Multimodal Retrieval in the Medical Domain workshop proceedings available

The proceedings from the First International Workshop Multimodal Retrieval in the Medical Domain (MRMD) 2015, Vienna Austria, March 29, 2015, are now available online: http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319244709

The workshop was held in connection with ECIR 2015. The 14 full papers presented, including one invited paper, a workshop overview and five papers on the VISCERAL Retrieval  Benchmark, were carefully reviewed and selected from 18 submissions. The papers focus on the following topics: importance of data other than text for information retrieval; semantic data analysis; scalability approaches towards big data sets.

Paper on the Control Capabilities of Myoelectric Robotic Phrostheses published

The paper ‘Control Capabilities of Myoelectric Robotic Prostheses by Hand Amputees: A Scientific Research and Market Overview’ by Manfredo Atzori and Henning Müller has been published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 

To view the online publication, please click here: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnsys.2015.00162/full?utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&field=&journalName=Frontiers_in_Systems_Neuroscience&id=162387

“Hand amputation can dramatically affect the capabilities of a person. Cortical reorganization occurs in the brain, but the motor and somatosensorial cortex can interact with the remnant muscles of the missing hand even many years after the amputation, leading to the possibility to restore the capabilities of hand amputees through myoelectric prostheses. Myoelectric hand prostheses with many degrees of freedom are commercially available and recent advances in rehabilitation robotics suggest that their natural control can be performed in real life. The first commercial products exploiting pattern recognition to recognize the movements have recently been released, however the most common control systems are still usually unnatural and must be learned through long training. Dexterous and naturally controlled robotic prostheses can become reality in the everyday life of amputees but the path still requires many steps. This mini-review aims to improve the situation by giving an overview of the advancements in the commercial and scientific domains in order to outline the current and future chances in this field and to foster the integration between market and scientific research.”

Digital Health 2016 – Scientific Summer School now online

Information regarding the “Digital Health 2016 – Early Diagnosis & Prevention – Professional & Scientific Summer School”, June 22-24 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland, is now on the website: www.hesge.ch/heds/summer-school-digital-health-2016.

A descriptive text, flyer and registration/ payment methods form can be found in the website. 

Each day a specific subject will be addressed, consisting of morning lectures and afternoon practical workshops and lab visits:
1. Electronic sensors for health monitoring, 
2. Medical imaging and image processing, 
3. Processing of big data in health. 
The theoretical morning sessions will introduce diverse applications of digital health devices for science and healthcare, but also provide critical views on the risks and other caveats of these innovative approaches. Apart from theoretical and practical aspects of data collection and processing, and their use in the context of early diagnosis and prevention, ethical aspects of digital health will be considered.
Hands-on workshops using established software for data processing, as well as collecting data and laboratory visits are scheduled during the afternoons.
A social program, important to reinforce national and international networking, is foreseen for the evenings.

 

Digital Health 2016 – Scientific Summer School now online

Information regarding the “Digital Health 2016 – Early Diagnosis & Prevention – Professional & Scientific Summer School”, June 22-24 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland, is now on the website: www.hesge.ch/heds/summer-school-digital-health-2016.

A descriptive text, flyer and registration/ payment methods form can be found in the website. 

Each day a specific subject will be addressed, consisting of morning lectures and afternoon practical workshops and lab visits:
1. Electronic sensors for health monitoring, 
2. Medical imaging and image processing, 
3. Processing of big data in health. 
The theoretical morning sessions will introduce diverse applications of digital health devices for science and healthcare, but also provide critical views on the risks and other caveats of these innovative approaches. Apart from theoretical and practical aspects of data collection and processing, and their use in the context of early diagnosis and prevention, ethical aspects of digital health will be considered.
Hands-on workshops using established software for data processing, as well as collecting data and laboratory visits are scheduled during the afternoons.
A social program, important to reinforce national and international networking, is foreseen for the evenings.

 

Paper about search behaviour in the medical domain published

The paper ‘How users search and what they search for in the medical domain: Understanding laypeople and experts through query logs’ by João Palotti, Allan Hanbury, Henning Müller and Charles E. Kahn Jr. is now available online: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10791-015-9269-8  

Abstract
The internet is an important source of medical knowledge for everyone, from laypeople to medical professionals. We investigate how these two extremes, in terms of user groups, have distinct needs and exhibit significantly different search behaviour. We make use of query logs in order to study various aspects of these two kinds of users. The logs from America Online, Health on the Net, Turning Research Into Practice and American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS) GoldMiner were divided into three sets: (1) laypeople, (2) medical professionals (such as physicians or nurses) searching for health content and (3) users not seeking health advice. Several analyses are made focusing on discovering how users search and what they are most interested in. One possible outcome of our analysis is a classifier to infer user expertise, which was built. We show the results and analyse the feature set used to infer expertise. We conclude that medical experts are more persistent, interacting more with the search engine. Also, our study reveals that, conversely to what is stated in much of the literature, the main focus of users, both laypeople and professionals, is on disease rather than symptoms. The results of this article, especially through the classifier built, could be used to detect specific user groups and then adapt search results to the user group.

Multimodal Retrieval in the Medical Domain proceedings now available

The proceedings from the ‘Multimodal Retrieval in the Medical Domain (MRMD) 2015’ workshop are now available online.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Workshop on Multimodal Retrieval  in the Medical Domain, MRMD 2015, held in Vienna, Austria, on March 29, 2015. The workshop was held in connection with ECIR 2015.
The 14 full papers presented, including one invited paper, a workshop overview and five papers on the VISCERAL Retrieval  Benchmark, were carefully reviewed and selected from 18 submissions. The papers focus on the following topics: importance of data other than text for information retrieval; semantic data analysis; scalability approaches towards big data sets.

 

SLDESUTO-Box webpage now available

The project SLDESUTO-Box has now an information webpage in the following link: http://www.hevs.ch/fr/rad-instituts/institut-informatique-de-gestion/projets/sldesuto-box-10060

The purpose of SLDESUTO-BOX is to use unique technology and knowledge within image analysis and based on market demand, develop a Decision Support Toolbox (DST). The DTS will support the pathologists in their challenging task to diagnose and evaluate the prognosis of different types of cancer. The DST will consist of a variety of tools that will be based on learning models for image analysis, trained according to different sub-specialties within pathology. Furthermore, we will also build a reference database, enabling pathologist access to verified reference cases with known clinical outcome.

Evaluation as a Service workshop

A workshop around the topic Evaluation as a Service and the reproducibility of scientific results is being organized by Henning Müller.

The workshop will include funding bodies, researchers and companies that provide the infrastructure and organize challenges, as well as scientist that have studied the scial aspects of challenges including participant motivation and incentivization.

More info can be found at the workshop webpage.

Project for a DEcision SUpport TOol in digital pathology has started

The SLDESUTO-BOX Eurostars sponsored Project kick-off meeting took place in Boston, USA. 

“The purpose of this project is to use unique technology and knowledge within image analysis and based on market demand, develop a Decision Support Toolbox (DST). The DTS will support the pathologists in their challenging task to diagnose and evaluate the prognosis of different types of cancer. The DST will consist of a variety of tools that will be based on learning models for image analysis, trained according to different sub-specialties within pathology. Furthermore, we will also build a reference database, enabling pathologist access to verified reference cases with known clinical outcome.”

More info can be found at the ContextVision webpage

Deep learning applied for histopathology images poster presented at MICCAI 2015

The paper ‘Combining Unsupervised Feature Learning and Riesz Wavelets for Histopathology Image Representation: Application to Identifying Anaplastic Medulloblastoma’ by Sebastian Otálora et al. was presented at the 18th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention – MICCAI2015 in Munich, Germany. 

This and other MedGIFT publications can be found at our publications page

Medical Image Retrieval paper now published in Cancer Informatics journal

The paper ‘Medical Image Retrieval: A Multimodal Approach’ has now been published in Cancer Informatics: http://www.la-press.com/medical-image-retrieval-a-multimodal-approach-article-a4957-abstract?article_id=4957. The authors of the paper are Yu Cao, Shawn Steffey, Jianbiao He, Degui Xiao, Cui Tao, Ping Chen and Henning Müller.

Abstract

Medical imaging is becoming a vital component of war on cancer. Tremendous amounts of medical image data are captured and recorded in a digital format during cancer care and cancer research. Facing such an unprecedented volume of image data with heterogeneous image modalities, it is necessary to develop effective and efficient content-based medical image retrieval systems for cancer clinical practice and research. While substantial progress has been made in different areas of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) research, direct applications of existing CBIR techniques to the medical images produced unsatisfactory results, because of the unique characteristics of medical images. In this paper, we develop a new multimodal medical image retrieval approach based on the recent advances in the statistical graphic model and deep learning. Specifically, we first investigate a new extended probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis model to integrate the visual and textual information from medical images to bridge the semantic gap. We then develop a new deep Boltzmann machine-based multimodal learning model to learn the joint density model from multimodal information in order to derive the missing modality. Experimental results with large volume of real-world medical images have shown that our new approach is a promising solution for the next-generation medical imaging indexing and retrieval system.

MICCAI accepted paper obtained Student Travel Award

The paper ‘Anaplastic Medulloblastoma tumor differentiation by combining Unsupervised Feature Learning and Riesz wavelets for histopathology image representation’ by Sebastian Otálora et al. accepted at MICCAI 2015, was selected for the Student Travel Award. 

This work was performed under the supervision of Henning Müller, Adrien Depeursinge and Manfredo Atzori.

Medical grids paper now available online

The paper ‘A review of medical grids and their direction – A Swiss/Japanese perspective’ by Toshiharu Nakai, Henning Müller et al. is now available online. 

The workshop paper from the International Journal of Research Studies in Computing is available here: http://consortiacademia.org/10-5861ijrsc-2015-1109/

Abstract

This paper presents a general and comparative review of the advances of grid technologies in medical sciences since 2000, with a special emphasis on Europe and Japan. The EU has over the years funded several big projects in the Grid and now the cloud area, covering besides the high energy physics domain also bioinformatics and medical applications as in image analysis. Bioinformatics and pharmaceutical design have been the major targets of grid applications in Japan. Grids and clouds share many of the same goals and techniques, although clouds are more commercially oriented and privately provided services and grids are rather publicly initiated resource sharing platforms between institutions without strong economic objectives. In the future, merging these two may potentially solve inter-operation problems of grids, which have been limiting the propagation of biomedical grids.