Pompeu Fabra University

About: Pompeu Fabra University is a education organization based out in Barcelona, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 8093 authors who have published 23570 publications receiving 858431 citations. The organization is also known as: Universitat Pompeu Fabra & UPF.

The Multiscenario Multienvironment BioSecure Multimodal Database (BMDB)

Abstract: A new multimodal biometric database designed and acquired within the framework of the European BioSecure Network of Excellence is presented. It is comprised of more than 600 individuals acquired simultaneously in three scenarios: 1 over the Internet, 2 in an office environment with desktop PC, and 3 in indoor/outdoor environments with mobile portable hardware. The three scenarios include a common part of audio/video data. Also, signature and fingerprint data have been acquired both with desktop PC and mobile portable hardware. Additionally, hand and iris data were acquired in the second scenario using desktop PC. Acquisition has been conducted by 11 European institutions. Additional features of the BioSecure Multimodal Database (BMDB) are: two acquisition sessions, several sensors in certain modalities, balanced gender and age distributions, multimodal realistic scenarios with simple and quick tasks per modality, cross-European diversity, availability of demographic data, and compatibility with other multimodal databases. The novel acquisition conditions of the BMDB allow us to perform new challenging research and evaluation of either monomodal or multimodal biometric systems, as in the recent BioSecure Multimodal Evaluation campaign. A description of this campaign including baseline results of individual modalities from the new database is also given. The database is expected to be available for research purposes through the BioSecure Association during 2008.

A Variational Framework for Exemplar-Based Image Inpainting

Abstract: Non-local methods for image denoising and inpainting have gained considerable attention in recent years. This is in part due to their superior performance in textured images, a known weakness of purely local methods. Local methods on the other hand have demonstrated to be very appropriate for the recovering of geometric structures such as image edges. The synthesis of both types of methods is a trend in current research. Variational analysis in particular is an appropriate tool for a unified treatment of local and non-local methods. In this work we propose a general variational framework for non-local image inpainting, from which important and representative previous inpainting schemes can be derived, in addition to leading to novel ones. We explicitly study some of these, relating them to previous work and showing results on synthetic and real images.

A review of heart chamber segmentation for structural and functional analysis using cardiac magnetic resonance imaging

Abstract: Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) has become a key imaging modality in clinical cardiology practice due to its unique capabilities for non-invasive imaging of the cardiac chambers and great vessels. A wide range of CMR sequences have been developed to assess various aspects of cardiac structure and function, and significant advances have also been made in terms of imaging quality and acquisition times. A lot of research has been dedicated to the development of global and regional quantitative CMR indices that help the distinction between health and pathology. The goal of this review paper is to discuss the structural and functional CMR indices that have been proposed thus far for clinical assessment of the cardiac chambers. We include indices definitions, the requirements for the calculations, exemplar applications in cardiovascular diseases, and the corresponding normal ranges. Furthermore, we review the most recent state-of-the art techniques for the automatic segmentation of the cardiac boundaries, which are necessary for the calculation of the CMR indices. Finally, we provide a detailed discussion of the existing literature and of the future challenges that need to be addressed to enable a more robust and comprehensive assessment of the cardiac chambers in clinical practice.

Automatic analysis and 3D-modelling of Hi-C data using TADbit reveals structural features of the fly chromatin colors.

Abstract: The sequence of a genome is insufficient to understand all genomic processes carried out in the cell nucleus. To achieve this, the knowledge of its three-dimensional architecture is necessary. Advances in genomic technologies and the development of new analytical methods, such as Chromosome Conformation Capture (3C) and its derivatives, provide unprecedented insights in the spatial organization of genomes. Here we present TADbit, a computational framework to analyze and model the chromatin fiber in three dimensions. Our package takes as input the sequencing reads of 3C-based experiments and performs the following main tasks: (i) pre-process the reads, (ii) map the reads to a reference genome, (iii) filter and normalize the interaction data, (iv) analyze the resulting interaction matrices, (v) build 3D models of selected genomic domains, and (vi) analyze the resulting models to characterize their structural properties. To illustrate the use of TADbit, we automatically modeled 50 genomic domains from the fly genome revealing differential structural features of the previously defined chromatin colors, establishing a link between the conformation of the genome and the local chromatin composition. TADbit provides three-dimensional models built from 3C-based experiments, which are ready for visualization and for characterizing their relation to gene expression and epigenetic states. TADbit is an open-source Python library available for download from https://github.com/3DGenomes/tadbit.

Exocrine pancreatic cancer: symptoms at presentation and their relation to tumour site and stage

Abstract: Introduction. The need to detect pancreatic cancer at earlier stages is undisputed. We recorded the signs and symptoms of patients presenting with exocrine pancreatic cancer and evaluated their association with clinical characteristics such as tumour site and disease stage.