Abstract: The efficiency of lung cancer screening for reducing mortality is hindered by the high rate of false positives. Artificial intelligence applied to radiomics could help to early discard benign cases from the analysis of CT scans. The available amount of data and the fact that benign cases are a minority, constitutes a main challenge for the successful use of state of the art methods (like deep learning), which can be biased, over-fitted and lack of clinical reproducibility. We present an hybrid approach combining the potential of radiomic features to characterize nodules in CT scans and the generalization of the feed forward networks. In order to obtain maximal reproducibility with minimal training data, we propose an embedding of nodules based on the statistical significance of radiomic features for malignancy detection. This representation space of lesions is the input to a feed
forward network, which architecture and hyperparameters are optimized using own-defined metrics of the diagnostic power of the whole system. Results of the best model on an independent set of patients achieve 100% of sensitivity and 83% of specificity (AUC = 0.94) for malignancy detection.

Abstract: The main advantage of segmentation by snakes consists in its ability to incorporate smoothness constraints on the detected shapes that can occur. Likewise, we propose to model snakes with other properties that reflect the information provided about the object of interest in a different extent. We consider different kinds of snakes, those searching for contours with a certain direction, those preserving an object’s model, those seeking for symmetry, those expanding open, etc. The availability of such a collection of snakes allows not only the more complete use of the knowledge about the segmented object, but also to solve some problems of the existing snakes. Our experiments on segmentation of facial features justify the usefulness of snakes with different properties.

Abstract: Lung cancer is one of the most diagnosed cancers among men and women. Actually,
lung cancer accounts for 13% of the total cases with a 5-year global survival
rate in patients. Although Early detection increases survival rate from 38% to 67%, accurate diagnosis remains a challenge. Pathological confirmation requires extracting a sample of the lesion tissue for its biopsy. The preferred procedure for tissue biopsy is called bronchoscopy. A bronchoscopy is an endoscopic technique for the internal exploration of airways which facilitates the performance of minimal invasive interventions with low risk for the patient. Recent advances in bronchoscopic devices have increased their use for minimal invasive diagnostic and intervention procedures, like lung cancer biopsy sampling. Despite the improvement in bronchoscopic device quality, there is a lack of intelligent computational systems for supporting in-vivo clinical decision during examinations. Existing technologies fail to accurately reach the lesion due to several aspects at intervention off-line planning and poor intra-operative guidance at exploration time. Existing guiding systems radiate patients and clinical staff,might be expensive and achieve a suboptimlal 70% of yield boost. Diagnostic yield could be improved reducing radiation and costs by developing intra-operative support systems able to guide the bronchoscopist to the lesion during the intervention. The goal of this PhD thesis is to develop an image-based navigation systemfor intra-operative guidance of bronchoscopists to a target lesion across a path previously planned on a CT-scan. We propose a 3D navigation system which uses the anatomy of video bronchoscopy frames to locate the bronchoscope within the airways. Once the bronchoscope is located, our navigation system is able to indicate the bifurcation which needs to be followed to reach the lesion. In order to facilitate an off-line validation
as realistic as possible, we also present a method for augmenting simulated virtual bronchoscopies with the appearance of intra-operative videos. Experiments performed on augmented and intra-operative videos, prove that our algorithm can be speeded up for an on-line implementation in the operating room.

Abstract: AcriveVessel is a new multimedia workstation which enables the visualization, acquisition and handling of both image modalities, on- and ofline. It enables DICOM v3.0 decompression and browsing, video acquisition,repmduction and storage for IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS) and angiograms with their corresponding ECG,automatic catheter segmentation in angiography images (using fast marching algorithm). BSpline models definition for vessel layers on IVUS images sequence and an extensively validated tool to fuse information. This approach defines the correspondence of every IVUS image with its correspondent point in the angiogram and viceversa. The 3 0 reconstruction of the NUS catheterhessel enables real distance measurements as well as threedimensional visualization showing vessel tortuosity in the space.