Abstract: Invited speaker

Abstract: State of the art machine learning methods need huge amounts of data with unambiguous annotations for their training. In the context of medical imaging this is, in general, a very difficult task due to limited access to clinical data, the time required for manual annotations and variability across experts. Simulated data could serve for data augmentation provided that its appearance was comparable to the actual appearance of intra-operative acquisitions. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a powerful tool for artistic style transfer, but lack a criteria for selecting epochs ensuring also preservation of intra-operative content.
We propose a multi-objective optimization strategy for a selection of cycleGAN epochs ensuring a mapping between virtual images and the intra-operative domain preserving anatomical content. Our approach has been applied to simulate intra-operative bronchoscopic videos and chest CT scans from virtual sketches generated using simple graphical primitives.

Abstract: Segmentation of airways in Computed Tomography (CT) scans is a must for accurate support of diagnosis and intervention of many pulmonary disorders. In particular, lung cancer diagnosis would benefit from segmentations reaching most distal airways. We present a method that combines descriptors of bronchi local appearance and graph global structural analysis to fine-tune thresholds on the descriptors adapted for each bronchial level. We have compared our method to the top performers of the EXACT09 challenge and to a commercial software for biopsy planning evaluated in an own-collected data-base of high resolution CT scans acquired under different breathing conditions. Results on EXACT09 data show that our method provides a high leakage reduction with minimum loss in airway detection. Results on our data-base show the reliability across varying breathing conditions and a competitive performance for biopsy planning compared to a commercial solution.

Abstract: Gliomas are the most common primary brain malignancies, with different degrees of aggressiveness, variable prognosis and various heterogeneous histologic sub-regions, i.e., peritumoral edematous/invaded tissue, necrotic core, active and non-enhancing core. This intrinsic heterogeneity is also portrayed in their radio-phenotype, as their sub-regions are depicted by varying intensity profiles disseminated across multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) scans, reflecting varying biological properties. Their heterogeneous shape, extent, and location are some of the factors that make these tumors difficult to resect, and in some cases inoperable. The amount of resected tumor is a factor also considered in longitudinal scans, when evaluating the apparent tumor for potential diagnosis of progression. Furthermore, there is mounting evidence that accurate segmentation of the various tumor sub-regions can offer the basis for quantitative image analysis towards prediction of patient overall survival. This study assesses the state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods used for brain tumor image analysis in mpMRI scans, during the last seven instances of the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge, i.e. 2012-2018. Specifically, we focus on i) evaluating segmentations of the various glioma sub-regions in preoperative mpMRI scans, ii) assessing potential tumor progression by virtue of longitudinal growth of tumor sub-regions, beyond use of the RECIST criteria, and iii) predicting the overall survival from pre-operative mpMRI scans of patients that undergone gross total resection. Finally, we investigate the challenge of identifying the best ML algorithms for each of these tasks, considering that apart from being diverse on each instance of the challenge, the multi-institutional mpMRI BraTS dataset has also been a continuously evolving/growing dataset.

Abstract: In this paper, a dual online subspace-based learning method called dual-generalized discriminative common vectors (Dual-GDCV) is presented. The method extends incremental GDCV by exploiting simultaneously both the concepts of incremental and decremental learning for supervised feature extraction and classification. Our methodology is able to update the feature representation space without recalculating the full projection or accessing the previously processed training data. It allows both adding information and removing unnecessary data from a knowledge base in an efficient way, while retaining the previously acquired knowledge. The proposed method has been theoretically proved and empirically validated in six standard face recognition and classification datasets, under two scenarios: (1) removing and adding samples of existent classes, and (2) removing and adding new classes to a classification problem. Results show a considerable computational gain without compromising the accuracy of the model in comparison with both batch methodologies and other state-of-art adaptive methods.