Yes!! After almost three years of hard work, I have my first journal article accepted for publication by European Radiology. It is published as open-access, so the article is free for everyone to download as a PDF. The article is entitled: “Using computer-aided detection in mammography as a decision support”. I’m very thrilled with my first publication, and I hope that I am on the right track getting my PhD. My second article about a multi-view CAD system is almost ready to be sent to an other journal for consideration. Read further for the abstract.

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I’ve been to the EIBIR Winter School that took place from January 17 – 22, 2010 in Viladrau, Spain to learn a lot about biomedical imaging research focused on the two leading causes of death worldwide: cardiovascular and oncologic diseases. During the five days, there were a lot of intense lectures hosted in the Hostal de la Gloria, Viladrau. To break the week, we also had a very nice excursion: a walk through the forest with a guide that took us to the house of one of the most famous bandits: Serrallonga. After the heavy week of studying, we finished our stay in Viladrau and went up into the Turo de l’Home ( ‘mountain man’ in Castilian), which is the highest mountain in the Montseny massif with a height of 1712 meters.
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For the third time I went to the SPIE Medical Imaging conference, being held this year in Orlando, Florida. The meeting was from 6-12 February 2009 at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort in Lake Buena Vista. It is one of my favourite conferences, as it has an overall informal character, which enables one to network and share ideas among colleagues in the field. This year I’ve presented my work at a different session than usually, in the Image Perception, Observer Performance and Technology Assessment session. It was a very sunny week, and we had also opportunities to relax and enjoy the nice weather and food.
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I attended world’s biggest radiology conference in Chicago, Illinois to present our interactive CAD system for detection of masses in mammograms. The technical exhibit was a great success, more than 110 people have done (part of) the observer experiment – and the comments about using CAD in a different way were overall very positive.

Click here to get the exhibit posters, and AuntMinnie’s Insider Exclusive article.

Click here to see some photo’s.

Yesterday, I received an email from Marko van Eekelen, president of the AIA Awards jury that I won the AIA Masters Award of the academic year 05/06 for my Master Thesis! I’m very honored, and this award mades me even more proud of my work. At December 15th there will be an official ceremony where I present a part of my thesis.

Some sources that published the press release:
Radboud University newsitem (dutch)
Press Center (dutch)

Breast cancer is the most common life-threatening type of cancer affecting women in The Netherlands. The success of the treatment of breast cancer largely depends on the stage of a tumor at the time of detection. Therefore, early detection of breast cancer is essential. Although mammography screening is currently the most effective tool for early detection of breast cancer, up to one-fifth of women with invasive breast cancer have a mammogram that is interpreted as normal, i.e., a false-negative mammogram result. To overcome such limitations, Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems for automatic classification of breast lesions as either benign or malignant are being developed. CAD systems help radiologists with the interpretation of lesions, such that they refer less women for further examination when they actually have benign lesions. In this thesis we constructed several types of classifiers, i.e., Bayesian networks and support vector machines, for the task of computer-aided diagnosis of breast lesions.

Classification of Breast Lesions in Digital Mammograms, Master Thesis (1.3 MB PDF)

Digital images have become an important source of information in the modern world of communication systems. Thinks about FBI fingerprints, MRI scans, ECG data, digital camera photos, building plans etc. In their raw form, these images require an enormous amount of memory. With the introduction of multimedia computing, the demand for processing, storing and transmitting images has increased exponentially. In the last two decades a considerable amount of research has been devoted to tackle the problem of image compression.

During the Research Lab 4 course, I wrote a paper about the similarities and differences, advantages and disadvantages of the two well known compression techniques: Fourier and Wavelets. JPEG, JPEG2000, DiVX and MPEG, all of them are based on one of these two techniques.

Research Paper (3.8 MB PDF) (5.5 MB PS)

Presentation (1.9MB PPT) (2.2MB PDF) (HTML)

Currently, hypercomputation is still very theoretical and there is still enough to discuss. Hypercomputation concerns the study of computation beyond that defined by the Turing machine. It is a multi-disciplinary research area across a wide variety of fields, including computer science, philosophy, physics, electronics, biology and artifical intelligence.

For a seminar to be given at the university, I’ve written with two fellow students a paper about the pre-hypercomputation history, explanation of hypercomputation and the philosphy of hypercomputation and artificial intelligence.

Paper (DUTCH) (518 KB PDF) (1.1 MB PS)

Presentation (ENGLISH) (1.6 MB PPT) (744 KB PDF)

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