samples (Fig. 1), which has not been done before. We present quantitative results showing that this approach is valid.