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: A good reliable approach to cardiac triggering is of utmost importance in obtaining accurate quantitative results of atherosclerotic plaque burden from the analysis of IntraVascular UltraSound. Although, in the last years, there has been an increase in research of methods for retrospective gating, there is no general consensus in a validation protocol. Many methods are based on quality assessment of longitudinal cuts appearance and those reporting quantitative numbers do not follow a standard protocol. Such heterogeneity in validation protocols makes faithful comparison across methods a difficult task. We propose a validation protocol based on the variability of the retrieved cardiac phase and explore the capability of several quality measures for quantifying such variability. An ideal detector, suitable for its application in clinical practice, should produce stable phases. That is, it should always sample the same cardiac cycle fraction. In this context, one should measure the variability (variance) of a candidate sampling with respect a ground truth (reference) sampling, since the variance would indicate how spread we are aiming a target. In order to quantify the deviation between the sampling and the ground truth, we have considered two quality scores reported in the literature: signed distance to the closest reference sample and distance to the right of each reference sample. We have also considered the residuals of the regression line of reference against candidate sampling. The performance of the measures has been explored on a set of synthetic samplings covering different cardiac cycle fractions and variabilities. From our simulations, we conclude that the metrics related to distances are sensitive to the shift considered while the residuals are robust against fraction and variabilities as far as one can establish a pair-wise correspondence between candidate and reference. We will further investigate the impact of false positive and negative detections in experimental data.

Abstract: Assessing Optical Flow (OF) quality is essential for its further use in reliable decision support systems. The absence of ground truth in such situations leads to the computation of OF Confidence Measures (CM) obtained from either input or output data. A fair comparison across the capabilities of the different CM for bounding OF error is required in order to choose the best OF-CM pair for discarding points where OF computation is not reliable. This paper presents a statistical probabilistic framework for assessing the quality of a given CM. Our quality measure is given in terms of the percentage of pixels whose OF error bound can not be determined by CM values. We also provide statistical tools for the computation of CM values that ensures a given accuracy of the flow field.

Abstract: In this work, we introduce the Global Planar Convolution module as a building-block for fully-convolutional networks that aggregates global information and, therefore, enhances the context perception capabilities of segmentation networks in the context of brain tumor segmentation. We implement two baseline architectures (3D UNet and a residual version of 3D UNet, ResUNet) and present a novel architecture based on these two architectures, ContextNet, that includes the proposed Global Planar Convolution module. We show that the addition of such module eliminates the need of building networks with several representation levels, which tend to be over-parametrized and to showcase slow rates of convergence. Furthermore, we provide a visual demonstration of the behavior of GPC modules via visualization of intermediate representations. We finally participate in the 2018 edition of the BraTS challenge with our best performing models, that are based on ContextNet, and report the evaluation scores on the validation and the test sets of the challenge.

Abstract: Assistance systems for e-Health applications have some specific requirements that demand of new methods for data gathering, analysis and modeling able to deal with SmallData:
1) systems should dynamically collect data from, both, the environment and the user to issue personalized recommendations; 2) data analysis should be able to tackle a limited number of samples prone to include non-informative data and possibly evolving in time due to changes in patient condition; 3) algorithms should run in real time with possibly limited computational resources and fluctuant internet access.
Electronic medical devices (and CyberPhysical devices in general) can enhance the process of data gathering and analysis in several ways: (i) acquiring simultaneously multiple sensors data instead of single magnitudes (ii) filtering data; (iii) providing real-time implementations condition by isolating tasks in individual processors of multiprocessors Systems-on-chip (MPSoC) platforms and (iv) combining information through sensor fusion
techniques.
Our approach focus on both aspects of the complementary role of CyberPhysical devices and analysis of SmallData in the process of personalized models building for e-Health applications. In particular, we will address the design of Cyber-Physical Systems in Health for Personalized Assistance (CyberHealth) in two specific application cases: 1) A Smart Assisted Driving System (SADs) for dynamical assessment of the driving capabilities of Mild Cognitive Impaired (MCI) people; 2) An Intelligent Operating Room (iOR) for improving the yield of bronchoscopic interventions for in-vivo lung cancer diagnosis.