Abstract: Bronchoscopy allows to examine the patient airways for detection of lesions and sampling of tissues without surgery. A main drawback in lung cancer diagnosis is the diculty to check whether the exploration is following the correct path to the nodule that has to be biopsied. The most extended guidance uses uoroscopy which implies repeated radiation of clinical sta and patients. Alternatives such as virtual bronchoscopy or electromagnetic navigation are very expensive and not completely robust to blood, mocus or deformations as to be extensively used. We propose a method that extracts and tracks stable lumen regions at dierent levels of the bronchial tree. The tracked regions are stored in a tree that encodes the anatomical structure of the scene which can be useful to retrieve the path to the lesion that the clinician should follow to do the biopsy. We present a multi-expert validation of our anatomical landmark extraction in 3 intra-operative ultrathin explorations.

Abstract: Background: Bronchoscopy is a safe technique for diagnosing peripheral pulmonary lesions (PPLs), and virtual bronchoscopic navigation (VBN) helps guide the bronchoscope to PPLs. Objectives: We aimed to compare the diagnostic yield of VBN-guided and unguided ultrathin bronchoscopy (UTB) and explore clinical and technical factors associated with better results. We developed a diagnostic algorithm for deciding whether to use VBN to reach PPLs or choose an alternative diagnostic approach. Methods: We compared diagnostic yield between VBN-UTB (prospective cases) and unguided UTB (historical controls) and analyzed the VBN-UTB subgroup to identify clinical and technical variables that could predict the success of VBN-UTB. Results: Fifty-five cases and 110 controls were included. The overall diagnostic yield did not differ between the VBN-guided and unguided arms (47 and 40%, respectively; p = 0.354). Although the yield was slightly higher for PPLs ≤20 mm in the VBN-UTB arm, the difference was not significant (p = 0.069). No other clinical characteristics were associated with a higher yield in a subgroup analysis, but an 85% diagnostic yield was observed when segmentation was optimal and the PPL was endobronchial (vs. 30% when segmentation was suboptimal and 20% when segmentation was optimal but the PPL was extrabronchial). Conclusions: VBN-guided UTB is not superior to unguided UTB. A greater impact of VBN-guided over unguided UTB is highly dependent on both segmentation quality and an endobronchial location of the PPL. Segmentation quality should be considered before starting a procedure, when an alternative technique that may improve yield can be chosen, saving time and resources.

Abstract: Obtaining a standardized benchmark of computational methods is a major issue in data-science communities. Dedicated frameworks enabling fair benchmarking in a unified environment are yet to be developed. Here, we introduce Codabench, a meta-benchmark platform that is open sourced and community driven for benchmarking algorithms or software agents versus datasets or tasks. A public instance of Codabench is open to everyone free of charge and allows benchmark organizers to fairly compare submissions under the same setting (software, hardware, data, algorithms), with custom protocols and data formats. Codabench has unique features facilitating easy organization of flexible and reproducible benchmarks, such as the possibility of reusing templates of benchmarks and supplying compute resources on demand. Codabench has been used internally and externally on various applications, receiving more than 130 users and 2,500 submissions. As illustrative use cases, we introduce four diverse benchmarks covering graph machine learning, cancer heterogeneity, clinical diagnosis, and reinforcement learning.

Abstract: Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (Cardiac MRI) has become a gold standard diagnostic technique for the assessment of cardiac mechanics, allowing the non-invasive calculation of left ventric- ular long axis longitudinal shortening (LVLS) and absolute myocardial torsion (AMT) between basal and apical left ventricular slices, a movement directly related to the helicoidal anatomic disposition of the myocardial fibers. The aim of this study is to determine AMT and LVLS behaviour and normal values from a group of healthy subjects. A group of 21 healthy volunteers (15 males) (age: 23–55 y.o., mean:30.7 ± 7.5) were prospectively included in an obser- vational study by Cardiac MRI. Left ventricular rotation (degrees) was calculated by custom-made software (Harmonic Phase Flow) in consecutive LV short axis planes tagged cine-MRI sequences. AMT was determined from the difference between basal and apical planes LV rotations. LVLS (%) was determined from the LV longitudinal and horizontal axis cine-MRI images. All the 21 cases studied were interpretable, although in three cases the value of the LV apical rotation could not be determined. The mean rotation of the basal and apical planes at end-systole were -3.71° ± 0.84° and 6.73° ± 1.69° (n:18) respectively, resulting in a LV mean AMT of 10.48° ± 1.63° (n:18). End-systolic mean LVLS was 19.07 ± 2.71%. Cardiac MRI allows for the calculation of AMT and LVLS, fundamental functional components of the ventricular twist mechanics conditioned, in turn, by the anatomical helical layout of the myocardial fibers. These values provide complementary information about systolic ventricular function in relation to the traditional parameters used in daily practice.

Abstract: Nowadays the paradigm of link discovery problems has shown significant improvements on Knowledge Graphs. However, method performances are harmed by the unbalanced nature of this classification problem, since many methods are easily biased to not find proper links. In this paper we present a discriminative neural variational auto-encoder model, called DNVAE from now on, in which we have introduced latent variables to serve as embedding vectors. As a result, the learnt generative model approximate better the underlying distribution and, at the same time, it better differentiate the type of relations in the knowledge graph. We have evaluated this approach on benchmark knowledge graph and Census records. Results in this last data set are quite impressive since we reach the highest possible score in the evaluation metrics. However, further experiments are still needed to deeper evaluate the performance of the method in more challenging tasks.

Abstract: The task of image-text matching aims to map representations from different modalities into a common joint visual-textual embedding. However, the most widely used datasets for this task, MSCOCO and Flickr30K, are actually image captioning datasets that offer a very limited set of relationships between images and sentences in their ground-truth annotations. This limited ground truth information forces us to use evaluation metrics based on binary relevance: given a sentence query we consider only one image as relevant. However, many other relevant images or captions may be present in the dataset. In this work, we propose two metrics that evaluate the degree of semantic relevance of retrieved items, independently of their annotated binary relevance. Additionally, we incorporate a novel strategy that uses an image captioning metric, CIDEr, to define a Semantic Adaptive Margin (SAM) to be optimized in a standard triplet loss. By incorporating our formulation to existing models, a large improvement is obtained in scenarios where available training data is limited. We also demonstrate that the performance on the annotated image-caption pairs is maintained while improving on other non-annotated relevant items when employing the full training set. The code for our new metric can be found at github. com/furkanbiten/ncsmetric and the model implementation at github. com/andrespmd/semanticadaptive_margin.

Abstract: We present a fully automatic methodology for the detection of the Media-Adventitia border (MAb) in human coronary artery in Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) images. A robust border detection is achieved by means of a holistic interpretation of the detection problem where the target object, i.e. the media layer, is considered as part of the whole vessel in the image and all the relationships between tissues are learnt. A fairly general framework exploiting multi-class tissue characterization as well as contextual information on the morphology and the appearance of the tissues is presented. The methodology is (i) validated through an exhaustive comparison with both Inter-observer variability on two challenging databases and (ii) compared with state-of-the-art methods for the detection of the MAb in IVUS. The obtained averaged values for the mean radial distance and the percentage of area difference are 0.211 mm and 10.1%, respectively. The applicability of the proposed methodology to clinical practice is also discussed.