Abstract: “Memory Fields” is a trans-disciplinary project aiming at the (re)valorisation of digital collections.Its main deliverable is an interface for a dual screen installation, used to access and mix the public library digital collections. The collections being used in this case are a collection of digitised posters from the Spanish Civil War, belonging to the Arxiu General de Catalunya, and a collection of field recordings made by Dan Norton. The system generates visualisations, and the images and sounds are mixed together using narrative primitives of video dj. Users contribute to the digital collections by adding personal memories and observations. The comments and recollections appear as flowers growing in a “memory field” and memories remain public in a Twitter feed (@Memoryfields).

Abstract: Wireless endoscopy is a very recent and at the same time unique technique allowing to visualize and study the occurrence of con- tractions and to analyze the intestine motility. Feature extraction is es- sential for getting efficient patterns to detect contractions in wireless video endoscopy of small intestine. We propose a novel method based on anisotropic image filtering and efficient statistical classification of con- traction features. In particular, we apply the image gradient tensor for mining informative skeletons from the original image and a sequence of descriptors for capturing the characteristic pattern of contractions. Fea- tures extracted from the endoluminal images were evaluated in terms of their discriminatory ability in correct classifying images as either belong- ing to contractions or not. Classification was performed by means of a support vector machine classifier with a radial basis function kernel. Our classification rates gave sensitivity of the order of 90.84% and specificity of the order of 94.43% respectively. These preliminary results highlight the high efficiency of the selected descriptors and support the feasibility of the proposed method in assisting the automatic detection and analysis of contractions.

Abstract: Wireless capsule video endoscopy is a novel and challenging clinical technique, whose major reported drawback relates to the high amount of time needed for video visualization. In this paper, we propose a method for the rejection of the parts of the video resulting not valid for analysis by means of automatic detection of intestinal juices. We applied Gabor filters for the characterization of the bubble-like shape of intestinal juices in fasting patients. Our method achieves a significant reduction in visualization time, with no relevant loss of valid frames. The proposed approach is easily extensible to other image analysis scenarios where the described pattern of bubbles can be found.

Abstract: Small Bowel Motility Assessment by means of Wireless Capsule Video Endoscopy constitutes a novel clinical methodology in which a capsule with a micro-camera attached to it is swallowed by the patient, emitting a RF signal which is recorded as a video of its trip throughout the gut. In order to overcome the main drawbacks associated with this technique -mainly related to the large amount of visualization time required-, our efforts have been focused on the development of a machine learning system, built up in sequential stages, which provides the specialists with the useful part of the video, rejecting those parts not valid for analysis. We successfully used Self Organized Maps in a general semi-supervised framework with the aim of tackling the different learning stages of our system. The analysis of the diverse types of images and the automatic detection of intestinal contractions is performed under the perspective of intestinal motility assessment in a clinical environment.

Abstract: A method for automatically detecting a post-duodenal boundary in an image stream of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The image stream is sampled to obtain a reduced set of images for processing. The reduced set of images is filtered to remove non-valid frames or non-valid portions of frames, thereby generating a filtered set of valid images. A polar representation of the valid images is generated. Textural features of the polar representation are processed to detect the post-duodenal boundary of the GI tract.

Abstract: Dynamic tracking of heart moving is one relevant target in medical imag- ing and can be helpful for analyzing heart dynamics in the study of several cardiac diseases. For this aim, a previous segmentation problem of such structures is stated, based on certain relevant features (like edges or intensity levels, textures, etc.) Clas- sical active models have been used, but they fail when overlapping structures or not well-defined contours are present. Automatic feature learning systems may be a pow- erful tool. Discriminant active contours present optimal results in this kind of problem. They are a kind of deformable models that converge to an optimal object segmenta- tion that dynamically adapts to the object contour. The feature space is designed from a filter bank in order to guarantee the search and learning of the set of relevant fea- tures for optimal classification on each part of the object. Tracking of target evolution is obtained through the whole set of images, using information from the actual and previous stages. Feedback systems are implemented to guarantee the minimum well- separable classification set in each segmentation step. Our implementation has been proved with several series of Magnetic Resonance with improved results in segmenta- tion in comparison to previous methods.