Abstract: The Chagaspsila disease is endemic in all Latin America, affecting millions of people in the continent. In order to diagnose and treat the Chagaspsila disease, it is important to detect and measure the coronary damage of the patient. In this paper, we analyze and categorize patients into different groups based on the coronary damage produced by the disease. Based on the features of the heart cycle extracted using high resolution ECG, a multi-class scheme of error-correcting output codes (ECOC) is formulated and successfully applied. The results show that the proposed scheme obtains significant performance improvements compared to previous works and state-of-the-art ECOC designs.

Abstract: The classification of large number of object categories is a challenging trend in the Pattern Recognition field. In the literature, this is often addressed using an ensemble of classifiers . In this scope, the Error-Correcting Output Codes framework has demonstrated to be a powerful tool for combining classifiers. However, most of the state-of-the-art ECOC approaches use a linear or exponential number of classifiers, making the discrimination of a large number of classes unfeasible. In this paper, we explore and propose a compact design of ECOC in terms of the number of classifiers. Evolutionary computation is used for tuning the parameters of the classifiers and looking for the best compact ECOC code configuration. The results over several public UCI data sets and different multi-class Computer Vision problems show that the proposed methodology obtains comparable (even better) results than the state-of-the-art ECOC methodologies with far less number of dichotomizers.

Abstract: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is commonly used in gesture recognition tasks in order to tackle the temporal length variability of gestures. In the DTW framework, a set of gesture patterns are compared one by one to a maybe infinite test sequence, and a query gesture category is recognized if a warping cost below a certain threshold is found within the test sequence. Nevertheless, either taking one single sample per gesture category or a set of isolated samples may not encode the variability of such gesture category. In this paper, a probability-based DTW for gesture recognition is proposed. Different samples of the same gesture pattern obtained from RGB-Depth data are used to build a Gaussian-based probabilistic model of the gesture. Finally, the cost of DTW has been adapted accordingly to the new model. The proposed approach is tested in a challenging scenario, showing better performance of the probability-based DTW in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches for gesture recognition on RGB-D data.

Abstract: JCR Impact Factor 2010: 3.349
Background This study aimed to determine the proportion of cases with abnormal intestinal motility among patients with functional bowel disorders. To this end, we applied an original method, previously developed in our laboratory, for analysis of endoluminal images obtained by capsule endoscopy. This novel technology is based on computer vision and machine learning techniques.
 Methods The endoscopic capsule (Pillcam SB1; Given Imaging, Yokneam, Israel) was administered to 80 patients with functional bowel disorders and 70 healthy subjects. Endoluminal image analysis was performed with a computer vision program developed for the evaluation of contractile events (luminal occlusions and radial wrinkles), non-contractile patterns (open tunnel and smooth wall patterns), type of content (secretions, chyme) and motion of wall and contents. Normality range and discrimination of abnormal cases were established by a machine learning technique. Specifically, an iterative classifier (one-class support vector machine) was applied in a random population of 50 healthy subjects as a training set and the remaining subjects (20 healthy subjects and 80 patients) as a test set.
 Key Results The classifier identified as abnormal 29% of patients with functional diseases of the bowel (23 of 80), and as normal 97% of healthy subjects (68 of 70) (P < 0.05 by chi-squared test). Patients identified as abnormal clustered in two groups, which exhibited either a hyper- or a hypodynamic motility pattern. The motor behavior was unrelated to clinical features.
Conclusions &  Inferences With appropriate methodology, abnormal intestinal motility can be demonstrated in a significant proportion of patients with functional bowel disorders, implying a pathologic disturbance of gut physiology.

Abstract: The automatic segmentation of multiple subcortical structures in brain Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) still remains a challenging task. In this paper, we address this problem using sparse representation and discriminative dictionary learning, which have shown promising results in compression, image denoising and recently in MRI segmentation. Particularly, we use multiclass dictionaries learned from a set of brain atlases to simultaneously segment multiple subcortical structures.
We also impose dictionary atoms to be specialized in one given class using label consistent K-SVD, which can alleviate the bias produced by unbalanced libraries, present when dealing with small structures. The proposed method is compared with other state of the art approaches for the segmentation of the Basal Ganglia of 35 subjects of a public dataset.
The promising results of the segmentation method show the eciency of the multiclass discriminative dictionary learning algorithms in MRI segmentation problems.