2025
Authors
Silva, JA; Silva, MF; Oliveira, HP; Rocha, CD;
Publication
APPLIED SCIENCES-BASEL
Abstract
Stroke often leads to severe motor impairment, especially in the upper limbs, greatly reducing a patient's ability to perform daily tasks. Effective rehabilitation is essential to restore function and improve quality of life. Traditional therapies, while useful, may lack engagement, leading to low motivation and poor adherence. Gamification-using game-like elements in non-game contexts-offers a promising way to make rehabilitation more engaging. The authors explore a gamified rehabilitation system designed in Unity 3D using a Kinect V2 camera. The game includes key features such as adjustable difficulty, real-time and predominantly positive feedback, user friendliness, and data tracking for progress. The evaluations were conducted with 18 healthy participants, most of whom had prior virtual reality experience. About 77% found the application highly motivating. While the gameplay was well received, the visual design was noted as lacking engagement. Importantly, all users agreed that the game offers a broad range of difficulty levels, making it accessible to various users. The results suggest that the system has strong potential to improve rehabilitation outcomes and encourage long-term use through enhanced motivation and interactivity.
2025
Authors
Sousa, P; Sousa, H; Pereira, T; Batista, E; Gouveia, P; Oliveira, HP;
Publication
38th IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems, CBMS 2025, Madrid, Spain, June 18-20, 2025
Abstract
Advancements in the care for patients with breast cancer have demanded the development of biomechanical breast models for the planning and risk mitigation of such invasive surgical procedures. However, these approaches require large amounts of high-quality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) training data that is of difficult acquisition and availability. Although this can be solved using synthetic data, generating high resolution images comes at the price of very high computational constraints and tipically low performances. On the other hand, producing lower resolution samples yields better results and efficiency but falls short of meeting health professional standards. Therefore, this work aims to validate a joint approach between lower resolution generative models and the proposed superresolution architecture, titled Shifted Window Image Restoration (SWinIR), which was used to achieve a 4x increase in image size of breast cancer patient MRI samples. Results prove to be promising and to further expand upon the super-resolution state-of-the-art, achieving good maximum peak signal-to-noise ratio of 41.36 and structural similarity index values of 0.962 and thus beating traditional methods and other machine learning architectures. © 2025 IEEE.
2025
Authors
Sousa, P; Campas, D; Andrade, J; Pereira, P; Gonçalves, T; Teixeira, LF; Pereira, T; Oliveira, HP;
Publication
Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis - 12th Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2025, Coimbra, Portugal, June 30 - July 3, 2025, Proceedings, Part II
Abstract
Cancer is a leading cause of mortality worldwide, with breast and lung cancer being the most prevalent globally. Early and accurate diagnosis is crucial for successful treatment, and medical imaging techniques play a pivotal role in achieving this. This paper proposes a novel pipeline that leverages generative artificial intelligence to enhance medical images by combining synthetic image generation and super-resolution techniques. The framework is validated in two medical use cases (breast and lung cancers), demonstrating its potential to improve the quality and quantity of medical imaging data, ultimately contributing to more precise and effective cancer diagnosis and treatment. Overall, although some limitations do exist, this paper achieved satisfactory results for an image size which is conductive to specialist analysis, and further expands upon this field’s capabilities. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
2025
Authors
Rodrigues Nogueira, AF; Oliveira, HP; Teixeira, LF;
Publication
Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis - 12th Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2025, Coimbra, Portugal, June 30 - July 3, 2025, Proceedings, Part I
Abstract
The aim of this work is to explore normalising flows to detect anomalous behaviours which is an essential task mainly for surveillance systems-related applications. To accomplish that, a series of ablation studies were performed by varying the parameters of the Spatio-Temporal Graph Normalising Flows (STG-NF) model [3] and combining it with attention mechanisms. Out of all these experiments, it was only possible to improve the state-of-the-art result for the UBnormal dataset by 3.4 percentual points (pp), for the Avenue by 4.7 pp and for the Avenue-HR by 3.2 pp. However, further research remains urgent to find a model that can give the best performance across different scenarios. The inaccuracies of the pose tracking and estimation algorithm seems to be the main factor limiting the models’ performance. The code is available at https://github.com/AnaFilipaNogueira/Abnormal-Human-Behaviour-Detection-using-Normalising-Flows-and-Attention-Mechanisms. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
2025
Authors
Fernandes, RF; Oliveira, HS; Ribeiro, PP; Oliveira, HP;
Publication
Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis - 12th Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2025, Coimbra, Portugal, June 30 - July 3, 2025, Proceedings, Part II
Abstract
Medical image captioning is an essential tool to produce descriptive text reports of medical images. One of the central problems of medical image captioning is their poor domain description generation because large pre-trained language models are primarily trained in non-medical text domains with different semantics of medical text. To overcome this limitation, we explore improvements in contrastive learning for X-ray images complemented with soft prompt engineering for medical image captioning and conditional text decoding for caption generation. The main objective is to develop a softprompt model to improve the accuracy and clinical relevance of the automatically generated captions while guaranteeing their complete linguistic accuracy without corrupting the models’ performance. Experiments on the MIMIC-CXR and ROCO datasets showed that the inclusion of tailored soft-prompts improved accuracy and efficiency, while ensuring a more cohesive medical context for captions, aiding medical diagnosis and encouraging more accurate reporting. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
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