Abstract: Evaluation of the performance and limitations of medical imaging algorithms is essential to estimate their impact in social, economic or clinical aspects. However, validation of medical imaging techniques is a challenging task due to the variety of imaging and clinical problems involved, as well as, the difficulties for systematically extracting a reliable solely ground truth. Although specific validation protocols are reported in any medical imaging paper, there are still two major concerns: definition of standardized methodologies transversal to all problems and generalization of conclusions to the whole clinical data set.
We claim that both issues would be fully solved if we had a statistical model relating ground truth and the output of computational imaging techniques. Such a statistical model could conclude to what extent the algorithm behaves like the ground truth from the analysis of a sampling of the validation data set. We present a statistical inference framework reporting the agreement and describing the relationship of two quantities. We show its transversality by applying it to validation of two different tasks: contour segmentation and landmark correspondence.

Abstract: Optical flow is a valuable tool for motion analysis in medical imaging sequences. A reliable application requires determining the accuracy of the computed optical flow. This is a main challenge given the absence of ground truth in medical sequences. This paper presents an error analysis of Lucas-Kanade schemes in terms of intrinsic design errors and numerical stability of the algorithm. Our analysis provides a confidence measure that is naturally correlated to the accuracy of the flow field. Our experiments show the higher predictive value of our confidence measure compared to existing measures.

Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Existing methods show excellent results when applied to 2D objects, but their quality drops across dimensions. This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial manifolds that avoid degenerated medial axis segments; second, we introduce an energy based method which performs independently of the dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to synthetic shapes of known medial geometry. Finally, we show results on shape representation of multiple abdominal organs, exploring the use of medial manifolds for the representation of multi-organ relations.