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: Evaluation of arterial tissue biomechanics for diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases is an active research field in the biomedical imaging processing area. IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS) is a unique tool for such assessment since it reflects tissue morphology and deformation. A proper quantification and visualization of both properties is hindered by vessel structures misalignments introduced by cardiac dynamics. This has encouraged development of IVUS motion compensation techniques. However, there is a lack of an objective evaluation of motion reduction ensuring a reliable clinical application This work reports a novel score, the Conservation of Density Rate (CDR), for validation of motion compensation in in-vivo pullbacks. Synthetic experiments validate the proposed score as measure of motion parameters accuracy; while results in in vivo pullbacks show its reliability in clinical cases.

Abstract: Changes in cardiac deformation patterns are correlated with cardiac pathologies. Deformation can be extracted from tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using Optical Flow (OF) techniques. For applications of OF in a clinical setting it is important to assess to what extent the performance of a particular OF method is stable across dierent clinical acquisition artifacts. This paper presents a statistical validation framework, based on ANOVA, to assess the motion and appearance factors that have the largest in uence on OF accuracy drop.
In order to validate this framework, we created a database of simulated tMRI data including the most common artifacts of MRI and test three dierent OF methods, including HARP.

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: 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.