CNN Filter Learning from Drawn Markers for the Detection of Suggestive Signs of COVID-19 in CT Images.

Early detection of COVID-19 is vital to control its spread. Deep learning methods have been presented to detect suggestive signs of COVID-19 from chest CT images. However, due to the novelty of the disease, annotated volumetric data are scarce. Here we propose a method that does not require either large annotated datasets or backpropagation to estimate the filters of a convolutional neural network (CNN). For a few CT images, the user draws markers at representative normal and abnormal regions. The method generates a feature extractor composed of a sequence of convolutional layers, whose kernels are specialized in enhancing regions similar to the marked ones, and the decision layer of our CNN is a support vector machine. As we have no control over the CT image acquisition, we also propose an intensity standardization approach. Our method can achieve mean accuracy and kappa values of 0.97 and 0.93, respectively, on a dataset with 117 CT images extracted from different sites, surpassing its counterpart in all scenarios.

Hashedcubes: Simple, Low Memory, Real-Time Visual Exploration of Big Data.

We propose Hashedcubes, a data structure that enables real-time visual exploration of large datasets that improves the state of the art by virtue of its low memory requirements, low query latencies, and implementation simplicity. In some instances, Hashedcubes notably requires two orders of magnitude less space than recent data cube visualization proposals. In this paper, we describe the algorithms to build and query Hashedcubes, and how it can drive well-known interactive visualizations such as binned scatterplots, linked histograms and heatmaps. We report memory usage, build time and query latencies for a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets, and find that although sometimes Hashedcubes offers slightly slower querying times to the state of the art, the typical query is answered fast enough to easily sustain a interaction. In datasets with hundreds of millions of elements, only about 2% of the queries take longer than 40ms. Finally, we discuss the limitations of data structure, potential spacetime tradeoffs, and future research directions.

Verifying volume rendering using discretization error analysis.

We propose an approach for verification of volume rendering correctness based on an analysis of the volume rendering integral, the basis of most DVR algorithms. With respect to the most common discretization of this continuous model (Riemann summation), we make assumptions about the impact of parameter changes on the rendered results and derive convergence curves describing the expected behavior. Specifically, we progressively refine the number of samples along the ray, the grid size, and the pixel size, and evaluate how the errors observed during refinement compare against the expected approximation errors. We derive the theoretical foundations of our verification approach, explain how to realize it in practice, and discuss its limitations. We also report the errors identified by our approach when applied to two publicly available volume rendering packages.

Edge transformations for improving mesh quality of marching cubes.

Marching Cubes is a popular choice for isosurface extraction from regular grids due to its simplicity, robustness, and efficiency. One of the key shortcomings of this approach is the quality of the resulting meshes, which tend to have many poorly shaped and degenerate triangles. This issue is often addressed through post processing operations such as smoothing. As we demonstrate in experiments with several datasets, while these improve the mesh, they do not remove all degeneracies, and incur an increased and unbounded error between the resulting mesh and the original isosurface. Rather than modifying the resulting mesh, we propose a method to modify the grid on which Marching Cubes operates. This modification greatly increases the quality of the extracted mesh. In our experiments, our method did not create a single degenerate triangle, unlike any other method we experimented with. Our method incurs minimal computational overhead, requiring at most twice the execution time of the original Marching Cubes algorithm in our experiments. Most importantly, it can be readily integrated in existing Marching Cubes implementations, and is orthogonal to many Marching Cubes enhancements (particularly, performance enhancements such as out-of-core and acceleration structures).

Edge groups: an approach to understanding the mesh quality of marching methods.

Marching Cubes is the most popular isosurface extraction algorithm due to its simplicity, efficiency and robustness. It has been widely studied, improved, and extended. While much early work was concerned with efficiency and correctness issues, lately there has been a push to improve the quality of Marching Cubes meshes so that they can be used in computational codes. In this work we present a new classification of MC cases that we call Edge Groups, which helps elucidate the issues that impact the triangle quality of the meshes that the method generates. This formulation allows a more systematic way to bound the triangle quality, and is general enough to extend to other polyhedral cell shapes used in other polygonization algorithms. Using this analysis, we also discuss ways to improve the quality of the resulting triangle mesh, including some that require only minor modifications of the original algorithm.

Hardware-assisted visibility sorting for unstructured volume rendering.

Harvesting the power of modern graphics hardware to solve the complex problem of real-time rendering of large unstructured meshes is a major research goal in the volume visualization community. While, for regular grids, texture-based techniques are well-suited for current GPUs, the steps necessary for rendering unstructured meshes are not so easily mapped to current hardware. We propose a novel volume rendering technique that simplifies the CPU-based processing and shifts much of the sorting burden to the GPU, where it can be performed more efficiently. Our hardware-assisted visibility sorting algorithm is a hybrid technique that operates in both object-space and image-space. In object-space, the algorithm performs a partial sort of the 3D primitives in preparation for rasterization. The goal of the partial sort is to create a list of primitives that generate fragments in nearly sorted order. In image-space, the fragment stream is incrementally sorted using a fixed-depth sorting network. In our algorithm, the object-space work is performed by the CPU and the fragment-level sorting is done completely on the GPU. A prototype implementation of the algorithm demonstrates that the fragment-level sorting achieves rendering rates of between one and six million tetrahedral cells per second on an ATI Radeon 9800.