In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), several images can be obtained using different imaging settings (e.g. T1, T2, DWI, and Flair). These images have similar anatomical structures but are with different contrasts, which provide a wealth of information for diagnosis. However, the images under specific imaging settings may not be available due to the limitation of scanning time or corruption caused by

Semantic segmentation of cardiac MR images is a challenging task due to its importance in medical assessment of heart diseases. Having a detailed localization of specific regions of interest such as Right and Left Ventricular Cavities and Myocardium, doctors can infer important information about the presence of cardiovascular diseases, which are today a major cause of death globally. This paper addresses

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The papers in this special section focus on new solutions and research initiatives in the area of media authentication and forensics. Media manipulation is now a pressing societal problem with broad implications. In the past, it required significant skill to create compelling manipulations because editing tools, such as Adobe Photoshop, required experienced users to alter images convincingly. Over

Most video forensic techniques look for traces within the data stream that are, however, mostly ineffective when dealing with strongly compressed or low resolution videos. Recent research highlighted that useful forensic traces are also left in the video container structure, thus offering the opportunity to understand the life-cycle of a video file without looking at the media stream itself. In this

The availability of large-scale facial databases, together with the remarkable progresses of deep learning technologies, in particular Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have led to the generation of extremely realistic fake facial content, raising obvious concerns about the potential for misuse. Such concerns have fostered the research on manipulation detection methods that, contrary to humans

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Operating deep neural networks (DNNs) on devices with limited resources requires the reduction of their memory as well as computational footprint. Popular reduction methods are network quantization or pruning, which either reduce the word length of the network parameters or remove weights from the network if they are not needed. In this article, we discuss a general framework for network reduction

Recently, deep neural network (DNN) based methods for low-dose CT have been investigated to achieve excellent performance in both image quality and computational speed. However, almost all methods using DNNs for low-dose CT require clean ground truth data with full radiation dose to train the DNNs. In this work, we attempt to train DNNs for low-dose CT reconstructions with reduced tube current by investigating

Solving visual question answering (VQA) task requires recognizing many diverse visual concepts as the answer. These visual concepts contain rich structural semantic meanings, e.g., some concepts in VQA are highly related (e.g., red & blue), some of them are less relevant (e.g., red & standing). It is very natural for humans to efficiently learn concepts by utilizing their semantic meanings to concentrate

Understanding multiparty human interaction dynamics is a challenging problem involving multiple data modalities and complex ordered interactions between multiple people. We propose a unified framework that integrates synchronized video, audio, and text streams from four people to capture the interaction dynamics in natural group meetings. We focus on estimating the dynamic social role of the meeting

Speech recognition and machine translation have made major progress over the past decades, providing practical systems to map one language sequence to another. Although multiple modalities such as sound and video are becoming increasingly available, the state-of-the-art systems are inherently unimodal, in the sense that they take a single modality — either speech or text — as input. Evidence from human

Semantic segmentation of mitochondria is essential for electron microscopy image analysis. Despite the great success achieved using supervised learning, it requires a large amount of expensive per-pixel annotations. Recent studies have proposed to exploit similar but annotated domains by domain adaptation, but the possible severe domain shift poses a challenge for the model transfer. In this study

Modern MRI schemes, which rely on compressed sensing or deep learning algorithms to recover MRI data from undersampled multichannel Fourier measurements, are widely used to reduce the scan time. The image quality of these approaches is heavily dependent on the sampling pattern. In this article, we introduce a continuous strategy to optimize the sampling pattern and the network parameters jointly. We

There is a growing need for flexible methods for the analysis of large-scale functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data for the estimation of global signatures that summarize the population while preserving individual-specific traits. Independent vector analysis (IVA) is a data-driven method that jointly estimates global spatio-temporal patterns from multi-subject fMRI data, and effectively

Inverse problems for accelerated MRI typically incorporate domain-specific knowledge about the forward encoding operator in a regularized reconstruction framework. Recently physics-driven deep learning (DL) methods have been proposed to use neural networks for data-driven regularization. These methods unroll iterative optimization algorithms to solve the inverse problem objective function, by alternating

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging is widely used for diagnostic imaging in interventional cardiology. The detection and quantification of atherosclerosis from acquired images is typically performed manually by medical experts or by virtual histology IVUS (VH-IVUS) software. VH-IVUS analyzes backscattered radio frequency (RF) signals to provide a color-coded tissue map, and is the method of choice

Many forensic techniques have recently been developed to determine whether an image has undergone a specific manipulation operation. When multiple consecutive operations are applied to images, forensic analysts not only need to identify the existence of each manipulation operation, but also to distinguish the order of the involved operations. However, image operator chain detection is still a challenging

With the rapid progress in recent years, techniques that generate and manipulate multimedia content can now provide a very advanced level of realism. The boundary between real and synthetic media has become very thin. On the one hand, this opens the door to a series of exciting applications in different fields such as creative arts, advertising, film production, and video games. On the other hand,

Multi-contrast MRI acquisitions of an anatomy enrich the magnitude of information available for diagnosis. Yet, excessive scan times associated with additional contrasts may be a limiting factor. Two mainstream frameworks for enhanced scan efficiency are reconstruction of undersampled acquisitions and synthesis of missing acquisitions. Recently, deep learning methods have enabled significant performance

Ultrasound imaging (UI) is characterized by the presence of multiplicative speckle noise and various acquisition artefacts. Designing ultrasound (US) similarity measures thus requires a particular attention. In the specific context of motion estimation, incorporating US characteristics does not only benefit traditional methods but also learning-based approaches, which are highly sensitive to the quality

One challenging aspect in face anti-spoofing (or presentation attack detection, PAD) refers to the difficulty of collecting enough and representative attack samples for an application-specific environment. In view of this, we tackle the problem of training a robust PAD model with limited data in an application-specific domain. We propose to leverage data from a richer and related domain to learn meaningful

Deep learning models have shown potential for reconstructing undersampled, multi-channel magnetic resonance (MR) image acquisitions. Recently proposed methods, however, have not leveraged information from prior subject-specific MR imaging sessions. Such data are often readily available through a picture archiving and communication system (PACS). We propose a flexible three-step method to incorporate

Medical image segmentation is the process of anatomically isolating organs for analysis and treatment. Leading works within this domain emerged with the well-known U-Net. Despite its success, recent works have shown the limitations of U-Net to conduct segmentation given image particularities such as noise, corruption or lack of contrast. Prior knowledge integration allows to overcome segmentation ambiguities

Automatic segmentation of anatomical landmarks from ultrasound (US) plays an important role in the management of preterm neonates with a very low birth weight due to the increased risk of developing intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) or other complications. One major problem in developing an automatic segmentation method for this task is the limited availability of annotated data. To tackle this issue

In this paper, we propose new image forgery detection and localization algorithms by recasting these problems as graph-based community detection problems. To do this, we introduce a novel graph-based representation of an image, which we call the Forensic Similarity Graph, that captures key forensic relationships among regions in the image. In this representation, small image patches are represented

Two features desired in a three-dimensional (3D) optical tomographic image reconstruction algorithm are the ability to reduce imaging artifacts and to do fast processing of large data volumes. Traditional iterative inversion algorithms are impractical in this context due to their heavy computational and memory requirements. We propose and experimentally validate a novel scalable iterative minibatch

The growing number of voice-controlled devices (VCDs), i.e. Google Home, Amazon Alexa, etc., has resulted in automation of home appliances, smart gadgets, and next generation vehicles, etc. However, VCDs and voice-activated services i.e. chatbots are vulnerable to audio replay attacks. Our vulnerability analysis of VCDs shows that these replays could be exploited in multi-hop scenarios to maliciously

Given a potentially manipulated probe image, provenance analysis aims to find all images derived from the probe (offsprings) and all images from which the probe is derived (ancestors) in a large dataset (provenance filtering), and reconstruct the manipulation history with the retrieved images (provenance graph building). In this paper, we address two major challenges in provenance analysis, retrieving

Deepfakes, or artificially generated audiovisual renderings, can be used to defame a public figure or influence public opinion. With the recent discovery of generative adversarial networks, an attacker using a normal desktop computer fitted with an off-the-shelf graphics processing unit can make renditions realistic enough to easily fool a human observer. Detecting deepfakes is thus becoming important

Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is a noninvasive technique that makes it possible to probe biological metabolic processes in vivo . However, PET image reconstruction is challenging due to the ill-posedness of the inverse problem. Many image reconstruction methods have been proposed over the past few years to improve diagnostic performance. However, most of these methods can compromise the

Regularization by denoising (RED) is an image reconstruction framework that uses an image denoiser as a prior. Recent work has shown the state-of-the-art performance of RED with learned denoisers corresponding to pre-trained convolutional neural nets (CNNs). In this work, we propose to broaden the current denoiser-centric view of RED by considering priors corresponding to networks trained for more

Deep learning has recently attracted widespread interest as a means of reducing noise in low-dose CT (LDCT) images. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are typically trained to transfer high-quality image features of normal-dose CT (NDCT) images to LDCT images. However, existing deep learning approaches for denoising LDCT images often overlook the statistical property of CT images. In this paper

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have been widely used in detection of global manipulations. However, designing effective DCNNs for specific image forensics tasks generally requires domain knowledge and experience gained from abundant experiments, which is time-consuming and labor-expensive. Approaches of automated network designing have been proposed for image classification tasks which

With Generative adversarial networks (GAN) achieving realistic image generation, fake image detection research has become an imminent need. In this paper, a novel detection algorithm is designed to exploit the structural defect in GAN, taking advantage of the most vulnerable link in GAN generators – the up-sampling process conducted by the Transposed Convolution operation. The Transposed Convolution

While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable performance on various supervised and unsupervised learning tasks, they typically consist of a massive number of parameters. This results in significant memory requirements as well as a computational burden. Consequently, there is a growing need for filter-level pruning approaches for compressing CNN based models that not only reduce

In this paper, a novel dictionary learning (DL) method is proposed to estimate sparse neural activations from multi-subject fMRI data sets. By exploiting the label information such as the patient and the normal healthy groups, the activation maps that are commonly shared across the groups as well as those that can explain the group differences are both captured. The proposed method was tested using

This paper introduces an adaptive sampling methodology for automated compression of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for accelerated inference on resource-constrained platforms. Modern DNN compression techniques comprise various hyperparameters that require per-layer customization. Our objective is to locate an optimal hyperparameter configuration that leads to lowest model complexity while adhering to

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Approximately one-fifth of theworld’s population suffer or have suffered from voice and speech production disorders due to diseases or some other dysfunction. Thus, there is a clear need for objective ways to evaluate the quality of voice and speech as well as its link to vocal fold activity, to evaluate the complex interaction between the larynx and voluntary movements of the articulators (i.e., lips

Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a sleep breathing disorder affecting at least 3–7% of male adults and 2–5% of female adults between 30 and 70 years. It causes recurrent partial or total obstruction episodes at the level of the pharynx which causes cessation of breath during sleep. The number of obstruction episodes per sleep hour, known as Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI), along with the degree of the daytime

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder in which pharyngeal collapse during sleep causes complete (apnea) or partial (hypopnea) airway obstruction. OSA is common and can have severe implications, but often remains undiagnosed. The most widely used objective measure of OSA severity is the number of obstructive events per hour of sleep, known as the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI). This study reports

Clinical literature provides convincing evidence that language deficits in Alzheimer's disease (AD) allow for distinguishing patients with dementia from healthy subjects. Currently, computational approaches have widely investigated lexicosemantic aspects of discourse production, while pragmatic aspects like cohesion and coherence, are still mostly unexplored. In this article, we aim at providing a

Speech analysis could provide an indicator of Alzheimer's disease and help develop clinical tools for automatically detecting and monitoring disease progression. While previous studies have employed acoustic (speech) features for characterisation of Alzheimer's dementia, these studies focused on a few common prosodic features, often in combination with lexical and syntactic features which require transcription

It is widely accepted that information derived from analyzing speech (the acoustic signal) and language production (words and sentences) serves as a useful window into the health of an individual's cognitive ability. In fact, most neuropsychological testing batteries have a component related to speech and language where clinicians elicit speech from patients for subjective evaluation across a broad

The heterogeneity in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) remains a challenging and unsolved issue in the current clinical practice. The behavioral differences between ASD subgroups are subtle and can be hard to be manually discerned by experts. Here, we propose a computational framework that is capable of modeling both vocal behaviors and body gestural movements of the interlocutors with their intricate

Information theoretic entropy measures are calculated from estimates of the probabilities of the constituent symbolic events. In natural sequences, such as those occurring in human language, the probabilistic structure typically follows a rank ordering pattern. Entropy has been used to model language by using large data sets to characterize the underlying source. To model the dynamic characteristics

Dysarthria is a motor speech impairment, often characterized by slow and slurred speech that is generally incomprehensible by human listeners. An understanding of the intelligibility level of the patient's dysarthric speech can provide an insight into the progression/status of the underlying cause and is essential for planning therapy. Automatic assessment of dysarthric speech intelligibility can be

Aphasia is a common type of acquired language impairment resulting from dysfunction in specific brain regions. Analysis of narrative spontaneous speech, e.g., story-telling, is an essential component of standardized clinical assessment on people with aphasia (PWA). Subjective assessment by trained speech-language pathologists (SLP) have many limitations in efficiency, effectiveness and practicality

Dysarthria is a speech-motor disorder that affects the articulatory systems inhibiting their speech communication efforts. To handle their communication problems, a speech recognition-based augmentative and alternative communication aid is used as an attractive alternative. However, successful development of an automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based aid depends on the availability of sufficient speech

The use of a psychoacoustic roughness model as a predictor of creaky voice is reported. We found that the roughness temporal profile of vocalic segments can predict the presence of creakiness in speech. Using a simple bi-directional Recurrent Neural Network ( rnn ), we were able to predict the presence of creakiness in vocalic segments from only roughness traces with an accuracy similar to that obtained

Automatic detection of voice pathology enables objective assessment and earlier intervention for the diagnosis. This study provides a systematic analysis of glottal source features and investigates their effectiveness in voice pathology detection. Glottal source features are extracted using glottal flows estimated with the quasi-closed phase (QCP) glottal inverse filtering method, using approximate

A new method for the automated speech production assessment (ASPA) of hearing impaired children is presented in this paper, providing feedback about the pronunciation quality of words and sentences uttered during unsupervised practice in the course of speech development. A database of the sounds produced by hearing impaired subjects was set up and assessed with a subjective test. The Mean Opinion Score

Recently, spectro-temporal representation of speech has been used in many fields of speech processing. Owing to this, we explore the use of spectro-temporal representation for speech intelligibility assessment especially for dysarthric speech. In this work, we investigate the use of spectro-temporal representations to evaluate intelligibility levels using artificial neural network (ANN) and convolutional

Given the limited accessibility to Speech and Language Pathologists (SLPs) children in need often have, pediatric Computer-Aided Speech Therapy (CAST) tools can play an important role in the early diagnosis and treatment of speech disorders. However, various challenges impede the implementation of accurate automated analysis of speech disorders in children. In this article, we first discuss three key