Segmentation of MR brain images with bias artifact

Brain MR Images corrupted by RF- Inhomogeneity (bias artifact) exhibit brightness variations across the image. As a consequence, a standard Fuzzy C-Means (fern) segmentation algorithm may fail. In this work we show a new general-purpose bias removing algorithm, which can be used as a pre-processing step for a fern segmentation. We also compare our experimental results with the ones achieved by using E2 D - H U M filter, showing an improvement in brain segmentation and bias removal.

Homomorphic Approach to RF-Inhomogeneity Removal Based on Gabor Filter

In this paper a bias correction algorithm for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is presented. The magnetic resonance (MR) images affected by this artifact, also called RF-inhomogeneity, exhibit irregular spatial brightness variations caused by magnetic field inhomogeneity. Here we present an original algorithm based on E2D - HUM, already proposed by some of the authors, where a modified Gabor filter is introduced in the elaboration chain to provide directional capabilities to suppress the artifact. The process of restoration doesn't care about the structure of the image and it has been applied to MR images of different parts of body like knee, abdomen, pelvis and brain. A comparison with oth…

Blood vessels and feature points detection on retinal images

In this paper we present a method for the automatic extraction of blood vessels from retinal images, while capturing points of intersection/overlap and endpoints of the vascular tree. The algorithm performance is evaluated through a comparison with handmade segmented images available on the STARE project database (STructured Analysis of the REtina). The algorithm is performed on the green channel of the RGB triad. The green channel can be used to represent the illumination component. The matched filter is used to enhance vessels w.r.t. the background. The separation between vessels and background is accomplished by a threshold operator based on gaussian probability density function. The len…

Automatic Extraction of Blood Vessels, Bifurcations and End Points in the Retinal Vascular Tree

In this paper we present an effective algorithm for automated extraction of the vascular tree in retinal images, including bifurcations, crossovers and end-points detection. Correct identification of these features in the ocular fundus helps the diagnosis of important systematic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension. The pre-processing consists in artefacts removal based on anisotropic diffusion filter. Then a matched filter is applied to enhance blood vessels. The filter uses a full adaptive kernel because each vessel has a proper orientation and thickness. The kernel of the filter needs to be rotated for all possible directions. As a consequence, a suitable kernel has been designed …

Pervasive access to MRI bias artifact suppression service on a grid.

Bias artifact corrupts magnetic resonance images in such a way that the image is afflicted by illumination variations. Some of the authors proposed the Exponential Entropy Driven - Homomorphic Unsharp Masking (E2D-HUM) algorithm that corrects this artifact without any a priori hypothesis about the tissues or the Magnetic Resonance image modality. Moreover, E2D-HUM does not care about the body part under examination and does not require any particular training task. People who want to use this algorithm, which is Matlab-based, have to set their own computers in order to execute it. Furthermore, they have to be Matlab-skilled to exploit all the features of the algorithm. In our work we propos…

Fuzzy C-Means Inspired Free Form Deformation Technique for Registration

This paper presents a novel method aimed to free form deformation function approximation for purpose of image registration. The method is currently feature-based. The algorithm is inspired to concepts derived from Fuzzy C-means clustering technique such as membership degree and cluster centroids. After algorithm explanation, tests and relative results obtained are presented and discussed. Finally, considerations on future improvements are elucidated.

A Teledentistry system for the second opinion

In this paper we present a Teledentistry system aimed to the Second Opinion task. It make use of a particular camera called intra-oral camera, also called dental camera, in order to perform the photo shooting and real-time video of the inner part of the mouth. The pictures acquired by the Operator with such a device are sent to the Oral Medicine Expert (OME) by means of a current File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service and the real-time video is channeled into a video streaming thanks to the VideoLan client/server (VLC) application. It is composed by a HTML5 web-pages generated by PHP and allows to perform the Second Opinion both when Operator and OME are logged and when one of them is offline.

Fuzzy C-Means Segmentation on Brain MR Slices Corrupted by RF-Inhomogeneity

Brain MR Images corrupted by RF-Inhomogeneity exhibit brightness variations in such a way that a standard Fuzzy C-Means (fcm) segmentation algorithm fails. As a consequence, modified versions of the algorithm can be found in literature, which take into account the artifact. In this work we show that the application of a suitable pre-processing algorithm, already presented by the authors, followed by a standard fcm segmentation achieves good results also. The experimental results ones are compared with those obtained using SPM5, which can be considered the state of the art algorithm oriented to brain segmentation and bias removal.

Noise Filtering Using Edge-Driven Adaptive Anisotropic Diffusion

This paper presents a method aimed to noise removal in MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). We propose an improvement of Perona and Malik's anisotropic diffusion filter. In our schema, the diffusion equation of the filter has been modified to take into account the edges direction, This allows the filter to blur uniform areas, while it better preserves the edges. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation is presented and the results are compared with other methods.

Semi-automated evaluation of small bowel mural attenuation at CT enterography using different temporal windows in patients affected by active Crohn disease

A PCA Interpretation of the Glasgow Coma Scale in the Trauma Brain Injury PECARN Dataset

CT scan is strongly recommended for a patient affected by head trauma, but he/she must absorb a certain amount of radiations. For this reason, the physician tries to avoid such a practice for pediatric patients. The symptoms analysis, visual/tactile inspection, and reactions to appropriate stimuli from the physician could induce him/her to put the patient in a period of observation instead of performing an immediate CT scan. As a consequence, the correct evaluation of those symptoms is a crucial task. For this reason, the Pediatric Glasgow Coma Scale (PGCS) plays a fundamental role, because it is a numeric scale regarding the patient’s mental status. It is computed as the sum of the score f…

Biological target volume segmentation for radiotherapy treatment planning

A Web-Oriented Java3D Talking Head

Facial animation denotes all those systems performing speech synchro- nization with an animated face model. These kinds of systems are named Talking Heads or Talking Faces. At the same time simple dialogue systems called chatbots have been developed. Chatbots are software agents able to interact with users through pattern-matching based rules. In this paper a Talking Head oriented to the creation of a Chatbot is presented. An answer is generated in form of text trig- gered by an input query. The answer is converted into a facial animation using a 3D face model whose lips movements are synchronized with the sound produced by a speech synthesis module. Our Talking Head exploits the naturalnes…

Volumetric Bias Correction

This paper presents a method to suppress the bias artifact, also known as RF-inhomogeneity, in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). This artifact produces illumination variations due to magnetic field fluctuations of the device. In the latest years many works have been devoted to face this problem. In this work we present the 3D version of a new approach to bias correction, which is called Exponential Entropy Driven Homomorphic Unsharp Masking (E2D-HUM). This technique has been already presented by some of the authors for the 2D case only. The description of the whole method is detailed, and some experimental results are reported.

Accessibility of the Italian institutional web pages: a survey on the compliance of the Italian public administration web pages to the Stanca Act and its 22 technical requirements for web accessibility

Accessibility of the Italian public administration web pages is ruled by the Stanca Act and in particular the Decree of the Minister issued on July 8, 2005. In this paper, an objective test is performed on the official web pages of the Italian province and region chief towns to check their compliance to the 22 technical requirements defined by the Stanca Act. A sample of 976 web pages belonging to the websites of the Italian chief towns have been downloaded in the period October---December 2012. Such a data collection has been submitted to Achecker, the worldwide recognized syntax and accessibility validation service. Several accessibility and syntax errors have been found following the aut…

A M3G Talking Head for Smartphones

Often customer information services or virtual support guides make use of friendly interface to facilitate human-machine interaction. Indeed, virtual guided tours or helpdesks use a talking anthropomorphic head to communicate with the user. In this paper, we present a talking head for Smart phones, PDAs and, in general, all the mobile devices able to support J2ME and MIDP protocol. The objective of this article is to illustrate how to make such an interface as portable as possible by maximizing the limited computational resources of these devices.

HCI for biomedical decision-making: From diagnosis to therapy.

Abstract Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) plays a fundamental role in the design of software oriented towards clinical decision-making tasks. Currently, physicians have to deal with an ensemble of systems and software tools in the clinical environment, such as clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs), Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACSs). Moreover, additional platforms aim at collaborative work particularly in telemedicine, where rehabilitation technologies and conversational agents can support the healthcare professionals.

Multi-modal Image Registration Using Fuzzy Kernel Regression

This paper presents a study aimed to the realization of a novel multiresolution registration framework. The transformation function is computed iteratively as a composition of local deformations determined by the maximization of mutual information. At each iteration, local transformations are joint together using fuzzy kernel regression. This technique represents the core of the mothod and it's formally described from a probabilistic perspective. It avoids blocking artifacts and allows to keep the final deformation spatially congruent and smooth. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that this approach is equally effective for registering datasets acquired from both si…

Bias Correction on Knee MR Images

An image retrieval system for artistic database on cultural heritage

An Emotional Talking Head for a Humoristic Chatbot

The interest about enhancing the interface usability of applications and entertainment platforms has increased in last years. The research in human-computer interaction on conversational agents, named also chatbots, and natural language dialogue systems equipped with audio-video interfaces has grown as well. One of the most pursued goals is to enhance the realness of interaction of such systems. For this reason they are provided with catchy interfaces using humanlike avatars capable to adapt their behavior according to the conversation content. This kind of agents can vocally interact with users by using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text To Speech (TTS) systems; besides they can c…

Medical image registration: Interpolations, similarities and optimizations strategies

This paper presents a study conducted for evaluating different interpolation schemes, similarity metrics and optimization algorithms for the purpose of volumetric medical image registration. Each technique has been implemented to be plugged in a modular system. Rotation, translation and scale error has been measured to obtain a performance evaluation for all of the combinations of the considered techniques. Several experimental tests were conducted for validation both on synthetic and real datasets providing an exhaustive overview of the various strategies used.

Slice to Volume Registration

A framework for data-driven adaptive GUI generation based on DICOM

Computer applications for diagnostic medical imaging provide generally a wide range of tools to support physicians in their daily diagnosis activities. Unfortunately, some functionalities are specialized for specific diseases or imaging modalities, while other ones are useless for the images under investigation. Nevertheless, the corresponding Graphical User Interface (GUI) widgets are still present on the screen reducing the image visualization area. As a consequence, the physician may be affected by cognitive overload and visual stress causing a degradation of performances, mainly due to unuseful widgets. In clinical environments, a GUI must represent a sequence of steps for image investi…

MORPHOLOGICAL BRAIN EXTRACTION FROM PD-WEIGHTED MR IMAGES: ALGORITHM AND EXPERIMENTATION

Effective and Efficient Interpolation for Mutual Information based Multimodality Elastic Image Registration

Mutual information (MI) is a popular similarity metric for multimodality image registration purpose. However, it is negatively influenced by artifacts due to interpolation effects. As a result, registration algorithms performance could be affected. In this paper a novel interpolation scheme is presented. It is both effective and efficient. Effective because it limits the presence of local maxima in the mutual information curve, efficient because it is simple to compute being based on simple and optimized distance measures. The method is validated and compared against other techniques both from performance and time complexity persepectives. Differently from other reference works, which perfo…

An Explorable Immersive Panorama

The immersive panoramas are widely used to provide virtual tours of real scene. Their use covers a wide field of applications: art, industry, space research, topography, forensic investigation and all those systems requiring the exploration of a virtual environment which simulates a real one. Often sophisticated devices are used to perform the panorama acquisition. In this paper, we present an image based immersive panorama requiring low cost devices for the acquisition task and provides an innovative human-computer interaction approach. Many panoramic images of the same location are captured. The visualization system changes the panorama in a transparent way with respect to the user intera…

A Tunable Digital Ishihara Plate for Pre-School Aged Children

Colors play a fundamental role for children, both in the everyday life and in education. They recognize the surrounding world, and play games making a large use of colors. They learn letters and numbers by means of colors. As a consequence, early diagnosis of color blindness is an crucial to support an individual affected by this visual perception alteration at the initial phase of his/her life. The diagnosis of red-green color deficiencies (protanopia or deuteranopia) is commonly accomplished by means of the Ishihara test, which consists of plates showing dots with different sizes where some of them compose numbers within a gamut of colors while the ones composing the background have diffe…

Virtual conversation with a real talking head

A talking head is system performing an animated face model synchronized with a speech synthesis module. It is used as a presentation layer of a conversational Agent which provide an answer. It provides an answer when a query is written as an input by the user. The textual answer is converted into facial movements of a 3D face model whose lips and tongue movements are synchronized with the sound of the synthetic voice. The Client-Server paradigm has been used for the WEB infrastructure delegating the animation and synchronization to the client, so that the server can satisfy multiple requests from clients; while the Chatbot, the Digital Signal Processing and the Natural language Processing a…

Illumination Correction on MR Images

Objective. An important artifact corrupting Magnetic Resonance Images is the rf inhomogeneity, also called bias artifact. This anomaly produces an abnormal illumination fluctuation on the image, due to variations of the device magnetic field. This artifact is particularly strong on images acquired with a device specialized on upper and lower limbs due to their coil configuration. A method based on homomorphic filtering aimed to suppress this artifact was proposed by Guillemaud. This filter has two faults: it doesnt provide an indication about the cutoff frequency (cf) and introduces another illumination artifact on the edges of the foreground. This work is an improvement to this method because i…

Fuzzy Smoothed Composition of Local Mapping Transformations for Non-rigid Image Registration

This paper presents a novel method for medical image regis- tration. The global transformation is obtained by composing affine trans- formations, which are recovered locally from given landmarks. Transfor- mations of adjacent regions are smoothed to avoid blocking artifacts, so that a unique continuous and differentiable global function is obtained. Such composition is operated using a technique derived from fuzzy C- means clustering. The method was successfully tested on several datasets; results, both qualitative and quantitative, are shown. Comparisons with other methods are reported. Final considerations on the efficiency of the technique are explained.

WATERSHED BASED DETECTION OF MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS LESIONS IN MR IMAGES

Morphological exponential entropy driven-HUM.

This paper presents an improvement to the Ex- ponential Entropy Driven - Homomorphic Unsharp Masking (E 2 D − HUM ) algorithm devoted to illumination artifact sup- pression on Magnetic Resonance Images. E 2 D−HUM requires a segmentation step to remove dark regions in the foreground whose intensity is comparable with background, because strong edges produce streak artifacts on the tissues. This new version of the algorithm keeps the same good properties of E 2 D − HUM without a segmentation phase, whose parameters should be chosen in relation to the image. I. INTRODUCTION Most of the studies on illumination correction found in literature are oriented to brain (18) magnetic resonance images (…

Three-dimensional Fuzzy Kernel Regression framework for registration of medical volume data

Abstract In this work a general framework for non-rigid 3D medical image registration is presented. It relies on two pattern recognition techniques: kernel regression and fuzzy c-means clustering. The paper provides theoretic explanation, details the framework, and illustrates its application to implement three registration algorithms for CT/MR volumes as well as single 2D slices. The first two algorithms are landmark-based approaches, while the third one is an area-based technique. The last approach is based on iterative hierarchical volume subdivision, and maximization of mutual information. Moreover, a high performance Nvidia CUDA based implementation of the algorithm is presented. The f…

GUI Usability in Medical Imaging

The diffusion of computer technologies in everyday life has involved the birth of standard methodologies to control their development. Indeed, the purpose of standardization procedures consists of providing rules aimed to control technologies leaving no space for empirical improvisations. In general, medical software manufacturers provide their applications with Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) that are not compliant with any clear and standard usability criterion. The only guideline is the creation of GUIs inherited from the ones adopted on medical consoles because physicians use them routinely. This paper addresses this issue: medical software interfaces should be designed trying to overcome…

Second Opinion System for Intraoral Lesions

In this paper we present the prototype of a teledentistry system to perform the remote diagnosis of oral diseases. It makes use of a particular device called intra-oral (or dental) camera properly designed to shoot video and take pictures of the inner part of the mouth. The intra-oral cameras can be connected via USB to a common PC and they are very cheap, unlike the intra-oral photography kit for DSLR cameras. Usually this kind of devices are used in dentistry studies for local visualization by means of specialized software. The novelty of our system is that the real-time video produced by this device is canalized into a video streming by means of Video LAN client server (VLC) and pictures…

A fully automatic method for biological target volume segmentation of brain metastases

Leksell Gamma Knife is a mini-invasive technique to obtain a complete destruction of cerebral lesions delivering a single high dose radiation beam. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging is increasingly utilized for radiation treatment planning. Nevertheless, lesion volume delineation in PET datasets is challenging because of the low spatial resolution and high noise level of PET images. Nowadays, the biological target volume (BTV) is manually contoured on PET studies. This procedure is time expensive and operator-dependent. In this article, a fully automatic algorithm for the BTV delineation based on random walks (RW) on graphs is proposed. The results are compared with the outcomes of…

Exponential Entropy Driven HUM on Knee MR Images

A very important artifact corrupting Magnetic Resonance Images is the RF inhomogeneity. This kind of artifact generates variations of illumination which trouble both direct examination by the doctor and segmentation algorithms. Even if homomorphic filtering approaches have been presented in literature, none of them has developed a measure to determine the cut-off frequency. In this work we present a measure based on information theory with a large experimental setup aimed to demonstrate the validity of our approach.

A Gabor-based Technique for Bias Removal in MR images

Magnetic Resonance images are often characterized by irregularly displaced luminance fluctuations that are called bias artifact. This disturb is due to a drop in signal intensity caused by the distance between imaged sample and receiver coil. An original approach to bias removal in Magnetic Resonance images is presented, which is based on the use of Gabor filter to extract the artifact. The proposed technique restores the image using a correction model, which is derived from the attenuation of signal diffusion across the tissues. No hypotheses are made about the structure of the tissues under investigation and the used MR spectrum. The approach is presented in detail, and extensive experime…

Image Segmentation Techniques for Healthcare Systems

The present special issue of the Journal of Healthcare Engineering collects articles written by researchers scattered around the world who belong to the academic and industrial environments. The papers of this special issue have been selected by a rigorous peer-reviewing process with the support of at least two reviewers per paper, along with the opinion written in the final decision by a component of the editorial staff. Different methods on biomedical image segmentation dedicated to healthcare systems have been developed regarding, for example, the fields of machine learning, deformable models, fuzzy models, and so on. Such methods have been applied on different biomedical image modalitie…

Morphological Exponential Entropy Driven Hum on Knee MR Images

Optic disc positioning and blood vessels extraction on eye fundus

This paper presents two methods aimed to the optic disc positioning on the retinal images. The first is based on a template of the entire image, while the second is based on the retinal vascularisation. For this second task, also a vessel extraction method is provided. Both the algorithm have been tested on test images of the Drive Database.

Bias artifact suppression on MR volumes.

RF-Inhomogeneity correction is a relevant research topic in the field of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). A volume corrupted by this artifact exhibits nonuni- form illumination both inside a single slice and between adjacent ones. In this work a bias correction technique is presented, which suppresses this artifact on MR vol- umes scanned from different body parts without any a-priori hypothesis on the artifact model. Theoretical foundations of the method are reported together with experimental results and a comparison is presented with both the 2D version of the algorithm and other techniques that are widely used in MRI literature.

An automatic method for metabolic evaluation of gamma knife treatments

Lesion volume delineation of Positron Emission Tomography images is challenging because of the low spatial resolution and high noise level. Aim of this work is the development of an operator independent segmentation method of metabolic images. For this purpose, an algorithm for the biological tumor volume delineation based on random walks on graphs has been used. Twenty-four cerebral tumors are segmented to evaluate the functional follow-up after Gamma Knife radiotherapy treatment. Experimental results show that the segmentation algorithm is accurate and has real-time performance. In addition, it can reflect metabolic changes useful to evaluate radiotherapy response in treated patients.

MultiSlice human organ extraction based on GVF

Segmentation techniques based on active contours algorithm are widely used in medical imaging. Unfortunately, they require a lot of parameters to be used and this can rep- resent an issue for those physicians with not much informatics skills. This paper proposes a software tool which allows to segment multiple slice can differ organ extraction setting a small number of parameters. Moreover, the tool offers the functionality to perform a multiple segmentation the same time, so that an entire volume composed by hundreds slices can be segmented.

Automatic Volumetric Liver Segmentation Using Texture Based Region Growing

In this paper an automatic texture based volumetric region growing method for liver segmentation is proposed. 3D seeded region growing is based on texture features with the automatic selection of the seed voxel inside the liver organ and the automatic threshold value computation for the region growing stop condition. Co-occurrence 3D texture features are extracted from CT abdominal volumes and the seeded region growing algorithm is based on statistics in the features space. Each CT volume is composed by 230 slices, having 512 x 512 pixels as spatial resolution, and 12-bit gray level resolution. In this initial feasible study, 5 healthy volunteer acquisitions has been used. Tests have been p…

Frequency Determined Homomorphic Unsharp Masking Algorithm on Knee MR Images

A very important artifact corrupting Magnetic Resonance (MR) Images is the RF inhomogeneity, also called Bias artifact. The visual effect produced by this kind of artifact is an illumination variation which afflicts this kind of medical images. In literature a lot of works oriented to the suppression of this artifact can be found. The approaches based on homomorphic filtering offer an easy way to perform bias correction but none of them can automatically determine the cut-off frequency. In this work we present a measure based on information theory in order to find the frequency mentioned above and this technique is applied to MR images of the knee which are hardly bias corrupted.

Automatic skull stripping in MRI based on morphological filters and fuzzy c-means segmentation

In this paper a new automatic skull stripping method for T1-weighted MR image of human brain is presented. Skull stripping is a process that allows to separate the brain from the rest of tissues. The proposed method is based on a 2D brain extraction making use of fuzzy c-means segmentation and morphological operators applied on transversal slices. The approach is extended to the 3D case, taking into account the result obtained from the preceding slice to solve the organ splitting problem. The proposed approach is compared with BET (Brain Extraction Tool) implemented in MRIcro software.

Recent advances of HCI in decision-making tasks for optimized clinical workflows and precision medicine.

The ever-increasing amount of biomedical data is enabling new large-scale studies, even though ad hoc computational solutions are required. The most recent Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been achieving outstanding performance and an important impact in clinical research, aiming at precision medicine, as well as improving healthcare workflows. However, the inherent heterogeneity and uncertainty in the healthcare information sources pose new compelling challenges for clinicians in their decision-making tasks. Only the proper combination of AI and human intelligence capabilities, by explicitly taking into account effective and safe interaction paradigms,…

Head–Neck Cancer Delineation

Head–Neck Cancer (HNC) has a relevant impact on the oncology patient population and for this reason, the present review is dedicated to this type of neoplastic disease. In particular, a collection of methods aimed at tumor delineation is presented, because this is a fundamental task to perform efficient radiotherapy. Such a segmentation task is often performed on uni-modal data (usually Positron Emission Tomography (PET)) even though multi-modal images are preferred (PET-Computerized Tomography (CT)/PET-Magnetic Resonance (MR)). Datasets can be private or freely provided by online repositories on the web. The adopted techniques can belong to the well-known image processing/computer-vision a…

WikiArt: An Ontology-Based Information Retrieval System for Arts

The paper presents WikiArt, a new system integrating three distinct types of contents about the art: data, information, and knowledge, to generate automatically thematic paths to consult all its contents. WikiArt is a wiki, allowing to manage cooperatively documents about artists, artworks, artistic movements or techniques, and so on. It is also an expert system, provided with an ontology about arts, with which it is able to plan possible different ways of consulting and browsing its contents. This ability is made possible by a second part of the ontology of the system, describing a collection of criteria regarding how to plan thematic paths, and by a set of rules followed by the expert sys…

Scratches Removal in Digitised Aerial Photos Concerning Sicilian Territory

In this paper we propose a fast and effective method to detect and restore scratches in aerial photos from a photographic archive concerning Sicilian territory. Scratch removal is a typical problem for old movie films but similar defects can be seen in still images. Our solution is based on a semiautomatic detection process and an unsupervised restoration algorithm. Results are comparable with those obtained with commercial restoration tools.

Fuzzy-based Kernel Regression Approaches for Free Form Deformation and Elastic Registration of Medical Images

In modern medicine, a largely diffused method for gathering knowledge about organs and tissues is obtained by means of merging information from several datasets. Such data are provided from multimodal or sequential acquisitions. As a consequence, a pre-processing step that is called “image registration” is required to achieve data integration. Image registration aims to obtain the best possible spatial correspondence between misaligned datasets. This procedure is also useful to correct distortions induced by magnetic interferences with the acquisition equipment signals or the ones due patient’s involuntary movements such as heartbeat or breathing. The problem can be regarded as finding the …

A Java 3D Talking Head for a Chatbot

Facial animation is referred to all those systems per- forming the speech synchronization with an animated face model. This kind of systems are called ”Talking Head” or ”Talking Face”. In this paper a Talking Head oriented to the creation of a Chatbot is presented. It requires an in- put query and an answer is generated in form of text. The answer is transduced into a facial animation using a 3D face model whose lips movements are synchronized with the sound produced by a speech synthesis module. Our ”Talk- ing Head” explores the naturalness of the facial animation and provides a real-time interactive interface to the user. The WEB infrastructure has been realized using the Client- Server m…

Semi-Automated evaluation of small bowel mural attenuation at CT enterography using different temporal windows in patients affected by active Crohn disease