Resultados de pesquisa

Most artistic performances rely on human gestures, ultimately resulting in an elaborate interaction between the performer and the audience. Humans, even without any kind of formal analysis background in music, dance or gesture are typically able to extract, almost unconsciously, a great amount of relevant information from a gesture. In fact, a gesture contains so much information, why not use it to further enhance a performance? Gestures and expressive communication are intrinsically connected, and being intimately attached to our own daily existence, both have a central position in our (nowadays) technological society. However, the use of technology to understand gestures is still somehow vaguely explored, it has moved beyond its first steps but the way towards systems fully capable of analyzing gestures is still long and d...

Breast Cancer Conservative Treatment (BCCT) is considered nowadays to be the most widespread form of locor-regional breast cancer treatment. However, aesthetic results are heterogeneous and difficult to evaluate in a standardized way. The limited reproducibility of subjective aesthetic evaluation in BCCT motivated the research towards objective methods. A recent computer system (BCCT. core) was developed to objectively and automatically evaluate the aesthetic result of BCCT. The system is centered on a support vector machine (SVM) classifier with a radial basis function (RBF) used to predict the overall cosmetic result from features computed on a digital photograph of the patient. However, this classifier is not ideal for the interpretation of the factors being used in the prediction. Therefore, an often suggested improvement is the in...

A avaliação estética da mama é um requisito em diversas aplicações médicas, nomeadamente no tratamento conservador do cancro da mama. Para ultrapassar as limitações de reprodutibilidade e praticabilidade dos métodos subjectivos correntes, foi recentemente desenvolvido um sistema inovador, assistido por computador para uso médico, denominado BCCT.core (Breast Cancer Conservative Treatment.cosmetic results), que prevê, automaticamente, o resultado estético do tratamento conservador do cancro da mama após intervenção [1]. Um dos grandes desafios no desenvolvimento de qualquer sistema computacional é desenhar interfaces de utilizador eficazes — fáceis de aprender, efectivas e que conduzam a uma experiência agradável. Neste trabalho, analisamos alguns dos aspectos mais importantes do desenho da interface do BCCT.core, relacionados com...

Rationale and Objectives Computer-aided detection and diagnosis (CAD) systems have been developed in the past two decades to assist radiologists in the detection and diagnosis of lesions seen on breast imaging exams, thus providing a second opinion. Mammographic databases play an important role in the development of algorithms aiming at the detection and diagnosis of mammary lesions. However, available databases often do not take into consideration all the requirements needed for research and study purposes. This article aims to present and detail a new mammographic database. Materials and Methods Images were acquired at a breast center located in a university hospital (Centro Hospitalar de S. João [CHSJ], Breast Centre, Porto) with the permission of the Portuguese National Committee of Data Protection and Hospital's Ethics Commit...

Microscopy examination has been the pillar of malaria diagnosis, being the recommended procedure when its quality can be maintained. However, the need for trained personnel and adequate equipment limits its availability and accessibility in malaria-endemic areas. Rapid, accurate, accessible diagnostic tools are increasingly required, as malaria control programs extend parasite-based diagnosis and the prevalence decreases. This paper presents an image processing and analysis methodology using supervised classification to assess the presence of malaria parasites and determine the species and life cycle stage in Giemsa-stained thin blood smears. The main differentiation factor is the usage of microscopic images exclusively acquired with low cost and accessible tools such as smartphones, a dataset of 566 images manually annotated by an exp...