Abstract: Invited speaker

Abstract: Project-Based Learning (PBL) is an educational strategy to improve student’s learning capability that, in recent years, has had a progressive acceptance in undergraduate studies. This methodology is based on solving a problem or project in a student working group. In this way, PBL focuses on learning the necessary tools to correctly find a solution to given problems. Since the learning initiative is transferred to the student, the PBL method promotes students own abilities. This allows a better assessment of the true workload that carries out the student in the subject. It follows that the methodology conforms to the guidelines of the Bologna document, which quantifies the student workload in a subject by means of the European credit transfer system (ECTS). PBL is currently applied in undergraduate studies needing strong practical training such as medicine, nursing or law sciences. Although this is also the case in engineering studies, amazingly, few experiences have been reported. In this paper we propose to use PBL in the educational organization of the Computer Graphics subjects in the Computer Science degree. Our PBL project focuses in the development of a C++ graphical environment based on the OpenGL libraries for visualization and handling of different graphical objects. The starting point is a basic skeleton that already includes lighting functions, perspective projection with mouse interaction to change the point of view and three predefined objects. Students have to complete this skeleton by adding their own functions to solve the project. A total number of 10 projects have been proposed and successfully solved. The exercises range from human face rendering to articulated objects, such as robot arms or puppets. In the present paper we extensively report the statement and educational objectives for two of the projects: solar system visualization and a chess game. We report our earlier educational experience based on the standard classroom theoretical, problem and practice sessions and the reasons that motivated searching for other learning methods. We have mainly chosen PBL because it improves the student learning initiative. We have applied the PBL educational model since the beginning of the second semester. The student’s feedback increases in his interest for the subject. We present a comparative study of the teachers’ and students’ workload between PBL and the classic teaching approach, which suggests that the workload increase in PBL is not as high as it seems.

Abstract: Plaque analysis in IVUS planes needs accurate intima and adventitia models. Large variety in adventitia descriptors difficulties its detection and motivates using a classification strategy for selecting points on the structure. Whatever the set of descriptors used, the selection stage suffers from fake responses due to noise and uncompleted true curves. In order to smooth background noise while strengthening responses, we apply a restricted anisotropic filter that homogenizes grey levels along the image significant structures. Candidate points are extracted by means of a simple semi supervised adaptive classification of the filtered image response to edge and calcium detectors. The final model is obtained by interpolating the former line segments with an anisotropic contour closing technique based on functional extension principles.

Abstract: Dimensionality reduction is key to alleviate machine learning artifacts in clinical applications with Small Sample Size (SSS) unbalanced datasets. Existing methods rely on either the probabilistic distribution of training data or the discriminant power of the reduced space, disregarding the impact of repeatability and uncertainty in features.In the present study is proposed the use of reproducibility of radiomics features to select features with high inter-class correlation coefficient (ICC). The reproducibility includes the variability introduced in the image acquisition, like medical scans acquisition parameters and convolution kernels, that affects intensity-based features and tumor annotations made by physicians, that influences morphological descriptors of the lesion.For the reproducibility of radiomics features three studies were conducted on cases collected at Vall Hebron Oncology Institute (VHIO) on responders to oncology treatment. The studies focused on the variability due to the convolution kernel, image acquisition parameters, and the inter-observer lesion identification. The features selected were those features with a ICC higher than 0.7 in the three studies.The selected features based on reproducibility were evaluated for lesion malignancy classification using a different database. Results show better performance compared to several state-of-the-art methods including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Kernel Discriminant Analysis via QR decomposition (KDAQR), LASSO, and an own built Convolutional Neural Network.