Estimated blind people in the world will exceed 40 million by 2025. To develop novel algorithms based on fundus image descriptors that allow the automatic classification of retinal tissue into ...healthy and pathological in early stages is necessary. In this paper, we focus on one of the most common pathologies in the current society: diabetic retinopathy. The proposed method avoids the necessity of lesion segmentation or candidate map generation before the classification stage. Local binary patterns and granulometric profiles are locally computed to extract texture and morphological information from retinal images. Different combinations of this information feed classification algorithms to optimally discriminate bright and dark lesions from healthy tissues. Through several experiments, the ability of the proposed system to identify diabetic retinopathy signs is validated using different public databases with a large degree of variability and without image exclusion.
Most current algorithms for automatic glaucoma assessment using fundus images rely on handcrafted features based on segmentation, which are affected by the performance of the chosen segmentation ...method and the extracted features. Among other characteristics, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are known because of their ability to learn highly discriminative features from raw pixel intensities.
In this paper, we employed five different ImageNet-trained models (VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, ResNet50 and Xception) for automatic glaucoma assessment using fundus images. Results from an extensive validation using cross-validation and cross-testing strategies were compared with previous works in the literature.
Using five public databases (1707 images), an average AUC of 0.9605 with a 95% confidence interval of 95.92-97.07%, an average specificity of 0.8580 and an average sensitivity of 0.9346 were obtained after using the Xception architecture, significantly improving the performance of other state-of-the-art works. Moreover, a new clinical database, ACRIMA, has been made publicly available, containing 705 labelled images. It is composed of 396 glaucomatous images and 309 normal images, which means, the largest public database for glaucoma diagnosis. The high specificity and sensitivity obtained from the proposed approach are supported by an extensive validation using not only the cross-validation strategy but also the cross-testing validation on, to the best of the authors' knowledge, all publicly available glaucoma-labelled databases.
These results suggest that using ImageNet-trained models is a robust alternative for automatic glaucoma screening system. All images, CNN weights and software used to fine-tune and test the five CNNs are publicly available, which could be used as a testbed for further comparisons.
The field of digital histopathology has seen incredible growth in recent years. Digital pathology is becoming a relevant tool in healthcare, industrial and research sectors to reduce the saturation ...of pathology departments and improve the productivity of pathologists by increasing diagnostic accuracy and reducing turnaround times. Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms may be used for the identification of relevant regions, extraction of features from a histological image and overall classification of images into specific classes. The combination of digital histopathology imaging and AI therefore presents a significant opportunity for the support of the pathologists' tasks and opens up a whole new world of computational analysis. In this paper, we have analysed the present, the challenges and the future of the computational pathology discussing the different existing strategies to overcome its main limitations and ensure the computational pathology acceptance. The lack of labelled data, which is the possibly largest challenge for all medical AI applications, is even more pronounced in computational pathology because of the multi-gigapixel nature of the images and high data heterogeneity. We consider the future of the computational pathology is the combination of weak label strategies with active learning and crowdsourcing scenarios since it would remove some of the workload from clinical experts and manual annotation obtaining clinically satisfactory performance with minimal annotation effort. In addition, we believe areas such as explainable AI, data fusion and secure role-based data sharing will be receiving increasing research attention in computational pathology in the close future.
•Computational pathology is the automatic analysis of histological images.•The present, challenges and future of computational pathology are analyzed.•Challenges: multi-gigapixel images, data heterogeneity and lack of labelled data.•Future directions: explainable AI, data fusion and secure role-based data sharing.•Combining weak label strategies, active learning and crowdsourcing is promising.
The purpose of the present study is to investigate whether the effectiveness of a new ad on digital channels (YouTube) can be predicted by using neural networks and neuroscience-based metrics (brain ...response, heart rate variability and eye tracking). Neurophysiological records from 35 participants were exposed to 8 relevant TV Super Bowl commercials. Correlations between neurophysiological-based metrics, ad recall, ad liking, the ACE metrix score and the number of views on YouTube during a year were investigated. Our findings suggest a significant correlation between neuroscience metrics and self-reported of ad effectiveness and the direct number of views on the YouTube channel. In addition, and using an artificial neural network based on neuroscience metrics, the model classifies (82.9% of average accuracy) and estimate the number of online views (mean error of 0.199). The results highlight the validity of neuromarketing-based techniques for predicting the success of advertising responses. Practitioners can consider the proposed methodology at the design stages of advertising content, thus enhancing advertising effectiveness. The study pioneers the use of neurophysiological methods in predicting advertising success in a digital context. This is the first article that has examined whether these measures could actually be used for predicting views for advertising on YouTube.
Facial information is processed by our brain in such a way that we immediately make judgments about, for example, attractiveness or masculinity or interpret personality traits or moods of other ...people. The appearance of each facial feature has an effect on our perception of facial traits. This research addresses the problem of measuring the size of these effects for five facial features (eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, and jaw). Our proposal is a mixed feature-based and image-based approach that allows judgments to be made on complete real faces in the categorization tasks, more than on synthetic, noisy, or partial faces that can influence the assessment. Each facial feature of the faces is automatically classified considering their global appearance using principal component analysis. Using this procedure, we establish a reduced set of relevant specific attributes (each one describing a complete facial feature) to characterize faces. In this way, a more direct link can be established between perceived facial traits and what people intuitively consider an eye, an eyebrow, a nose, a mouth, or a jaw. A set of 92 male faces were classified using this procedure, and the results were related to their scores in 15 perceived facial traits. We show that the relevant features greatly depend on what we are trying to judge. Globally, the eyes have the greatest effect. However, other facial features are more relevant for some judgments like the mouth for happiness and femininity or the nose for dominance.
Abstract
Capsule endoscopy (CE) is a widely used, minimally invasive alternative to traditional endoscopy that allows visualisation of the entire small intestine. Patient preparation can help to ...obtain a cleaner intestine and thus better visibility in the resulting videos. However, studies on the most effective preparation method are conflicting due to the absence of objective, automatic cleanliness evaluation methods. In this work, we aim to provide such a method capable of presenting results on an intuitive scale, with a relatively light-weight novel convolutional neural network architecture at its core. We trained our model using 5-fold cross-validation on an extensive data set of over 50,000 image patches, collected from 35 different CE procedures, and compared it with state-of-the-art classification methods. From the patch classification results, we developed a method to automatically estimate pixel-level probabilities and deduce cleanliness evaluation scores through automatically learnt thresholds. We then validated our method in a clinical setting on 30 newly collected CE videos, comparing the resulting scores to those independently assigned by human specialists. We obtained the highest classification accuracy for the proposed method (95.23%), with significantly lower average prediction times than for the second-best method. In the validation of our method, we found acceptable agreement with two human specialists compared to interhuman agreement, showing its validity as an objective evaluation method.
The annotation of large datasets is often the bottleneck in the successful application of artificial intelligence in computational pathology. For this reason recently Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) ...and Semi Supervised Learning (SSL) approaches are gaining popularity because they require fewer annotations. In this work we couple SSL and MIL to train a deep learning classifier that combines the advantages of both methods and overcomes their limitations. Our method is able to learn from the global WSI diagnosis and a combination of labeled and unlabeled patches. Furthermore, we propose and evaluate an efficient labeling paradigm that guarantees a strong classification performance when combined with our learning framework. We compare our method to SSL and MIL baselines, the state-of-the-art and completely supervised training. With only a small percentage of patch labels our proposed model achieves a competitive performance on SICAPv2 (Cohen's kappa of 0.801 with 450 patch labels), PANDA (Cohen's kappa of 0.794 with 22,023 patch labels) and Camelyon16 (ROC AUC of 0.913 with 433 patch labels). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/arneschmidt/ssl_and_mil_cancer_classification .
Analysis of histopathological image supposes the most reliable procedure to identify prostate cancer. Most studies try to develop computer aid-systems to face the Gleason grading problem. On the ...contrary, we delve into the discrimination between healthy and cancerous tissues in its earliest stage, only focusing on the information contained in the automatically segmented gland candidates. We propose a hand-driven learning approach, in which we perform an exhaustive hand-crafted feature extraction stage combining in a novel way descriptors of morphology, texture, fractals and contextual information of the candidates under study. Then, we carry out an in-depth statistical analysis to select the most relevant features that constitute the inputs to the optimised machine-learning classifiers. Additionally, we apply for the first time on prostate segmented glands, deep-learning algorithms modifying the popular VGG19 neural network. We fine-tuned the last convolutional block of the architecture to provide the model specific knowledge about the gland images. The hand-driven learning approach, using a nonlinear Support Vector Machine, reports a slight outperforming over the rest of experiments with a final multi-class accuracy of 0.876 ± 0.026 in the discrimination between false glands (artefacts), benign glands and Gleason grade 3 glands.
According to the Global Cancer Observatory, 2020, breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer type in both genders (11.7%), while prostate cancer is the second most common cancer type in men (14.1%). ...In digital pathology, Content-Based Medical Image Retrieval (CBMIR) is a powerful tool for improving cancer diagnosis by searching for similar histopathological Whole Slide Images (WSIs). CBMIR empowers pathologists to explore similar patches to their query, enhancing diagnostic reliability and accuracy. In this paper, a customized unsupervised Convolutional Auto Encoder (CAE) was developed in the proposed Unsupervised CBMIR (UCBMIR) to replicate the traditional cancer diagnosis workflow, offering the potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy and efficiency by reducing pathologists’ workload. Furthermore, it provides a more transparent supporting tool for pathologists in cancer diagnosis. UCBMIR was evaluated using two widely used numerical techniques in CBMIR, visual techniques, and compared with a classifier. Validation encompassed three data sets, including an external evaluation to demonstrate its effectiveness. UCBMIR achieved 99% and 80% top 5 recalls on BreaKHis and SICAPv2 with the first evaluation technique while using the second technique, it reached 91% and 70% precision for BreaKHis and SICAPv2, respectively. Moreover, UCBMIR displayed a strong capability to identify diverse patterns, yielding 81% accuracy in the top 5 predictions on an external image from Arvaniti. The proposed unsupervised CBMIR tool delivered 83% accuracy in retrieving images with the same cancer type.
Classification or typology systems used to categorize different human body parts have existed for many years. Nevertheless, there are very few taxonomies of facial features. Ergonomics, forensic ...anthropology, crime prevention or new human-machine interaction systems and online activities, like e-commerce, e-learning, games, dating or social networks, are fields in which classifications of facial features are useful, for example, to create digital interlocutors that optimize the interactions between human and machines. However, classifying isolated facial features is difficult for human observers. Previous works reported low inter-observer and intra-observer agreement in the evaluation of facial features. This work presents a computer-based procedure to automatically classify facial features based on their global appearance. This procedure deals with the difficulties associated with classifying features using judgements from human observers, and facilitates the development of taxonomies of facial features. Taxonomies obtained through this procedure are presented for eyes, mouths and noses.