Detection of pathologies in retina digital images an empirical mode decomposition approach

Accurate automatic detection of pathologies in retina digital images offers a promising approach in clinicalapplications. This thesis employs the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to extract six statistical textural features from retina digital images. The statistical features are the mean, standard deviation, smoothness, third moment, uniformity, and entropy. The purpose is to classify normal and abnormal images. Five different pathologies are considered. They are Artery sheath (Coat’s disease), blot hemorrhage, retinal degeneration (circinates), age-related macular degeneration (drusens), and diabetic retinopathy (microaneurysms and exudates). Four classifiers are employed; including support vector machines (SVM), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), k-nearest neighbor algorithm (k-NN), and probabilistic neural networks (PNN). For each experiment, ten random folds are generated to perform cross-validation tests. In order to assess the performance of the classifiers, the average and standard deviation of the correct recognition rate, sensitivity and specificity are computed for each simulation. The experimental results highlight two main conclusions. First, they show the outstanding performance of EMD over DWT with all classifiers. Second, they demonstrate the superiority of the SVM classifier over QDA, k-NN, and PNN. Finally, principal component analysis (PCA) was employed to reduce the number of features in hope to improve the accuracy of classifiers. We find that there is no general and significant improvement of the performance, however. In sum, the EMD-SVM system provides a promising approach for the detection of pathologies in digital retina

Analysis of Signal Decomposition and Stain Separation methods for biomedical applications

Nowadays, the biomedical signal processing and classification and medical image interpretation play an essential role in the detection and diagnosis of several human diseases. The problem of high variability and heterogeneity of information, which is extracted from digital data, can be addressed with signal decomposition and stain separation techniques which can be useful approaches to highlight hidden patterns or rhythms in biological signals and specific cellular structures in histological color images, respectively. This thesis work can be divided into two macro-sections. In the first part (Part I), a novel cascaded RNN model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) blocks is presented with the aim to classify sleep stages automatically. A general workflow based on single-channel EEG signals is developed to enhance the low performance in staging N1 sleep without reducing the performances in the other sleep stages (i.e. Wake, N2, N3 and REM). In the same context, several signal decomposition techniques and time-frequency representations are deployed for the analysis of EEG signals. All extracted features are analyzed by using a novel correlation-based timestep feature selection and finally the selected features are fed to a bidirectional RNN model. In the second part (Part II), a fully automated method named SCAN (Stain Color Adaptive Normalization) is proposed for the separation and normalization of staining in digital pathology. This normalization system allows to standardize digitally, automatically and in a few seconds, the color intensity of a tissue slide with respect to that of a target image, in order to improve the pathologist’s diagnosis and increase the accuracy of computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) systems. Multiscale evaluation and multi-tissue comparison are performed for assessing the robustness of the proposed method. In addition, a stain normalization based on a novel mathematical technique, named ICD (Inverse Color Deconvolution) is developed for immunohistochemical (IHC) staining in histopathological images. In conclusion, the proposed techniques achieve satisfactory results compared to state-of-the-art methods in the same research field. The workflow proposed in this thesis work and the developed algorithms can be employed for the analysis and interpretation of other biomedical signals and for digital medical image analysis

Novel two dimensional singular spectrum analysis for effective feature extraction and data classification in hyperspectral imaging

Feature extraction is of high importance for effective data classification in hyperspectral imaging (HSI). Considering the high correlation among band images, spectral-domain feature extraction is widely employed. For effective spatial information extraction, a 2-D extension to singular spectrum analysis (SSA), a recent technique for generic data mining and temporal signal analysis, is proposed. With 2D-SSA applied to HSI, each band image is decomposed into varying trend, oscillations and noise. Using the trend and selected oscillations as features, the reconstructed signal, with noise highly suppressed, becomes more robust and effective for data classification. Three publicly available data sets for HSI remote sensing data classification are used in our experiments. Comprehensive results using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier have quantitatively evaluated the efficacy of the proposed approach. Benchmarked with several state-of-the-art methods including 2-D empirical mode decomposition (2D-EMD), it is found that our proposed 2D-SSA approach generates the best results in most cases. Unlike 2D-EMD which requires sequential transforms to obtain detailed decomposition, 2D-SSA extracts all components simultaneously. As a result, the executive time in feature extraction can also be dramatically reduced. The superiority in terms of enhanced discrimination ability from 2D-SSA is further validated when a relatively weak classifier, k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), is used for data classification. In addition, the combination of 2D-SSA with 1D-PCA (2D-SSA-PCA) has generated the best results among several other approaches, which has demonstrated the great potential in combining 2D-SSA with other approaches for effective spatial-spectral feature extraction and dimension reduction in HSI

Advanced Techniques for Ground Penetrating Radar Imaging

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) has become one of the key technologies in subsurface sensing and, in general, in non-destructive testing (NDT), since it is able to detect both metallic and nonmetallic targets. GPR for NDT has been successfully introduced in a wide range of sectors, such as mining and geology, glaciology, civil engineering and civil works, archaeology, and security and defense. In recent decades, improvements in georeferencing and positioning systems have enabled the introduction of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) techniques in GPR systems, yielding GPR–SAR systems capable of providing high-resolution microwave images. In parallel, the radiofrequency front-end of GPR systems has been optimized in terms of compactness (e.g., smaller Tx/Rx antennas) and cost. These advances, combined with improvements in autonomous platforms, such as unmanned terrestrial and aerial vehicles, have fostered new fields of application for GPR, where fast and reliable detection capabilities are demanded. In addition, processing techniques have been improved, taking advantage of the research conducted in related fields like inverse scattering and imaging. As a result, novel and robust algorithms have been developed for clutter reduction, automatic target recognition, and efficient processing of large sets of measurements to enable real-time imaging, among others. This Special Issue provides an overview of the state of the art in GPR imaging, focusing on the latest advances from both hardware and software perspectives

Proceedings, MSVSCC 2018

Proceedings of the 12th Annual Modeling, Simulation & Visualization Student Capstone Conference held on April 19, 2018 at VMASC in Suffolk, Virginia. 155 pp