Abstract: Medical imaging is very useful in the assessment and treatment of many diseases. To deal with the great amount of data provided by imaging scanners and extract quantitative information that physicians can interpret, many analysis algorithms have been developed. Any process of analysis always consists of a first step of segmenting some particular structure. In medical imaging, structures are not always well defined and suffer from noise artifacts thus, ordinary segmentation methods are not well suited. The ones that seem to give better results are those based on deformable models. Nevertheless, despite their capability of mixing image features together with smoothness constraints that may compensate for image irregularities, these are naturally local methods, i. e., each node of the active contour evolve taking into account information about its neighbors and some other weak constraints about flexibility and smoothness, but not about the global shape that they should find. Due to the fact that structures to be segmented are the same for all cases but with some inter and intra-patient variation, the incorporation of a priori knowledge about shape in the segmentation method will provide robustness to it. Active Shape Models is an algorithm based on the creation of a shape model called Point Distribution Model. It performs a segmentation using only shapes similar than those previously learned from a training set that capture most of the variation presented by the structure. This algorithm works by updating shape nodes along a normal segment which often can be too restrictive. For this reason we propose a generalization of this algorithm that we call Generalized Active Shape Models and fully integrates the a priori knowledge given by the Point Distribution Model with deformable models or any other appropriate segmentation method. Two different applications to cardiac imaging of this generalized method are developed and promising results are shown.

Abstract: A useful tool for some specific studies in cardiac disease diagnosis is vessel plaque assessment by analysis of IVUS sequences. Manual detection of luminal (inner) and media-adventitia (external) vessel borders is the main activity of physicians in the process of lumen narrowing (plaque) quantification. Difficult definition of vessel border descriptors, as well as, shades, artifacts and blurred signal response due to ultrasound physical properties troubles automated adventitia segmentation. In order to efficiently approach such a complex problem, we propose blending advanced anisotropic filtering operators and statistical classification techniques into a vessel border modelling strategy. Our systematic statistical analysis shows that the reported adventitia detection achieves an accuracy in the range of inter-observer variability regardless of plaque nature, vessel geometry and incomplete vessel borders.

Abstract: Accurate computation of optical flow is a key-point in many image processing fields. Detection of anomalous and unpredicted agents (such as pedestrians, bikers or cars) in urban scenes or pathology discrimination in medical imaging sequences, to mention just a two. The above kinds sequences present two main difficulties for standard optical flow techniques. On one hand, variability in acquisition conditions (illuminance, medical imaging modality, ...) force an alterantive representation for images fulfilling the britghtness constancy constrain. On the hand, current variational schemes produce oversmoothed fields unable to properly model discontinuous behaviours such as collisions or functionless pathological areas. This master project explores the abilities and limitations of local and global optical flow approaches. The master student will put especial emphasis in the theoretical grounds behind in order to design a variational framework combining the theoretical advantages of the considered techniques. In particular an optical flow based on Gabor phase tracking (developed in the group for medical imaging) will be generalized to urban scenes.

Abstract: Endoscopy is the process in which a camera is introduced inside a human.
Given that endoscopy provides realistic images (in contrast to other modalities) and allows non-invase minimal intervention procedures (which can aid in diagnosis and surgical interventions), its use has spreaded during last decades.
In this project we will focus on bronchoscopic procedures, during which the camera is introduced through the trachea in order to have a diagnostic of the patient. The diagnostic interventions are focused on: degree of stenosis (reduction in tracheal area), prosthesis or early diagnosis of tumors. In the first case, assessment of the luminal area and the calculation of the diameters of the tracheal rings are required. A main limitation is that all the process is done by hand,
which means that the doctor takes all the measurements and decisions just by looking at the screen. As far as we know there is no computational framework for helping the doctors in the diagnosis.
This project will consist of analysing bronchoscopic videos in order to extract useful information for the diagnostic of the degree of stenosis. In particular we will focus on segmentation of the tracheal rings. As a result of this project several strategies (for detecting tracheal rings) had been implemented in order to compare their performance.