José-Luis Sancho-Gómez

Purpose: The aim of this study was to analyze the relevance of asymmetry features between both eyes of the same patient for glaucoma screening using optical coherence tomography. Methods: Spectral-domain optical coherence tomography was used to estimate the thickness of the peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer in both eyes of the patients in the study. These measurements were collected in a dataset from healthy and glaucoma patients. Several metrics for asymmetry in the retinal nerve fiber layer thickness between the two eyes were then proposed. These metrics were evaluated using the dataset by performing a statistical analysis to assess their significance as relevant features in the diagnosis of glaucoma. Finally, the usefulness of these asymmetry features was demonstrated by designing supervised machine learning models that can be used for the early diagnosis of glaucoma. Results: Machine learning models were designed and optimized, specifically decision trees, based on the values of proposed asymmetry metrics. The use of these models on the dataset provided good classification of the patients (accuracy 88%, sensitivity 70%, specificity 93% and precision 75%). Conclusions: The obtained machine learning models based on retinal nerve fiber layer asymmetry are simple but effective methods which offer a good trade-off in classification of patients and simplicity. The fast binary classification relies on a few asymmetry values of the retinal nerve fiber layer thickness, allowing their use in the daily clinical practice for glaucoma screening.

Glaucoma is a group of eye conditions that damage the optic nerve, the health of which is vital for good eyesight. This damage is often caused by higher-than-normal pressure in the eye. In the past few years, the applications of artificial intelligence and data science have increased rapidly in medicine especially in imaging applications. In particular, deep learning tools have been successfully applied obtaining, in some cases, results superior to those obtained by humans. In this article, we present a soft novel ensemble model based on the K-NN algorithm, that combines the probability of class membership obtained by several deep learning models. In this research, three models of different nature (CNN, CapsNets and Convolutional Autoencoders) have been selected searching for diversity. The latent space of these models are combined using the local information provided by the true sample labels and the K-NN algorithm is applied to determine the final decision. The results obtained on two different datasets of retinal images show that the proposed ensemble model improves the diagnosis capabilities for both the individual models and the state-of-the-art results.

Hand gestures provide humans a convenient way to interact with computers and many applications. However, factors such as the complexity of hand gesture models, differences in hand size and position, and other factors can affect the performance of the recognition and classification algorithms. Some developments of deep learning such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and capsule networks (CapsNets) have been proposed to improve the performance of image recognition systems in this particular field. While CNNs are undoubtedly the most widely used networks for object detection and image classification, CapsNets emerged to solve part of the limitations of the former. For this reason, in this work a particular ensemble of both networks is proposed to solve the American Sign Language recognition problem very effectively. The method is based on increasing diversity in both the model and the dataset. The results obtained show that the proposed ensemble model together with a simple data augmentation process produces a very competitive accuracy performance with the all considered datasets.

Ensemble methods have been widely used for improving the results of the best single classificationmodel. A large body of works have achieved better performance mainly by applying one specific ensemble method. However, very few works have explored complex fusion schemes using het-erogeneous ensembles with new aggregation strategies. This paper is three-fold: 1) It provides an overview of the most popular ensemble methods, 2) analyzes several fusion schemes using MNIST as guiding thread and 3) introduces MNIST-NET10, a complex heterogeneous fusion architecture based on a degree of certainty aggregation approach; it combines two heterogeneous schemes from the perspective of data, model and fusion strategy. MNIST-NET10 reaches a new record in MNISTwith only 10 misclassified images. Our analysis shows that such complex heterogeneous fusionarchitectures based on the degree of certainty can be considered as a way of taking benefit fromdiversity.