Abstract: Hundreds of millions of figures are available in the biomedical literature, representing important biomedical experimental evidence. Since text is a rich source of information in figures, automatically extracting such text may assist in the task of mining figure information and understanding biomedical documents. Unlike images in the open domain, biomedical figures present a variety of unique challenges. For example, biomedical figures typically have complex layouts, small font sizes, short text, specific text, complex symbols and irregular text arrangements. This paper presents the final results of the ICDAR 2017 Competition on Text Extraction from Biomedical Literature Figures (ICDAR2017 DeTEXT Competition), which aims at extracting (detecting and recognizing) text from biomedical literature figures. Similar to text extraction from scene images and web pictures, ICDAR2017 DeTEXT Competition includes three major tasks, i.e., text detection, cropped word recognition and end-to-end text recognition. Here, we describe in detail the data set, tasks, evaluation protocols and participants of this competition, and report the performance of the participating methods.

Abstract: This paper presents a prototype system running on portable devices for browsing and word searching through historical handwritten document collections. The platform adapts the paradigm of eBook reading, where the narrative is not necessarily sequential, but centered on the user actions. The novelty is to replace digitally born books by digitized historical manuscripts of marriage licenses, so document analysis tasks are required in the browser. With an active reading paradigm, the user can cast queries of people names, so he/she can implicitly follow genealogical links. In addition, the system allows combined searches: the user can refine a search by adding more words to search. As a second contribution, the retrieval functionality involves as a core technology a word spotting module with an unified approach, which allows combined query searches, and also two input modalities: query-by-example, and query-by-string.

Abstract: The Quantitative Coronary Angiography (QCA) is a methodology used to evaluate the arterial diseases and, in particular, the degree of stenosis. In this paper we propose AQCA, a fully automatic method for vessel segmentation based on graph cut theory. Vesselness, geodesic paths and a new multi-scale edgeness map are used to compute a globally optimal artery segmentation. We evaluate the method performance in a rigorous numerical way on two datasets. The method can detect an artery with precision 92.9 +/- 5% and sensitivity 94.2 +/- 6%. The average absolute distance error between detected and ground truth centerline is 1.13 +/- 0.11 pixels (about 0.27 +/- 0.025 mm) and the absolute relative error in the vessel caliber estimation is 2.93% with almost no bias. Moreover, the method can discriminate between arteries and catheter with an accuracy of 96.4%.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a complete framework that automatically provides fluid-dynamic and plaque analysis from IVUS and Angiographic sequences. Such framework is used to analyze, in three coronary arteries, the relation between wall shear stress with type and amount of plaque. Preliminary qualitative results show an inverse relation between the wall shear stress and the plaque burden, which is confirmed by the fact that the plaque growth is higher on the wall having concave curvature. Regarding the plaque type it was observed that regions having low shear stress are predominantly fibro-lipidic while the heavy calcifications are in general located in areas of the vessel having high WSS.