Abstract: The mitral valve vortex ring is a promising flow structure for analysis of diastolic function, however, methods for objective extraction of its formation to dissolution are lacking. We present a novel algorithm for objective extraction of the temporal evolution of the mitral valve vortex ring from magnetic resonance 4D flow data and validated the method against visual analysis. The algorithm successfully extracted mitral valve vortex rings during both early- and late-diastolic filling and agreed substantially with visual assessment. Early-diastolic mitral valve vortex ring properties differed between healthy subjects and patients with ischemic heart disease.

Abstract: Les bandes dessinées représentent un patrimoine culturel important dans de nombreux pays et leur numérisation massive offre la possibilité d'effectuer des recherches dans le contenu des images. À ce jour, ce sont principalement les structures des pages et leurs contenus textuels qui ont été étudiés, peu de travaux portent sur le contenu graphique. Nous proposons de nous appuyer sur des éléments déjà étudiés tels que la position des cases et des bulles, pour réduire l'espace de recherche et localiser les personnages en fonction de la queue des bulles. L'évaluation de nos différentes contributions à partir de la base eBDtheque montre un taux de détection des queues de bulle de 81.2%, de localisation des personnages allant jusqu'à 85% et un gain d'espace de recherche de plus de 50%.

Abstract: The current study is part of the EMPATHIC project, whose aim is to develop an Empathic Virtual Coach (VC) capable of promoting healthy and independent aging. To this end, the VC needs to be capable of perceiving the emotional states of users and adjusting its behaviour during the interactions according to what the users are experiencing in terms of emotions and comfort. Thus, the present work focuses on some sessions where elderly users of three different countries interact with a simulated system. Audio and video information extracted from these sessions were examined by external observers to assess participants' emotional experience with the EMPATHIC-VC in terms of categorical and dimensional assessment of emotions. Analyses were conducted on the emotional labels assigned by the external observers while participants were engaged in two different scenarios: a generic one, where the interaction was carried out with no intention to discuss a specific topic, and a nutrition one, aimed to accomplish a conversation on users' nutritional habits. Results of analyses performed on both audio and video data revealed that the EMPATHIC coach did not elicit negative feelings in the users. Indeed, users from all countries have shown relaxed and positive behavior when interacting with the simulated VC during both scenarios. Overall, the EMPATHIC-VC was capable to offer an enjoyable experience without eliciting negative feelings in the users. This supports the hypothesis that an Empathic Virtual Coach capable of considering users' expectations and emotional states could support elderly people in daily life activities and help them to remain independent.

Abstract: A common technique to avoid overfitting when training deep neural networks (DNN) is to monitor the performance in a dedicated validation data partition and to stop
training as soon as it saturates. This only focuses on what the model does, while completely ignoring what happens inside it.
In this work, we open the “black-box” of DNN in order to perform early stopping. We propose to use a novel theoretical framework that analyses meso-scale patterns in the topology of the functional graph of a network while it trains. Based on it,
we decide when it transitions from learning towards overfitting in a more explainable way. We exemplify the benefits of this approach on a state-of-the art custom DNN that jointly learns local representations and label structure employing an ensemble of dedicated subnetworks. We show that it is practically equivalent in performance to early stopping with patience, the standard early stopping algorithm in the literature. This proves beneficial for AU recognition performance and provides new insights into how learning of AUs occurs in DNNs.

Abstract: Facial expressions are combinations of basic components called Action Units (AU). Recognizing AUs is key for general facial expression analysis. Recently, efforts in automatic AU recognition have been dedicated to learning combinations of local features and to exploiting correlations between AUs. We propose a deep neural architecture that tackles both problems by combining learned local and global features in its initial stages and replicating a message passing algorithm between classes similar to a graphical model inference approach in later stages. We show that by training the model end-to-end with increased supervision we improve state-of-the-art by 5.3% and 8.2% performance on BP4D and DISFA datasets, respectively.

Abstract: Hundreds of millions of figures are available in the biomedical literature, representing important biomedical experimental evidence. Since text is a rich source of information in figures, automatically extracting such text may assist in the task of mining figure information and understanding biomedical documents. Unlike images in the open domain, biomedical figures present a variety of unique challenges. For example, biomedical figures typically have complex layouts, small font sizes, short text, specific text, complex symbols and irregular text arrangements. This paper presents the final results of the ICDAR 2017 Competition on Text Extraction from Biomedical Literature Figures (ICDAR2017 DeTEXT Competition), which aims at extracting (detecting and recognizing) text from biomedical literature figures. Similar to text extraction from scene images and web pictures, ICDAR2017 DeTEXT Competition includes three major tasks, i.e., text detection, cropped word recognition and end-to-end text recognition. Here, we describe in detail the data set, tasks, evaluation protocols and participants of this competition, and report the performance of the participating methods.