Abstract: BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE:
Fast intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) video processing is required for calcium volume computation during the planning phase of percutaneous coronary interventional (PCI) procedures. Nonlinear multiresolution techniques are generally applied to improve the processing time by down-sampling the video frames.
METHODS:
This paper presents four different segmentation methods for calcium volume measurement, namely Threshold-based, Fuzzy c-Means (FCM), K-means, and Hidden Markov Random Field (HMRF) embedded with five different kinds of multiresolution techniques (bilinear, bicubic, wavelet, Lanczos, and Gaussian pyramid). This leads to 20 different kinds of combinations. IVUS image data sets consisting of 38,760 IVUS frames taken from 19 patients were collected using 40 MHz IVUS catheter (Atlantis® SR Pro, Boston Scientific®, pullback speed of 0.5 mm/sec.). The performance of these 20 systems is compared with and without multiresolution using the following metrics: (a) computational time; (b) calcium volume; (c) image quality degradation ratio; and (d) quality assessment ratio.
RESULTS:
Among the four segmentation methods embedded with five kinds of multiresolution techniques, FCM segmentation combined with wavelet-based multiresolution gave the best performance. FCM and wavelet experienced the highest percentage mean improvement in computational time of 77.15% and 74.07%, respectively. Wavelet interpolation experiences the highest mean precision-of-merit (PoM) of 94.06 ± 3.64% and 81.34 ± 16.29% as compared to other multiresolution techniques for volume level and frame level respectively. Wavelet multiresolution technique also experiences the highest Jaccard Index and Dice Similarity of 0.7 and 0.8, respectively. Multiresolution is a nonlinear operation which introduces bias and thus degrades the image. The proposed system also provides a bias correction approach to enrich the system, giving a better mean calcium volume similarity for all the multiresolution-based segmentation methods. After including the bias correction, bicubic interpolation gives the largest increase in mean calcium volume similarity of 4.13% compared to the rest of the multiresolution techniques. The system is automated and can be adapted in clinical settings.
CONCLUSIONS:
We demonstrated the time improvement in calcium volume computation without compromising the quality of IVUS image. Among the 20 different combinations of multiresolution with calcium volume segmentation methods, the FCM embedded with wavelet-based multiresolution gave the best performance.

Abstract: We present the results of recent challenges in Automated Computer Vision (AutoCV, renamed here for clarity AutoCV1 and AutoCV2, 2019), which are part of a series of challenge on Automated Deep Learning (AutoDL). These two competitions aim at searching for fully automated solutions for classification tasks in computer vision, with an emphasis on any-time performance. The first competition was limited to image classification while the second one included both images and videos. Our design imposed to the participants to submit their code on a challenge platform for blind testing on five datasets, both for training and testing, without any human intervention whatsoever. Winning solutions adopted deep learning techniques based on already published architectures, such as AutoAugment, MobileNet and ResNet, to reach state-of-the-art performance in the time budget of the challenge (only 20 minutes of GPU time). The novel contributions include strategies to deliver good preliminary results at any time during the learning process, such that a method can be stopped early and still deliver good performance. This feature is key for the adoption of such techniques by data analysts desiring to obtain rapidly preliminary results on large datasets and to speed up the development process. The soundness of our design was verified in several aspects: (1) Little overfitting of the on-line leaderboard providing feedback on 5 development datasets was observed, compared to the final blind testing on the 5 (separate) final test datasets, suggesting that winning solutions might generalize to other computer vision classification tasks; (2) Error bars on the winners’ performance allow us to say with confident that they performed significantly better than the baseline solutions we provided; (3) The ranking of participants according to the any-time metric we designed, namely the Area under the Learning Curve, was different from that of the fixed-time metric, i.e. AUC at the end of the fixed time budget. We released all winning solutions under open-source licenses. At the end of the AutoDL challenge series, all data of the challenge will be made publicly available, thus providing a collection of uniformly formatted datasets, which can serve to conduct further research, particularly on meta-learning.

Abstract: The most common tool for population-wide COVID-19 identification is the Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction test that detects the presence of the virus in the throat (or sputum) in swab samples. This test has a sensitivity between 59% and 71%. However, this test does not provide precise information regarding the extension of the pulmonary infection. Moreover, it has been proven that through the reading of a computed tomography (CT) scan, a clinician can provide a more complete perspective of the severity of the disease. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive system for fully-automated COVID-19 detection and lesion segmentation from CT scans, powered by deep learning strategies to support decision-making process for the diagnosis of COVID-19.

Abstract: In the last years, the consolidation of deep neural network architectures for information extraction in document images has brought big improvements in the performance of each of the tasks involved in this process, consisting of text localization, transcription, and named entity recognition. However, this process is traditionally performed with separate methods for each task. In this work we propose an end-to-end model that combines a one stage object detection network with branches for the recognition of text and named entities respectively in a way that shared features can be learned simultaneously from the training error of each of the tasks. By doing so the model jointly performs handwritten text detection, transcription, and named entity recognition at page level with a single feed forward step. We exhaustively evaluate our approach on different datasets, discussing its advantages and limitations compared to sequential approaches. The results show that the model is capable of benefiting from shared features by simultaneously solving interdependent tasks.

Abstract: Food image recognition has recently attracted the attention of many researchers, due to the challenging problem it poses, the ease collection of food images, and its numerous applications to health and leisure. In real applications, it is necessary to analyze and recognize thousands of different foods. For this purpose, we propose a novel prediction scheme based on a class hierarchy that considers local classifiers, in addition to a flat classifier. In order to make a decision about which approach to use, we define different criteria that take into account both the analysis of the Epistemic Uncertainty estimated from the ‘children’ classifiers and the prediction from the ‘parent’ classifier. We evaluate our proposal using three Uncertainty estimation methods, tested on two public food datasets. The results show that the proposed method reduces parent-child error propagation in hierarchical schemes and improves classification results compared to the single flat classifier, meanwhile maintains good performance regardless the Uncertainty estimation method chosen.