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Xavier Otazu, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Maria Vanrell. (2010). Towards a unified chromatic inducction model. VSS - Journal of Vision, 10(12:5), 1–24.
Abstract: In a previous work (X. Otazu, M. Vanrell, & C. A. Párraga, 2008b), we showed how several brightness induction effects can be predicted using a simple multiresolution wavelet model (BIWaM). Here we present a new model for chromatic induction processes (termed Chromatic Induction Wavelet Model or CIWaM), which is also implemented on a multiresolution framework and based on similar assumptions related to the spatial frequency and the contrast surround energy of the stimulus. The CIWaM can be interpreted as a very simple extension of the BIWaM to the chromatic channels, which in our case are defined in the MacLeod-Boynton (lsY) color space. This new model allows us to unify both chromatic assimilation and chromatic contrast effects in a single mathematical formulation. The predictions of the CIWaM were tested by means of several color and brightness induction experiments, which showed an acceptable agreement between model predictions and psychophysical data.
Keywords: Visual system; Color induction; Wavelet transform
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C. Alejandro Parraga, Jordi Roca, & Maria Vanrell. (2011). Do Basic Colors Influence Chromatic Adaptation? VSS - Journal of Vision, 11(11), 85.
Abstract: Color constancy (the ability to perceive colors relatively stable under different illuminants) is the result of several mechanisms spread across different neural levels and responding to several visual scene cues. It is usually measured by estimating the perceived color of a grey patch under an illuminant change. In this work, we hypothesize whether chromatic adaptation (without a reference white or grey) could be driven by certain colors, specifically those corresponding to the universal color terms proposed by Berlin and Kay (1969). To this end we have developed a new psychophysical paradigm in which subjects adjust the color of a test patch (in CIELab space) to match their memory of the best example of a given color chosen from the universal terms list (grey, red, green, blue, yellow, purple, pink, orange and brown). The test patch is embedded inside a Mondrian image and presented on a calibrated CRT screen inside a dark cabin. All subjects were trained to “recall” their most exemplary colors reliably from memory and asked to always produce the same basic colors when required under several adaptation conditions. These include achromatic and colored Mondrian backgrounds, under a simulated D65 illuminant and several colored illuminants. A set of basic colors were measured for each subject under neutral conditions (achromatic background and D65 illuminant) and used as “reference” for the rest of the experiment. The colors adjusted by the subjects in each adaptation condition were compared to the reference colors under the corresponding illuminant and a “constancy index” was obtained for each of them. Our results show that for some colors the constancy index was better than for grey. The set of best adapted colors in each condition were common to a majority of subjects and were dependent on the chromaticity of the illuminant and the chromatic background considered.
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Jordi Roca, A.Owen, G.Jordan, Y.Ling, C. Alejandro Parraga, & A.Hurlbert. (2011). Inter-individual Variations in Color Naming and the Structure of 3D Color Space. In Journal of Vision (Vol. 12, 166).
Abstract: 36.307
Many everyday behavioural uses of color vision depend on color naming ability, which is neither measured nor predicted by most standardized tests of color vision, for either normal or anomalous color vision. Here we demonstrate a new method to quantify color naming ability by deriving a compact computational description of individual 3D color spaces. Methods: Individual observers underwent standardized color vision diagnostic tests (including anomaloscope testing) and a series of custom-made color naming tasks using 500 distinct color samples, either CRT stimuli (“light”-based) or Munsell chips (“surface”-based), with both forced- and free-choice color naming paradigms. For each subject, we defined his/her color solid as the set of 3D convex hulls computed for each basic color category from the relevant collection of categorised points in perceptually uniform CIELAB space. From the parameters of the convex hulls, we derived several indices to characterise the 3D structure of the color solid and its inter-individual variations. Using a reference group of 25 normal trichromats (NT), we defined the degree of normality for the shape, location and overlap of each color region, and the extent of “light”-“surface” agreement. Results: Certain features of color perception emerge from analysis of the average NT color solid, e.g.: (1) the white category is slightly shifted towards blue; and (2) the variability in category border location across NT subjects is asymmetric across color space, with least variability in the blue/green region. Comparisons between individual and average NT indices reveal specific naming “deficits”, e.g.: (1) Category volumes for white, green, brown and grey are expanded for anomalous trichromats and dichromats; and (2) the focal structure of color space is disrupted more in protanopia than other forms of anomalous color vision. The indices both capture the structure of subjective color spaces and allow us to quantify inter-individual differences in color naming ability.
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Javier Vazquez, J. Kevin O'Regan, Maria Vanrell, & Graham D. Finlayson. (2012). A new spectrally sharpened basis to predict colour naming, unique hues, and hue cancellation. VSS - Journal of Vision, 12(6 (7)), 1–14.
Abstract: When light is reflected off a surface, there is a linear relation between the three human photoreceptor responses to the incoming light and the three photoreceptor responses to the reflected light. Different colored surfaces have different linear relations. Recently, Philipona and O'Regan (2006) showed that when this relation is singular in a mathematical sense, then the surface is perceived as having a highly nameable color. Furthermore, white light reflected by that surface is perceived as corresponding precisely to one of the four psychophysically measured unique hues. However, Philipona and O'Regan's approach seems unrelated to classical psychophysical models of color constancy. In this paper we make this link. We begin by transforming cone sensors to spectrally sharpened counterparts. In sharp color space, illumination change can be modeled by simple von Kries type scalings of response values within each of the spectrally sharpened response channels. In this space, Philipona and O'Regan's linear relation is captured by a simple Land-type color designator defined by dividing reflected light by incident light. This link between Philipona and O'Regan's theory and Land's notion of color designator gives the model biological plausibility. We then show that Philipona and O'Regan's singular surfaces are surfaces which are very close to activating only one or only two of such newly defined spectrally sharpened sensors, instead of the usual three. Closeness to zero is quantified in a new simplified measure of singularity which is also shown to relate to the chromaticness of colors. As in Philipona and O'Regan's original work, our new theory accounts for a large variety of psychophysical color data.
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David Roche, Debora Gil, & Jesus Giraldo. (2012). Assessing agonist efficacy in an uncertain Em world. In A. Christopoulus and M. Bouvier (Ed.), 40th Keystone Symposia on mollecular and celular biology (79). Keystone Symposia.
Abstract: The operational model of agonism has been widely used for the analysis of agonist action since its formulation in 1983. The model includes the Em parameter, which is defined as the maximum response of the system. The methods for Em estimation provide Em values not significantly higher than the maximum responses achieved by full agonists. However, it has been found that that some classes of compounds as, for instance, superagonists and positive allosteric modulators can increase the full agonist maximum response, implying upper limits for Em and thereby posing doubts on the validity of Em estimates. Because of the correlation between Em and operational efficacy, τ, wrong Em estimates will yield wrong τ estimates.
In this presentation, the operational model of agonism and various methods for the simulation of allosteric modulation will be analyzed. Alternatives for curve fitting will be presented and discussed.
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Fernando Vilariño, & Petia Radeva. (2002). Patch-Optimized Discriminant Active Contours for Medical Image Segmentation. In Iberoamerican Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Springer Verlag.
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Enric Marti, Jaume Rocarias, & Ricardo Toledo. (2008). Caronte: gestión flexible de grupos de alumnos en asignaturas de universidad y actividades sobre estos grupos. Barcelona.
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Alberto Hidalgo, Ferran Poveda, Enric Marti, Debora Gil, Albert Andaluz, Francesc Carreras, et al. (2012). Evidence of continuous helical structure of the cardiac ventricular anatomy assessed by diffusion tensor imaging magnetic resonance multiresolution tractography. ECR - European Radiology, 3(1), 361–362.
Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure linking morphology and func- tion of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for medical and surgical clinical procedures and studies. Diffusion tensor MRI provides a discrete measurement of the 3D arrangement of myocardial fibres by the observation of local anisotropic
diffusion of water molecules in biological tissues. In this work, we present a multi- scale visualisation technique based on DT-MRI streamlining capable of uncovering additional properties of the architectural organisation of the heart. Methods and Materials: We selected the John Hopkins University (JHU) Canine Heart Dataset, where the long axis cardiac plane is aligned with the scanner’s Z- axis. Their equipment included a 4-element passed array coil emitting a 1.5 T. For DTI acquisition, a 3D-FSE sequence is apply. We used 200 seeds for full-scale tractography, while we applied a MIP mapping technique for simplified tractographic reconstruction. In this case, we reduced each DTI 3D volume dimensions by order- two magnitude before streamlining.
Our simplified tractographic reconstruction method keeps the main geometric features of fibres, allowing for an easier identification of their global morphological disposition, including the ventricular basal ring. Moreover, we noticed a clearly visible helical disposition of the myocardial fibres, in line with the helical myocardial band ventricular structure described by Torrent-Guasp. Finally, our simplified visualisation with single tracts identifies the main segments of the helical ventricular architecture.
DT-MRI makes possible the identification of a continuous helical architecture of the myocardial fibres, which validates Torrent-Guasp’s helical myocardial band ventricular anatomical model.
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Simone Balocco, O. Camara, E. Vivas, T. Sola, L. Guimaraens, H. A. van Andel, et al. (2010). Feasibility of Estimating Regional Mechanical Properties of Cerebral Aneurysms In Vivo. MEDPHYS - Medical Physics, 37(4), 1689–1706.
Abstract: PURPOSE:
In this article, the authors studied the feasibility of estimating regional mechanical properties in cerebral aneurysms, integrating information extracted from imaging and physiological data with generic computational models of the arterial wall behavior.
METHODS:
A data assimilation framework was developed to incorporate patient-specific geometries into a given biomechanical model, whereas wall motion estimates were obtained from applying registration techniques to a pair of simulated MR images and guided the mechanical parameter estimation. A simple incompressible linear and isotropic Hookean model coupled with computational fluid-dynamics was employed as a first approximation for computational purposes. Additionally, an automatic clustering technique was developed to reduce the number of parameters to assimilate at the optimization stage and it considerably accelerated the convergence of the simulations. Several in silico experiments were designed to assess the influence of aneurysm geometrical characteristics and the accuracy of wall motion estimates on the mechanical property estimates. Hence, the proposed methodology was applied to six real cerebral aneurysms and tested against a varying number of regions with different elasticity, different mesh discretization, imaging resolution, and registration configurations.
RESULTS:
Several in silico experiments were conducted to investigate the feasibility of the proposed workflow, results found suggesting that the estimation of the mechanical properties was mainly influenced by the image spatial resolution and the chosen registration configuration. According to the in silico experiments, the minimal spatial resolution needed to extract wall pulsation measurements with enough accuracy to guide the proposed data assimilation framework was of 0.1 mm.
CONCLUSIONS:
Current routine imaging modalities do not have such a high spatial resolution and therefore the proposed data assimilation framework cannot currently be used on in vivo data to reliably estimate regional properties in cerebral aneurysms. Besides, it was observed that the incorporation of fluid-structure interaction in a biomechanical model with linear and isotropic material properties did not have a substantial influence in the final results.
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Marina Alberti, Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Joana Silva, et al. (2012). Automatic Bifurcation Detection in Coronary IVUS Sequences. TBME - IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 59(4), 1022–2031.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a fully automatic method which identifies every bifurcation in an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) sequence, the corresponding frames, the angular orientation with respect to the IVUS acquisition, and the extension. This goal is reached using a two-level classification scheme: first, a classifier is applied to a set of textural features extracted from each image of a sequence. A comparison among three state-of-the-art discriminative classifiers (AdaBoost, random forest, and support vector machine) is performed to identify the most suitable method for the branching detection task. Second, the results are improved by exploiting contextual information using a multiscale stacked sequential learning scheme. The results are then successively refined using a-priori information about branching dimensions and geometry. The proposed approach provides a robust tool for the quick review of pullback sequences, facilitating the evaluation of the lesion at bifurcation sites. The proposed method reaches an F-Measure score of 86.35%, while the F-Measure scores for inter- and intraobserver variability are 71.63% and 76.18%, respectively. The obtained results are positive. Especially, considering the branching detection task is very challenging, due to high variability in bifurcation dimensions and appearance.
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Javier Marin, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez, Jaume Amores, & Ludmila I. Kuncheva. (2014). Occlusion handling via random subspace classifiers for human detection. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Part B), 44(3), 342–354.
Abstract: This paper describes a general method to address partial occlusions for human detection in still images. The Random Subspace Method (RSM) is chosen for building a classifier ensemble robust against partial occlusions. The component classifiers are chosen on the basis of their individual and combined performance. The main contribution of this work lies in our approach’s capability to improve the detection rate when partial occlusions are present without compromising the detection performance on non occluded data. In contrast to many recent approaches, we propose a method which does not require manual labelling of body parts, defining any semantic spatial components, or using additional data coming from motion or stereo. Moreover, the method can be easily extended to other object classes. The experiments are performed on three large datasets: the INRIA person dataset, the Daimler Multicue dataset, and a new challenging dataset, called PobleSec, in which a considerable number of targets are partially occluded. The different approaches are evaluated at the classification and detection levels for both partially occluded and non-occluded data. The experimental results show that our detector outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in the presence of partial occlusions, while offering performance and reliability similar to those of the holistic approach on non-occluded data. The datasets used in our experiments have been made publicly available for benchmarking purposes
Keywords: Pedestriand Detection; occlusion handling
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Frederic Sampedro, Anna Domenech, & Sergio Escalera. (2014). Obtaining quantitative global tumoral state indicators based on whole-body PET/CT scans: A breast cancer case study. NMC - Nuclear Medicine Communications, 35(4), 362–371.
Abstract: Objectives: In this work we address the need for the computation of quantitative global tumoral state indicators from oncological whole-body PET/computed tomography scans. The combination of such indicators with other oncological information such as tumor markers or biopsy results would prove useful in oncological decision-making scenarios.
Materials and methods: From an ordering of 100 breast cancer patients on the basis of oncological state through visual analysis by a consensus of nuclear medicine specialists, a set of numerical indicators computed from image analysis of the PET/computed tomography scan is presented, which attempts to summarize a patient’s oncological state in a quantitative manner taking into consideration the total tumor volume, aggressiveness, and spread.
Results: Results obtained by comparative analysis of the proposed indicators with respect to the experts’ evaluation show up to 87% Pearson’s correlation coefficient when providing expert-guided PET metabolic tumor volume segmentation and 64% correlation when using completely automatic image analysis techniques.
Conclusion: Global quantitative tumor information obtained by whole-body PET/CT image analysis can prove useful in clinical nuclear medicine settings and oncological decision-making scenarios. The completely automatic computation of such indicators would improve its impact as time efficiency and specialist independence would be achieved.
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Jordi Roca, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Maria Vanrell. (2011). Categorical Focal Colours are Structurally Invariant Under Illuminant Changes. In European Conference on Visual Perception (196). Perception 40.
Abstract: The visual system perceives the colour of surfaces approximately constant under changes of illumination. In this work, we investigate how stable is the perception of categorical \“focal\” colours and their interrelations with varying illuminants and simple chromatic backgrounds. It has been proposed that best examples of colour categories across languages cluster in small regions of the colour space and are restricted to a set of 11 basic terms (Kay and Regier, 2003 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 100 9085\–9089). Following this, we developed a psychophysical paradigm that exploits the ability of subjects to reliably reproduce the most representative examples of each category, adjusting multiple test patches embedded in a coloured Mondrian. The experiment was run on a CRT monitor (inside a dark room) under various simulated illuminants. We modelled the recorded data for each subject and adapted state as a 3D interconnected structure (graph) in Lab space. The graph nodes were the subject\’s focal colours at each adaptation state. The model allowed us to get a better distance measure between focal structures under different illuminants. We found that perceptual focal structures tend to be preserved better than the structures of the physical \“ideal\” colours under illuminant changes.
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Olivier Penacchio, & C. Alejandro Parraga. (2011). What is the best criterion for an efficient design of retinal photoreceptor mosaics? PER - Perception, 40, 197.
Abstract: The proportions of L, M and S photoreceptors in the primate retina are arguably determined by evolutionary pressure and the statistics of the visual environment. Two information theory-based approaches have been recently proposed for explaining the asymmetrical spatial densities of photoreceptors in humans. In the first approach Garrigan et al (2010 PLoS ONE 6 e1000677), a model for computing the information transmitted by cone arrays which considers the differential blurring produced by the long-wavelength accommodation of the eye’s lens is proposed. Their results explain the sparsity of S-cones but the optimum depends weakly on the L:M cone ratio. In the second approach (Penacchio et al, 2010 Perception 39 ECVP Supplement, 101), we show that human cone arrays make the visual representation scale-invariant, allowing the total entropy of the signal to be preserved while decreasing individual neurons’ entropy in further retinotopic representations. This criterion provides a thorough description of the distribution of L:M cone ratios and does not depend on differential blurring of the signal by the lens. Here, we investigate the similarities and differences of both approaches when applied to the same database. Our results support a 2-criteria optimization in the space of cone ratios whose components are arguably important and mostly unrelated.
[This work was partially funded by projects TIN2010-21771-C02-1 and Consolider-Ingenio 2010-CSD2007-00018 from the Spanish MICINN. CAP was funded by grant RYC-2007-00484]
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Jordi Roca, C. Alejandro Parraga, & Maria Vanrell. (2012). Predicting categorical colour perception in successive colour constancy. In Perception (Vol. 41, 138).
Abstract: Colour constancy is a perceptual mechanism that seeks to keep the colour of objects relatively stable under an illumination shift. Experiments haveshown that its effects depend on the number of colours present in the scene. We
studied categorical colour changes under different adaptation states, in particular, whether the colour categories seen under a chromatically neutral illuminant are the same after a shift in the chromaticity of the illumination. To do this, we developed the chromatic setting paradigm (2011 Journal of Vision11 349), which is as an extension of achromatic setting to colour categories. The paradigm exploits the ability of subjects to reliably reproduce the most representative examples of each category, adjusting multiple test patches embedded in a coloured Mondrian. Our experiments were run on a CRT monitor (inside a dark room) under various simulated illuminants and restricting the number of colours of the Mondrian background to three, thus weakening the adaptation effect. Our results show a change in the colour categories present before (under neutral illumination) and after adaptation (under coloured illuminants) with a tendency for adapted colours to be less saturated than before adaptation. This behaviour was predicted by a simple
affine matrix model, adjusted to the chromatic setting results.
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