Abstract: Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer worldwide and the second most common malignant tumor in Europe. Screening tests have shown to be very eective in increasing the survival rates since they allow an early detection of polyps. Among the dierent screening techniques, colonoscopy is considered the gold standard although clinical studies mention several problems that have an impact in the quality of the procedure. The navigation through the rectum and colon track can be challenging for the physicians which can increase polyp miss rates. The thorough visualization of the colon track must be ensured so that
the chances of missing lesions are minimized. The visual analysis of colonoscopy images can provide important information to the physicians and support their navigation during the procedure.
Blood vessels and their branching patterns can provide descriptive power to potentially develop biometric markers. Anatomical markers based on blood vessel patterns could be used to identify a particular scene in colonoscopy videos and to support endoscope navigation by generating a sequence of ordered scenes through the dierent colon sections. By verifying the presence of vascular content in the endoluminal scene it is also possible to certify a proper
inspection of the colon mucosa and to improve polyp localization. Considering the potential uses of blood vessel description, this contribution studies the characterization of the vascular content and the analysis of the descriptive power of its branching patterns.
Blood vessel characterization in colonoscopy images is shown to be a challenging task. The endoluminal scene is conformed by several elements whose similar characteristics hinder the development of particular models for each of them. To overcome such diculties we propose the use of the blood vessel branching characteristics as key features for pattern description. We present a model to characterize junctions in binary patterns. The implementation
of the junction model allows us to develop a junction localization method. We
created two data sets including manually labeled vessel information as well as manual ground truths of two types of keypoint landmarks: junctions and endpoints. The proposed method outperforms the available algorithms in the literature in experiments in both, our newly created colon vessel data set, and in DRIVE retinal fundus image data set. In the latter case, we created a manual ground truth of junction coordinates. Since we want to explore the descriptive potential of junctions and vessels, we propose a graph-based approach to
create anatomical markers. In the context of polyp localization, we present a new method to inhibit the in uence of blood vessels in the extraction valley-prole information. The results show that our methodology decreases vessel in
uence, increases polyp information and leads to an improvement in state-of-the-art polyp localization performance. We also propose a polyp-specic segmentation method that outperforms other general and specic approaches.

Abstract: We have previously developed an original method to evaluate small bowel motor function based on computer vision analysis of endoluminal images obtained by capsule endoscopy. Our aim was to demonstrate intestinal motor abnormalities in patients with functional bowel disorders by endoluminal vision analysis. Patients with functional bowel disorders (n = 205) and healthy subjects (n = 136) ingested the endoscopic capsule (Pillcam-SB2, Given-Imaging) after overnight fast and 45 min after gastric exit of the capsule a liquid meal (300 ml, 1 kcal/ml) was administered. Endoluminal image analysis was performed by computer vision and machine learning techniques to define the normal range and to identify clusters of abnormal function. After training the algorithm, we used 196 patients and 48 healthy subjects, completely naive, as test set. In the test set, 51 patients (26%) were detected outside the normal range (P < 0.001 vs. 3 healthy subjects) and clustered into hypo- and hyperdynamic subgroups compared with healthy subjects. Patients with hypodynamic behavior (n = 38) exhibited less luminal closure sequences (41 ± 2% of the recording time vs. 61 ± 2%; P < 0.001) and more static sequences (38 ± 3 vs. 20 ± 2%; P < 0.001); in contrast, patients with hyperdynamic behavior (n = 13) had an increased proportion of luminal closure sequences (73 ± 4 vs. 61 ± 2%; P = 0.029) and more high-motion sequences (3 ± 1 vs. 0.5 ± 0.1%; P < 0.001). Applying an original methodology, we have developed a novel classification of functional gut disorders based on objective, physiological criteria of small bowel function.

Abstract: We propose a meta-parameter free, off-the-shelf, simple and fast unsupervised feature learning algorithm, which exploits a new way of optimizing for sparsity. Experiments on CIFAR-10, STL- 10 and UCMerced show that the method achieves the state-of-theart performance, providing discriminative features that generalize well.

Abstract: While depth tends to improve network performances, it also makes gradient-based training more difficult since deeper networks tend to be more non-linear. The recently proposed knowledge distillation approach is aimed at obtaining small and fast-to-execute models, and it has shown that a student network could imitate the soft output of a larger teacher network or ensemble of networks. In this paper, we extend this idea to allow the training of a student that is deeper and thinner than the teacher, using not only the outputs but also the intermediate representations learned by the teacher as hints to improve the training process and final performance of the student. Because the student intermediate hidden layer will generally be smaller than the teacher's intermediate hidden layer, additional parameters are introduced to map the student hidden layer to the prediction of the teacher hidden layer. This allows one to train deeper students that can generalize better or run faster, a trade-off that is controlled by the chosen student capacity. For example, on CIFAR-10, a deep student network with almost 10.4 times less parameters outperforms a larger, state-of-the-art teacher network.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new method for egocentric video temporal segmentation based on integrating a statistical mean change detector and agglomerative clustering(AC) within an energy-minimization framework. Given the tendency of most AC methods to oversegment video sequences when clustering their frames, we combine the clustering with a concept drift detection technique (ADWIN) that has rigorous guarantee of performances. ADWIN serves as a statistical upper bound for the clustering-based video segmentation. We integrate both techniques in an energy-minimization framework that serves to disambiguate the decision of both techniques and to complete the segmentation taking into account the temporal continuity of video frames descriptors. We present experiments over egocentric sets of more than 13.000 images acquired with different wearable cameras, showing that our method outperforms state-of-the-art clustering methods.

Abstract: Arterial pulse wave velocity (PWV), an independent predictor of cardiovascular disease, physiologically increases with age; however, growing evidence suggests metabolic syndrome (MetS) accelerates this increase. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables reliable noninvasive assessment of arterial stiffness by measuring arterial PWV in specific vascular segments. We investigated the association between the presence of MetS and its components with carotid PWV (cPWV) in asymptomatic subjects without diabetes. We assessed cPWV by MRI in 61 individuals (mean age, 55.3 ± 14.1 years; median age, 55 years): 30 with MetS and 31 controls with similar age, sex, body mass index, and LDL-cholesterol levels. The study population was dichotomized by the median age. To remove the physiological association between PWV and age, unpaired t tests and multiple regression analyses were performed using the residuals of the regression between PWV and age. cPWV was higher in middle-aged subjects with MetS than in those without (p = 0.001), but no differences were found in elder subjects (p = 0.313). cPWV was associated with diastolic blood pressure (r = 0.276, p = 0.033) and waist circumference (r = 0.268, p = 0.038). The presence of MetS was associated with increased cPWV regardless of age, sex, blood pressure, and waist (p = 0.007). The MetS components contributing independently to an increased cPWV were hypertension (p = 0.018) and hypertriglyceridemia (p = 0.002). The presence of MetS is associated with an increased cPWV in middle-aged subjects. In particular, hypertension and hypertriglyceridemia may contribute to early progression of carotid stiffness.