Measuring airways in chest computed tomography (CT) images is important for characterizing diseases such as cystic fibrosis, yet very time-consuming to perform manually. Machine learning algorithms offer an alternative, but need large sets of annotated data to perform well. We investigate whether crowdsourcing can be used to gather airway annotations which can serve directly for measuring the airways, or as training data for the algorithms. We generate image slices at known locations of airways and request untrained crowd workers to outline the airway lumen and airway wall. Our results show that the workers are able to interpret the images, but that the instructions are too complex, leading to many unusable annotations. After excluding unusable annotations, quantitative results show medium to high correlations with expert measurements of the airways. Based on this positive experience, we describe a number of further research directions and provide insight into the challenges of crowdsourcing in medical images from the perspective of first-time users.

When characterizing teams of people, molecules, or general graphs, it is difficult to encode all information using a single feature vector only. For these objects dissimilarity matrices that do capture the interaction or similarity between the sub-elements (people, atoms, nodes), can be used. This paper compares several representations of dissimilarity matrices, that encode the cluster characteristics, latent dimensionality, or outliers of these matrices. It appears that both the simple eigenvalue spectrum, or histogram of distances are already quite effective, and are able to reach high classification performances in multiple instance learning (MIL) problems. Finally, an analysis on teams of people is given, illustrating the potential use of dissimilarity matrix characterization for business consultancy.

Supervised classification is widely used for image segmentation. To work effectively, these techniques need large amounts of labeled training data, that is representative of the test data. Different patient groups, different scanners or different scanning protocols can lead to differences between the images, thus representative data might not be available. Transfer learning techniques can be used to account for these differences, thus taking advantage of all the available data acquired with different protocols. We investigate the use of classifier ensembles, where each classifier is weighted according to the similarity between the data it is trained on, and the data it needs to segment. We examine 3 asymmetric similarity measures that can be used in scenarios where no labeled data from a newly introduced scanner or scanning protocol is available. We show that the asymmetry is informative and the direction of measurement needs to be chosen carefully. We also show that a point set similarity measure is robust across different studies, and outperforms state-of-the-art results on a multi-center brain tissue segmentation task.