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: Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (CLE) is an emerging imaging technique that allows the in-vivo acquisition of cell patterns of potentially malignant lesions. Such patterns could discriminate between inflammatory and neoplastic lesions and, thus, serve as a first in-vivo biopsy to discard cases that do not actually require a cell biopsy.
The goal of this work is to explore whether CLE images obtained during videobronchoscopy contain enough visual information to discriminate between benign and malign peripheral lesions for lung cancer diagnosis. To do so, we have performed a pilot comparative study with 12 patients (6 adenocarcinoma and 6 benign-inflammatory) using 2 different methods for CLE pattern analysis: visual analysis by 3 experts and a novel methodology that uses graph methods to find patterns in pre-trained feature spaces. Our preliminary results indicate that although visual analysis can only achieve a 60.2% of accuracy, the accuracy of the proposed unsupervised image pattern classification raises to 84.6%.
We conclude that CLE images visual information allow in-vivo detection of neoplastic lesions and graph structural analysis applied to deep-learning feature spaces can achieve competitive results.

Abstract: Photorealistic virtual environments are crucial for developing and testing automated driving systems in a safe way during trials. As commercially available simulators are expensive and bulky, this paper presents a low-cost, extendable, and easy-to-use (LEE) virtual environment with the aim to highlight its utility for level 3 driving automation. In particular, an experiment is performed using the presented simulator to explore the influence of different variables regarding control transfer of the car after the system was driving autonomously in a highway scenario. The results show that the speed of the car at the time when the system needs to transfer the control to the human driver is critical.

Abstract: Cardiac deformation and changes therein have been linked to pathologies. Both can be extracted in detail from tagged Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using harmonic phase (HARP) images. Although point tracking algorithms have shown to have high accuracies on HARP images, these vary with position. Detecting and discarding areas with unreliable results is crucial for use in clinical support systems. This paper assesses the capability of two confidence measures (CMs), based on energy and image structure, for detecting locations with reduced accuracy in motion tracking results. These CMs were tested on a database of simulated tMRI images containing the most common artifacts that may affect tracking accuracy. CM performance is assessed based on its capability for HARP tracking error bounding and compared in terms of significant differences detected using a multi comparison analysis of variance that takes into account the most influential factors on HARP tracking performance. Results showed that the CM based on image structure was better suited to detect unreliable optical flow vectors. In addition, it was shown that CMs can be used to detect optical flow vectors with large errors in order to improve the optical flow obtained with the HARP tracking algorithm.

Abstract: Bronchoscopy biopsy can be used to diagnose lung cancer without risking complications of other interventions like transthoracic needle aspiration. During bronchoscopy, the clinician has to navigate through the bronchial tree to the target lesion. A main drawback is the difficulty to check whether the exploration is following the correct path. The usual guidance using fluoroscopy implies repeated radiation of the clinician, while alternative systems (like electromagnetic navigation) require specific equipment that increases intervention costs. We propose to compute the navigated path using anatomical landmarks extracted from the sole analysis of videobronchoscopy images. Such landmarks allow matching the current exploration to the path previously planned on a CT to indicate clinician whether the planning is being correctly followed or not. We present a feasibility study of our landmark based CT-video matching using bronchoscopic videos simulated on a virtual bronchoscopy interactive interface.