Abstract: This paper presents a patient-sensitive simulation strategy capable of using the most efficient way the high-performance computational resources. The proposed strategy directly involves three different players: Computational Mechanics Scientists (CMS), Image Processing Scientists and Cardiologists, each one mastering its own expertise area within the project. This paper describes the general integrative scheme but focusing on the CMS side presents a massively parallel implementation of computational electrophysiology applied to cardiac tissue simulation. The paper covers different angles of the computational problem: equations, numerical issues, the algorithm and parallel implementation. The proposed methodology is illustrated with numerical simulations testing all the different possibilities, ranging from small domains up to very large ones. A key issue is the almost ideal scalability not only for large and complex problems but also for medium-size meshes. The explicit formulation is particularly well suited for solving this highly transient problems, with very short time-scale.

Abstract: This paper presents a vision-based approach for mobile robot localization. The model of the environment is topological. The new approach characterizes a place using a signature. This signature consists of a constellation of descriptors computed over different types of local affine covariant regions extracted from an omnidirectional image acquired rotating a standard camera with a pan-tilt unit. This type of representation permits a reliable and distinctive environment modelling. Our objectives were to validate the proposed method in indoor environments and, also, to find out if the combination of complementary local feature region detectors improves the localization versus using a single region detector. Our experimental results show that if false matches are effectively rejected, the combination of different covariant affine region detectors increases notably the performance of the approach by combining the different strengths of the individual detectors. In order to reduce the localization time, two strategies are evaluated: re-ranking the map nodes using a global similarity measure and using standard perspective view field of 45°.
In order to systematically test topological localization methods, another contribution proposed in this work is a novel method to see the degradation in localization performance as the robot moves away from the point where the original signature was acquired. This allows to know the robustness of the proposed signature. In order for this to be effective, it must be done in several, variated, environments that test all the possible situations in which the robot may have to perform localization.

Abstract: Corners and junctions are landmarks characterized by the lack of differentiability in the unit tangent to the image level curve. Detectors based on differential operators are not, by their own definition, the best posed as they require a higher degree of differentiability to yield a reliable response. We argue that a corner detector should be based on the degree of continuity of the tangent vector to the image level sets, work on the image domain and need no assumptions on neither the image local structure nor the particular geometry of the corner/junction. An operator measuring the degree of differentiability of the projection matrix on the image gradient fulfills the above requirements. Because using smoothing kernels leads to corner misplacement, we suggest an alternative fake response remover based on the receptive field inhibition of spurious details. The combination of both orientation discontinuity detection and noise inhibition produce our inhibition orientation energy (IOE) landmark locator.

Abstract: Graph-based representations of patterns are very flexible and powerful, but they are not easily processed due to the lack of learning algorithms in the domain of graphs. Embedding a graph into a vector space solves this problem since graphs are turned into feature vectors and thus all the statistical learning machinery becomes available for graph input patterns. In this work we present a new way of embedding discrete attributed graphs into vector spaces using node and edge label frequencies. The methodology is experimentally tested on graph classification problems, using patterns of different nature, and it is shown to be competitive to state-of-the-art classification algorithms for graphs, while being computationally much more efficient.

Abstract: BACKGROUND:
The precise relation of intestinal gas to symptoms, particularly abdominal bloating and distension remains incompletely elucidated. Our aim was to define the normal values of intestinal gas volume and distribution and to identify abnormalities in relation to functional-type symptoms.
METHODS:
Abdominal computed tomography scans were evaluated in healthy subjects (n = 37) and in patients in three conditions: basal (when they were feeling well; n = 88), during an episode of abdominal distension (n = 82) and after a challenge diet (n = 24). Intestinal gas content and distribution were measured by an original analysis program. Identification of patients outside the normal range was performed by machine learning techniques (one-class classifier). Results are expressed as median (IQR) or mean ± SE, as appropriate.
KEY RESULTS:
In healthy subjects the gut contained 95 (71, 141) mL gas distributed along the entire lumen. No differences were detected between patients studied under asymptomatic basal conditions and healthy subjects. However, either during a spontaneous bloating episode or once challenged with a flatulogenic diet, luminal gas was found to be increased and/or abnormally distributed in about one-fourth of the patients. These patients detected outside the normal range by the classifier exhibited a significantly greater number of abnormal features than those within the normal range (3.7 ± 0.4 vs 0.4 ± 0.1; p < 0.001).
CONCLUSIONS & INFERENCES:
The analysis of a large cohort of subjects using original techniques provides unique and heretofore unavailable information on the volume and distribution of intestinal gas in normal conditions and in relation to functional gastrointestinal symptoms.

Abstract: Variable rate is a requirement for flexible and adaptable image and video compression. However, deep image compression methods (DIC) are optimized for a single fixed rate-distortion (R-D) tradeoff. While this can be addressed by training multiple models for different tradeoffs, the memory requirements increase proportionally to the number of models. Scaling the bottleneck representation of a shared autoencoder can provide variable rate compression with a single shared autoencoder. However, the R-D performance using this simple mechanism degrades in low bitrates, and also shrinks the effective range of bitrates. To address these limitations, we formulate the problem of variable R-D optimization for DIC, and propose modulated autoencoders (MAEs), where the representations of a shared autoencoder are adapted to the specific R-D tradeoff via a modulation network. Jointly training this modulated autoencoder and the modulation network provides an effective way to navigate the R-D operational curve. Our experiments show that the proposed method can achieve almost the same R-D performance of independent models with significantly fewer parameters.

Abstract: In recent years, several deep learning models have been proposed to accurately quantify and diagnose cardiac pathologies. These automated tools heavily rely on the accurate segmentation of cardiac structures in MRI images. However, segmentation of the right ventricle is challenging due to its highly complex shape and ill-defined borders. Hence, there is a need for new methods to handle such structure's geometrical and textural complexities, notably in the presence of pathologies such as Dilated Right Ventricle, Tricuspid Regurgitation, Arrhythmogenesis, Tetralogy of Fallot, and Inter-atrial Communication. The last MICCAI challenge on right ventricle segmentation was held in 2012 and included only 48 cases from a single clinical center. As part of the 12th Workshop on Statistical Atlases and Computational Models of the Heart (STACOM 2021), the M&Ms-2 challenge was organized to promote the interest of the research community around right ventricle segmentation in multi-disease, multi-view, and multi-center cardiac MRI. Three hundred sixty CMR cases, including short-axis and long-axis 4-chamber views, were collected from three Spanish hospitals using nine different scanners from three different vendors, and included a diverse set of right and left ventricle pathologies. The solutions provided by the participants show that nnU-Net achieved the best results overall. However, multi-view approaches were able to capture additional information, highlighting the need to integrate multiple cardiac diseases, views, scanners, and acquisition protocols to produce reliable automatic cardiac segmentation algorithms.

Abstract: IF: 1.138