Abstract: Cardiac dynamics suppression is a main issue for visual improvement and computation of tissue mechanical properties in IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS). Although in recent times several motion compensation techniques have arisen, there is a lack of objective evaluation of motion reduction in in vivo pullbacks. We consider that the assessment protocol deserves special attention for the sake of a clinical applicability as reliable as possible. Our work focuses on defining a quality measure and a validation protocol assessing IVUS motion compensation. On the grounds of continuum mechanics laws we introduce a novel score measuring motion reduction in in vivo sequences. 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: Tagged magnetic resonance is a very usefull and unique tool that provides a complete local and global knowledge of the left ventricle (LV) motion. In this article we introduce a method capable of tracking and segmenting the LV. Spectral methods are applied in order to obtain the so called HARP images which encode information about movement and are the base for LV point-tracking. For segmentation we use Active Shapes (ASM) that model LV shape variation in order to overcome possible local misplacements of the boundary. We finally show experiments on both synthetic and real data which appear to be very promising.

Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Existing methods show excellent results when applied to 2D
objects, but their quality drops across dimensions. This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial
manifolds that avoid degenerated medial axis segments; second, we introduce an energy based method which performs independently of the dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our
method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to synthetic shapes of known medial geometry. Finally, we show results on shape representation of multiple abdominal organs,
exploring the use of medial manifolds for the representation of multi-organ relations.

Abstract: Empirical and mechanistic models differ in their approaches to the analysis of pharmacological effect. Whereas the parameters of the former are not physical constants those of the latter embody the nature, often complex, of biology. Empirical models are exclusively used for curve fitting, merely to characterize the shape of the E/[A] curves. Mechanistic models, on the contrary, enable the examination of mechanistic hypotheses by parameter simulation. Regretfully, the many parameters that mechanistic models may include can represent a great difficulty for curve fitting, representing, thus, a challenge for computational method development. In the present study some empirical and mechanistic models are shown and the connections, which may appear in a number of cases between them, are analyzed from the curves they yield. It may be concluded that systematic and careful curve shape analysis can be extremely useful for the understanding of receptor function, ligand classification and drug discovery, thus providing a common language for the communication between pharmacologists and medicinal chemists.

Abstract: Computational intelligent systems could reduce polyp miss rate in colonoscopy for colon cancer diagnosis and, thus, increase the efficiency of the procedure. One of the main problems of existing polyp localization methods is a lack of spatio-temporal stability in their response. We propose to explore the response of a given polyp localization across temporal windows in order to select
those image regions presenting the highest stable spatio-temporal response.
Spatio-temporal stability is achieved by extracting 3D watershed regions on the
temporal window. Stability in localization response is statistically determined by analysis of the variance of the output of the localization method inside each 3D region. We have explored the benefits of considering spatio-temporal stability in two different tasks: polyp localization and polyp detection. Experimental results indicate an average improvement of 21:5% in polyp localization and 43:78% in polyp detection.