Abstract
Clinical decisions are sometimes based on a variety of patient's information such as: age, weight or information extracted from image exams, among others. Depending on the nature of the disease or anatomy, clinicians can base their decisions on different image exams like mammographies, positron emission tomography scans or magnetic resonance images. However, the analysis of those exams is far from a trivial task. Over the years, the use of image descriptors-computational algorithms that present a summarized description of image regions-became an important tool to assist the clinician in such tasks. This paper presents an overview of the use of image descriptors in healthcare contexts, attending to different image exams. In the making of this review, we analyzed over 70 studies related to the application of image descriptors of different natures-e.g., intensity, texture, shape-in medical image analysis. Four imaging modalities are featured: mammography, PET, CT and MRI. Pathologies typically covered by these modalities are addressed: breast masses and microcalcifications in mammograms, head and neck cancer and Alzheimer's disease in the case of PET images, lung nodules regarding CTs and multiple sclerosis and brain tumors in the MRI section.

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Dealing with missing data is a crucial step in the preprocessing stage of most data mining projects. Especially in healthcare contexts, addressing this issue is fundamental, since it may result in keeping or loosing critical patient information that can help physicians in their daily clinical practice. Over the years, many researchers have addressed this problem, basing their approach on the implementation of a set of imputation techniques and evaluating their performance in classification tasks. These classic approaches, however, do not consider some intrinsic data information that could be related to the performance of those algorithms, such as features’ distribution. Establishing a correspondence between data distribution and the most proper imputation method avoids the need of repeatedly testing a large set of methods, since it provides a heuristic on the best choice for each feature in the study. The goal of this work is to understand the relationship between data distribution and the performance of well-known imputation techniques, such as Mean, Decision Trees, k-Nearest Neighbours, Self-Organizing Maps and Support Vector Machines imputation. Several publicly available datasets, all complete, were selected attending to several characteristics such as number of distributions, features and instances. Missing values were artificially generated at different percentages and the imputation methods were evaluated in terms of Predictive and Distributional Accuracy. Our findings show that there is a relationship between features’ distribution and algorithms’ performance, although some factors must be taken into account, such as the number of features per distribution and the missing rate at state.

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