Abstract

Abstract
This paper describes a methodology for Diabetic Retinopathy detection from eye fundus images using a generalization of the Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) method. We formulate the BoVW as two neural networks that can be trained jointly. Unlike the BoVW, our model is able to learn how to perform feature extraction, feature encoding and classification guided by the classification error. The model achieves 0.97 Area Under the Curve (AUC) on the DR2 dataset while the standard BoVW approach achieves 0.94 AUC. Also, it performs at the same level of the state-of-the-art on the Messidor dataset with 0.90 AUC.

Abstract
This paper presents a new method for automatic common carotid artery detection in B-mode ultrasonography. The proposed method is based on the location of phase symmetry patterns at apropriate scale of analysis. The local phase information is derived from the monogenic signal and isotropic log-normal band-pass filters, and the resulting common carotid artery is located using a dynamic programming optimization algorithm. The experiments show that the proposed method is more robust to noise than previous approaches, although additional research is required for robust common carotid artery detection on the more complicated cases.

Abstract
This work presents the results of the characterization of lung nodules in chest Computerized Tomography for benign/malignant classification. A set of image features was used in the Computer-aided Diagnosis system to distinguish benign from malignant nodules and, therefore, diagnose lung cancer. A filter-based feature selection approach was used in order to define an optimal subset with higher accuracy. A large and heterogeneous set of 293 features was defined, including shape, intensity and texture features. We used different KNN and SVM classifiers to evaluate the features subsets. The estimated results were tested in a dataset annotated by radiologists. Promising results were obtained with an area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC value) of 96:2 ± 0:5% using SVM.

Abstract
The Arteriolar-to-Venular Ratio (AVR) is a well known index for the early diagnosis of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension or cardio-vascular pathologies. This paper presents an automatic approach for the estimation of the AVR in retinal images. The proposed method includes vessel segmentation, vessel caliber estimation, optic disc detection, region of interest determination, artery/vein classification and finally AVR calculation. This method was evaluated using the images of the INSPIRE-AVR dataset. The mean error of the measured AVR values with respect to the reference ones was 0.05, which is identical to the one achieved by a medical expert using a semi-automated system, thus demonstrating the reliability of the herein proposed solution for AVR estimation.

Abstract
The classification of retinal vessels into artery/vein (A/V) is an important phase for automating the detection of vascular changes, and for the calculation of characteristic signs associated with several systemic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and other cardiovascular conditions. This paper presents an automatic approach for A/V classification based on the analysis of a graph extracted from the retinal vasculature. The proposed method classifies the entire vascular tree deciding on the type of each intersection point (graph nodes) and assigning one of two labels to each vessel segment (graph links). Final classification of a vessel segment as A/V is performed through the combination of the graph-based labeling results with a set of intensity features. The results of this proposed method are compared with manual labeling for three public databases. Accuracy values of 88.3%, 87.4%, and 89.8% are obtained for the images of the INSPIREAVR, DRIVE, and VICAVR databases, respectively. These results demonstrate that our method outperforms recent approaches for A/V classification.