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: For millennia, the study of the couple brain-mind has fascinated the humanity in order to understand the complex nature of cognitive states. A cognitive state is the state of the mind at a specific time and involves cognition activities to acquire and process information for making a decision, solving a problem, or achieving a goal.
While normal cognitive states assist in the successful accomplishment of tasks; on the contrary, abnormal states of the mind can lead to task failures due to a reduced cognition capability. In this thesis, we focus on the assessment of cognitive states by means of the analysis of ElectroEncephaloGrams (EEG) signals using deep learning methods. EEG records the electrical activity of the brain using a set of electrodes placed on the scalp that output a set of spatiotemporal signals that are expected to be correlated to a specific mental process.
From the point of view of artificial intelligence, any method for the assessment of cognitive states using EEG signals as input should face several challenges. On the one hand, one should determine which is the most suitable approach for the optimal combination of the multiple signals recorded by EEG electrodes. On the other hand, one should have a protocol for the collection of good quality unambiguous annotated data, and an experimental design for the assessment of the generalization and transfer of models. In order to tackle them, first, we propose several convolutional neural architectures to perform data fusion of the signals recorded by EEG electrodes, at raw signal and feature levels. Four channel fusion methods, easy to incorporate into any neural network architecture, are proposed and assessed. Second, we present a method to create an unambiguous dataset for the prediction of cognitive mental workload using serious games and an Airbus-320 flight simulator. Third, we present a validation protocol that takes into account the levels of generalization of models based on the source and amount of test data.
Finally, the approaches for the assessment of cognitive states are applied to two use cases of high social impact: the assessment of mental workload for personalized support systems in the cockpit and the detection of epileptic seizures. The results obtained from the first use case show the feasibility of task transfer of models trained to detect workload in serious games to real flight scenarios. The results from the second use case show the generalization capability of our EEG channel fusion methods at k-fold cross-validation, patient-specific, and population levels.

Abstract: Videobronchoscopy is a medical imaging technique that allows interactive navigation inside the respiratory pathways. This imaging modality provides realistic images and allows non-invasive minimal intervention procedures. Tracheal procedures are routinary interventions that require assessment of the percentage of obstructed pathway for injury (stenosis) detection. Visual assessment in videobronchoscopic sequences requires high expertise of trachea anatomy and is prone to human error.
This paper introduces an automatic method for the estimation of steneosed trachea percentage reduction in videobronchoscopic images. We look for tracheal rings , whose deformation determines the degree of obstruction. For ring extraction , we present a ring detector based on an illumination and appearance model. This model allows us to parametrise the ring detection. Finally, we can infer optimal estimation parameters for any video resolution.

Abstract: Poor convergence to concave shapes is a main limitation of snakes as a standard segmentation and shape modelling technique. The gradient of the external energy of the snake represents a force that pushes the snake into concave regions, as its internal energy increases when new inexion points are created. In spite of the improvement of the external energy by the gradient vector ow technique, highly non convex shapes can not be obtained, yet. In the present paper, we develop a new external energy based on the geometry of the curve to be modelled. By tracking back the deformation of a curve that evolves by minimum curvature ow, we construct a distance map that encapsulates the natural way of adapting to non convex shapes. The gradient of this map, which we call curvature vector ow (CVF), is capable of attracting a snake towards any contour, whatever its geometry. Our experiments show that, any initial snake condition converges to the curve to be modelled in optimal time.

Abstract: Presently, man-machine interface development is a widespread research activity. A system to understand hand drawn architectural drawings in a CAD environment is presented in this paper. To understand a document, we have to identify its building elements and their structural properties. An attributed graph structure is chosen as a symbolic representation of the input document and the patterns to recognize in it. An inexact subgraph isomorphism procedure using relaxation labeling techniques is performed. In this paper we focus on how to speed up the matching. There is a building element, the walls, characterized by a hatching pattern. Using a straight line Hough transform (SLHT)-based method, we recognize this pattern, characterized by parallel straight lines, and remove from the input graph the edges belonging to this pattern. The isomorphism is then applied to the remainder of the input graph. When all the building elements have been recognized, the document is redrawn, correcting the inaccurate strokes obtained from a hand-drawn input.