Abstract: Smoothing of biomedical images should preserve gray-level transitions between adjacent tissues, while restoring contours consistent with anatomical structures. Anisotropic diffusion operators are based on image appearance discontinuities (either local or contextual) and might fail at weak inter-tissue transitions. Meanwhile, the output of block-wise and morphological operations is prone to present a block structure due to the shape and size of the considered pixel neighborhood. In this contribution, we use differential geometry concepts to define a diffusion operator that restricts to image consistent level-sets. In this manner, the final state is a non-uniform intensity image presenting homogeneous inter-tissue transitions along anatomical structures, while smoothing intra-structure texture. Experiments on different types of medical images (magnetic resonance, computerized tomography) illustrate its benefit on a further process (such as segmentation) of images.

Abstract: Changes in cardiac deformation patterns are correlated with cardiac pathologies. Deformation can be extracted from tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using Optical Flow (OF) techniques. For applications of OF in a clinical setting it is important to assess to what extent the performance of a particular OF method is stable across dierent clinical acquisition artifacts. This paper presents a statistical validation framework, based on ANOVA, to assess the motion and appearance factors that have the largest in uence on OF accuracy drop.
In order to validate this framework, we created a database of simulated tMRI data including the most common artifacts of MRI and test three dierent OF methods, including HARP.

Abstract: This paper introduces a framework for evaluating the performance of information retrieval systems. Current evaluation metrics provide an average score that does not consider performance variability across the query set. In this manner, conclusions lack of any statistical significance, yielding poor inference to cases outside the query set and possibly unfair comparisons. We propose to apply statistical methods in order to obtain a more informative measure for problems in which different query classes can be identified. In this context, we assess the performance variability on two levels: overall variability across the whole query set and specific query class-related variability. To this end, we estimate confidence bands for precision-recall curves, and we apply ANOVA in order to assess the significance of the performance across different query classes.

Abstract: In real-world problems, it is mandatory to design a termination condition for Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) ensuring stabilization close to the unknown optimum. Distribution-based quantities are good candidates as far as suitable parameters are used. A main limitation for application to real-world problems is that such parameters strongly depend on the topology of the objective function, as well as, the EA paradigm used.
We claim that the termination problem would be fully solved if we had a model measuring to what extent a distribution-based quantity asymptotically behaves like the solution accuracy. We present a regression-prediction model that relates any two given quantities and reports if they can be statistically swapped as termination conditions. Our framework is applied to two issues. First, exploring if the parameters involved in the computation of distribution-based quantities influence their asymptotic behavior. Second, to what extent existing distribution-based quantities can be asymptotically exchanged for the accuracy of the EA solution.

Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Accurate computation of one pixel wide medial surfaces is mandatory. Those surfaces must represent faithfully the geometry of the volume. Although morphological methods produce excellent results in 2D, their complexity and quality drops across dimensions, due to a more complex description of pixel neighborhoods. This paper introduces a continuous operator for accurate and efficient computation of medial structures of arbitrary dimension. Our experiments show its higher performance for medical imaging applications in terms of simplicity of medial structures and capability for reconstructing the anatomical volume