Uncertainty as key element in the analysis of X–ray angiography images

The X–ray angiography images are routinely used to assess the blood vessels. The acquisition procedure considers a medical imaging system which allows obtaining views of the vessel while the blood flows thought them. The X–ray source is influenced on the region to be viewed and then, the projection of the all anatomical structures in the champ of view is shown through an image intensifier. The information of the blood vessel is impacted for the other structures. Additionally, the blood and the contrast product required in the acquisition are not mixed homogeneously, producing artifacts in the images. Finally, the noise is also an impact factor in the quality of the angiography images. In the coronary vessel case, the branches of the network are superposed. In this paper, an enhancement procedure to diminish the uncertainty associated to X–ray angiography images is reported. The relation between two versions of the angiograms is determined using a fuzzy connector considering that this relation diminishes the images intrinsic uncertainty. These versions correspond with images filtered with low-pass and high-pass image filters, respectively. The technique is tested with images of the coronary and kidney vessels. The qualitative results show a good enhanced of the angiography images

New anisotropic diffusion operator in images filtering

The anisotropic di usion lters have become in the fundamental bases to address the medical images noise problem. The main attributes of these lters are: the noise removal e ectiveness and the preservation of the information belonging to the edges that delimit the objects of an image. Due to these excellent attributes, through this article, a comparative study is proposed between a new di usion operator and the Lorentz operator, proposed by the pioneers of anisotropic di usion. For this, a strategy consisting of two phases is designed. In the rst, called operator construction, the composition of functions is used to generate a new di usion operator that meets with the conditions reported for this kind of the mathematical object. In the second phase, denominated ltering, a synthetic cardiac images database, based on computed tomography, is ltered using the aforementioned operators. According with the value obtained for the peak of the signal-to-noise ratio, the new operator shows similar performance to the Lorentz operator. The implementation of this new operator contributes to the generation of new knowledge in digital image processing context

The rubric as an assessment strategy in the mathematical argumentation process

The article shares the proposal of an analytical rubric as a strategy for the assessment and monitoring of learning outcomes in students who develop an argumentative plot from the mathematics field, to solve any problem situation in daily life. The study was based on the theory of mathematical argumentation proposed by Duval and the contributions of León and Calderón, as well as the dimensions presented to us by the logical frameworks in the design of analytical rubrics. The research was developed under the social critical paradigm through the design of pedagogical action research, and the focus group technique was used for the collection of information composed by five professors from the department of basic sciences. As a result, a collective rubric that, in addition to generating processes of self-assessment and self-training in teachers, evidences a decrease in the existent subjectivity of the evaluation processes, thus strengthening its objectivity

Parallel methods for linear systems solution in extreme learning machines: an overview

This paper aims to present an updated review of parallel algorithms for solving square and rectangular single and double precision matrix linear systems using multi-core central processing units and graphic processing units. A brief description of the methods for the solution of linear systems based on operations, factorization and iterations was made. The methodology implemented, in this article, is a documentary and it was based on the review of about 17 papers reported in the literature during the last five years (2016-2020). The disclosed findings demonstrate the potential of parallelism to significantly decrease extreme learning machines training times for problems with large amounts of data given the calculation of the Moore Penrose pseudo inverse. The implementation of parallel algorithms in the calculation of the pseudo-inverse will allow to contribute significantly in the applications of diversifying areas, since it can accelerate the training time of the extreme learning machines with optimal results

Pulmonary adenocarcinoma characterization using computed tomography images

Lung cancer is one of the pathologies that sensitively affects the health of human beings. Particularly, the pathology called pulmonary adenocarcinoma represents 25% of all lung cancers. In this research, we propose a semiautomatic technique for the characterization of a tumor (adenocarcinoma type), present in a three-dimensional pulmonary computed tomography dataset. Following the basic scheme of digital image processing, first, a bank of smoothing filters and edge detectors is applied allowing the adequate preprocessing over the dataset images. Then, clustering methods are used for obtaining the tumor morphology. The relative percentage error and the accuracy rate were the metrics considered to determine the performance of the proposed technique. The values obtained from the metrics used reflect an excellent correlation between the morphology of the tumor, generated manually by a pneumologist and the values obtained by the proposed technique. In the clinical and surgical contexts, the characterization of the detected lung tumor is made in terms of volume occupied by the tumor and it allows the monitoring of this disease as well as the activation of the respective protocols for its approach

Usefulness of digital images segmentation in pulmonary transplantation

In the presence of pulmonary pathologies such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diffuse pulmonary disease and cystic fibrosis, among others, it is common to require the removal or replacement of a portion of lungs. There are several requirements for both donors and organ receivers (recipients) established in the literature. May be the main one is the volume that the donor's lungs occupy in the thoracic cavity. This parameter is vital because if the volume of the lungs exceeds the thoracic cavity of the recipients the transplant, logically, is unfeasible for physical reasons such as the incompatibility between the receiver lung volume and the donor lung volume. In this sense, the present paper proposes the creation of a hybrid technique, based on digital image processing techniques application to raise the quality of the information related to lungs captured in three-dimensional sequences of computed tomography and for generating the morphology and the volumes of the lungs, belonging to a patient. During the filtering stage median, saturated and gradient magnitude filters are applied with the purpose of addressing the noise and artefacts images problems; whereas during the segmentation stage, methods based on clustering processes are used to extract the lungs from the images. The values obtained for the metric that assesses the quality of the hybrid computational technique reflect its good performance. Additionally, these results are very important in clinical processes where both the shapes and volumes of lungs are vital for monitoring some lung diseases that can affect the normal lung physiology

Semi-automatic detection of the evolutionary forms of visceral leishmaniasis in microscopic blood smears

Leishmaniasis is a complex group of diseases caused by obligate unicellular and intracellular eukaryotic protozoa of the leishmania genus. Leishmania species generate diverse syndromes ranging from skin ulcers of spontaneous resolution to fatal visceral disease. These syndromes belong to three categories: visceral leishmaniasis, cutaneous leishmaniasis and mucosal leishmaniasis. The visceral leishmaniasis is based on the reticuloendothelial system producing hepatomegaly, splenomegaly and lymphadenopathy. In the present article, a semiautomatic segmentation strategy is proposed to obtain the segmentations of the evolutionary shapes of visceral leishmaniasis called parasites, specifically of the type amastigote and promastigote. For this purpose, the optical microscopy images containing said evolutionary shapes, which are generated from a blood smear, are subjected to a process of transformation of the color intensity space into a space of intensity in gray levels that facilitate their subsequent preprocessing and adaptation. In the preprocessing stage, smoothing filters and edge detectors are used to enhance the optical microscopy images. In a complementary way, a segmentation technique that groups the pixels corresponding to each one of the parasites, presents in the considered images, is applied. The results reveal a high correspondence between the available manual segmentations and the semi-automatic segmentations which are useful for the characterization of the parasites. The obtained segmentations let us to calculate areas and perimeters associated with the parasites segmented. These results are very important in clinical context where both the area and perimeter calculated are vital for monitoring the development of visceral leishmaniasis

Large cells cancer volumetry in chest computed tomography pulmonary images

Lung cancer is the leading oncological cause of death in the world. As for carcinomas, they represent between 90% and 95% of lung cancers; among them, non-small cell lung cancer is the most common type and the large cell carcinoma, the pathology on which this research focuses, is usually detected with the computed tomography images of the thorax. These images have three big problems: noise, artifacts and low contrast. The volume of the large cell carcinoma is obtained from the segmentations of the cancerous tumor generated, in a semi-automatic way, by a computational strategy based on a combination of algorithms that, in order to address the aforementioned problems, considers median and gradient magnitude filters and an unsupervised grouping technique for generating the large cell carcinoma morphology. The results of high correlation between the semi-automatic segmentations and the manual ones, drawn up by a pulmonologist, allow us to infer the excellent performance of the proposed technique. This technique can be useful in the detection and monitoring of large cell carcinoma and if it is considering this kind of computational strategy, medical specialists can establish the clinic or surgical actions oriented to address this pulmonary pathology

Use of computational realistic models for the cardiac ejection fraction calculation

Ejection fraction is one of the most useful clinical descriptors to determine the cardiac function of a subject. For this reason, obtaining the value of this descriptor is of vital importance and requires high precision. However, in the clinical routine, to generate the mentioned descriptor value, a geometric hypothesis is assumed, obtaining an approximate value for this fraction, usually by excess, and which is a dependent-operator. The aim of the present work is to propose the accurate calculation of the ejection fraction from realistic models, obtained computationally, of the cardiac chamber called right ventricle. Normally, the geometric hypothesis that makes this ventricle coincide with a pyramidal type geometric shape, is not usually, fulfilled in subjects affected by several cardiac pathologies, so as an alternative to this problem, the computational segmentation process is used to generate the morphology of the right ventricle and from it proceeds to obtain, accurately, the ejection fraction value. In this sense, an automatic strategy based on no-lineal filters, smart operator and region growing technique is propose in order to generate the right ventricle ejection fraction. The results are promising due we obtained an excellent correspondence between the manual segmentation and the automatic one generated by the realistic models

Usefulness of cutting planes in the hierarchical segmentation of cardiac anatomical structures

A spatial geometric plane is defined by the three-dimensional coordinates of a pair of spatial points and the direction that the normal vector establishes, which is formed by joining those points by means of an oriented line segment. This type of planes, in three-dimensional images, is extremely useful as an alternative solution to the problem of low contrast that exhibit the anatomical structures present in cardiac computed tomography images. To do this, after using a predetermined filter bank and in order to define a region of interest, a smart operator based on least squares support vector machines is trained and validated in order to detect the aforementioned coordinates which enables the location of the plane, in the three-dimensional space that contains the considered images. Once the structure that is required to segment is identified, a discriminant function is used that cancels all information not linked to this structure. In this work, the segmentation of the left ventricle, based on region growing technique, is firstly considered and then the left atrium is segmented considering region growing technique and an inverse discriminant function. The results show an excellent correspondence relationship when the spatial union of both structures is made