Abstract: Virtual bronchoscopy (VB) is a non-invasive exploration tool for intervention planning and navigation of possible pulmonary lesions (PLs). A VB software involves the location of a PL and the calculation of a route, starting from the trachea, to reach it. The selection of a VB software might be a complex process, and there is no consensus in the community of medical software developers in which is the best-suited system to use or framework to choose. The authors present Bronchoscopy Exploration (BronchoX), a VB software to plan biopsy interventions that generate physician-readable instructions to reach the PLs. The authors’ solution is open source, multiplatform, and extensible for future functionalities, designed by their multidisciplinary research and development group. BronchoX is a compound of different algorithms for segmentation, visualisation, and navigation of the respiratory tract. Performed results are a focus on the test the effectiveness of their proposal as an exploration software, also to measure its accuracy as a guiding system to reach PLs. Then, 40 different virtual planning paths were created to guide physicians until distal bronchioles. These results provide a functional software for BronchoX and demonstrate how following simple instructions is possible to reach distal lesions from the trachea.

Abstract: Assessing Optical Flow (OF) quality is essential for its further use in reliable decision support systems. The absence of ground truth in such situations leads to the computation of OF Confidence Measures (CM) obtained from either input or output data. A fair comparison across the capabilities of the different CM for bounding OF error is required in order to choose the best OF-CM pair for discarding points where OF computation is not reliable. This paper presents a statistical probabilistic framework for assessing the quality of a given CM. Our quality measure is given in terms of the percentage of pixels whose OF error bound can not be determined by CM values. We also provide statistical tools for the computation of CM values that ensures a given accuracy of the flow field.

Abstract: A main bottleneck in bronchoscopic biopsy sampling is to efficiently reach the lesion navigating across bronchial levels. Any guidance system should be able to localize the scope position during the intervention with minimal costs and alteration of clinical protocols. With the final goal of an affordable image-based guidance, this work presents a novel strategy to extract and codify the anatomical structure of bronchi, as well as, the scope navigation path from videobronchoscopy. Experiments using interventional data show that our method accurately identifies the bronchial structure. Meanwhile, experiments using simulated data verify that the extracted navigation path matches the 3D route.

Abstract: More than half of all commercial aircraft operation accidents could have been prevented by executing a go-around. Making timely decision to execute a go-around manoeuvre can potentially reduce overall aviation industry accident rate. In this paper, we describe a cockpit-deployable machine learning system to support flight crew go-around decision-making based on the prediction of a hard landing event.
This work presents a hybrid approach for hard landing prediction that uses features modelling temporal dependencies of aircraft variables as inputs to a neural network. Based on a large dataset of 58177 commercial flights, the results show that our approach has 85% of average sensitivity with 74% of average specificity at the go-around point. It follows that our approach is a cockpit-deployable recommendation system that outperforms existing approaches.

Abstract: Optical flow is a valuable tool for motion analysis in autonomous navigation systems. A reliable application requires determining the accuracy of the computed optical flow. This is a main challenge given the absence of ground truth in real world sequences. This paper introduces a measure of optical flow accuracy for Lucas-Kanade based flows in terms of the numerical stability of the data-term. We call this measure optical flow condition number. A statistical analysis over ground-truth data show a good statistical correlation between the condition number and optical flow error. Experiments on driving sequences illustrate its potential for autonomous navigation systems.

Abstract: Among all filtering techniques, those based exclu- sively on image level sets (geometric flows) have proven to be the less sensitive to the nature of noise and the most contrast preserving. A common feature to existent curvature flows is that they penalize high curvature, regardless of the curve regularity. This constitutes a major drawback since curvature extreme values are standard descriptors of the contour geometry. We argue that an operator designed with shape recovery purposes should include a term penalizing irregularity in the curvature rather than its magnitude. To this purpose, we present a novel geometric flow that includes a function that measures the degree of local irregularity present in the curve. A main advantage is that it achieves non-trivial steady states representing a smooth model of level curves in a noisy image. Performance of our approach is compared to classical filtering techniques in terms of quality in the restored image/shape and asymptotic behavior. We empirically prove that our approach is the technique that achieves the best compromise between image quality and evolution stabilization.