Abstract: Handwritten text recognition in low resource scenarios, such as manuscripts with rare alphabets, is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a few-shot learning-based handwriting recognition approach that significantly reduces the human annotation process, by requiring only a few images of each alphabet symbols. The method consists of detecting all the symbols of a given alphabet in a textline image and decoding the obtained similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. Our model is first pretrained on synthetic line images generated from an alphabet, which could differ from the alphabet of the target domain. A second training step is then applied to reduce the gap between the source and the target data. Since this retraining would require annotation of thousands of handwritten symbols together with their bounding boxes, we propose to avoid such human effort through an unsupervised progressive learning approach that automatically assigns pseudo-labels to the unlabeled data. The evaluation on different datasets shows that our model can lead to competitive results with a significant reduction in human effort. The code will be publicly available in the following repository: https://github.com/dali92002/HTRbyMatching

Abstract: Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune, systemic, inflammatory disorder that mainly af- fects bone joints. While there is no cure for this disease, continuous advances on palliative treatments require frequent verification of patient’s illness evolution. Such evolution is mea- sured through several available semi-quantitative methods that require evaluation of hand and foot X-ray images. Accurate assessment is a time consuming task that requires highly trained personnel. This hinders a generalized use in clinical practice for early diagnose and disease follow-up. In the context of the automatization of such evaluation methods we present a method for detection and characterization of finger joints in hand radiography images. Several measures for assessing the reduction of joint space width are proposed. We compare for the first time such measures to the Van der Heijde score, the gold standard method for rheumatoid arthritis assessment. The proposed method outperforms existing strategies with a detection rate above 95%. Our comparison to Van der Heijde index shows a promising correlation that encourages further research.

Abstract: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune inflammatory type of arthritis which mainly affects hands on its first stages. Though it is a chronic disease and there is no cure for it, treatments require an accurate assessment of illness evolution. Such assessment is based on evaluation of hand X-ray images by using one of the several available semi-quantitative methods. This task requires highly trained medical personnel. That is why the automation of the assessment would allow professionals to save time and effort. Two stages are involved in this task. Firstly, the joint detection, afterwards, the joint characterization. Unlike the little existing previous work, this contribution clearly separates those two stages and sets the foundations of a modular assessment system focusing on the characterization stage. A hand joint dataset is created and an accurate data analysis is achieved in order to identify relevant features. Since the sclerosis and the lower bone were decided to be the most important features, different computer vision techniques were used in order to develop a detector system for both of them. Joint space width measures are provided and their correlation with Sharp-Van der Heijde is verified

Abstract: Endoscopy is the process in which a camera is introduced inside a human.
Given that endoscopy provides realistic images (in contrast to other modalities) and allows non-invase minimal intervention procedures (which can aid in diagnosis and surgical interventions), its use has spreaded during last decades.
In this project we will focus on bronchoscopic procedures, during which the camera is introduced through the trachea in order to have a diagnostic of the patient. The diagnostic interventions are focused on: degree of stenosis (reduction in tracheal area), prosthesis or early diagnosis of tumors. In the first case, assessment of the luminal area and the calculation of the diameters of the tracheal rings are required. A main limitation is that all the process is done by hand,
which means that the doctor takes all the measurements and decisions just by looking at the screen. As far as we know there is no computational framework for helping the doctors in the diagnosis.
This project will consist of analysing bronchoscopic videos in order to extract useful information for the diagnostic of the degree of stenosis. In particular we will focus on segmentation of the tracheal rings. As a result of this project several strategies (for detecting tracheal rings) had been implemented in order to compare their performance.