Open Access
A study on the suitability of different pooling operators for convolutional neural networks in the prediction of COVID-19 through chest x-ray image analysis
(Elsevier, 2024) Rodríguez Martínez, Iosu; Ursúa Medrano, Pablo; Fernández Fernández, Francisco Javier; Takáč, Zdenko; Bustince Sola, Humberto; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa
The 2019 coronavirus disease outbreak, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome type-2 virus (SARS-CoV-2), was declared a pandemic in March 2020. Since its emergence to the present day, this disease has brought multiple countries to the brink of health care collapse during several waves of the disease. One of the most common tests performed on patients is chest x-ray imaging. These images show the severity of the patient's illness and whether it is indeed covid or another type of pneumonia. Automated assessment of this type of imaging could alleviate the time required for physicians to treat and diagnose each patient. To this end, in this paper we propose the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to carry out this process. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we present a pipeline adapted to this problem, covering all steps from the preprocessing of the datasets to the generation of classification models based on CNNs. Secondly, we have focused our study on the modification of the information fusion processes of this type of architectures, in the pooling layers. We propose a number of aggregation theory functions that are suitable to replace classical processes and have shown their benefits in past applications, and study their performance in the context of the x-ray classification problem. We find that replacing the feature reduction processes of CNNs leads to drastically different behaviours of the final model, which can be beneficial when prioritizing certain metrics such as precision or recall.
Open Access
On fuzzy implications derived from general overlap functions and their relation to other classes
(MDPI, 2023) Pinheiro, Jocivania; Santos, Helida; Pereira Dimuro, Graçaliz; Bedregal, Benjamin; Santiago, Regivan; Fernández Fernández, Francisco Javier; Bustince Sola, Humberto; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC
There are distinct techniques to generate fuzzy implication functions. Despite most of them using the combination of associative aggregators and fuzzy negations, other connectives such as (general) overlap/grouping functions may be a better strategy. Since these possibly non-associative operators have been successfully used in many applications, such as decision making, classification and image processing, the idea of this work is to continue previous studies related to fuzzy implication functions derived from general overlap functions. In order to obtain a more general and flexible context, we extend the class of implications derived by fuzzy negations and t-norms, replacing the latter by general overlap functions, obtaining the so-called (GO, N)-implication functions. We also investigate their properties, the aggregation of (GO, N)-implication functions, their characterization and the intersections with other classes of fuzzy implication functions.
Open Access
VCI-LSTM: Vector choquet integral-based long short-term memory
(IEEE, 2022) Ferrero Jaurrieta, Mikel; Takáč, Zdenko; Fernández Fernández, Francisco Javier; Horanská, Lubomíra; Pereira Dimuro, Graçaliz; Montes Rodríguez, Susana; Díaz, Irene; Bustince Sola, Humberto; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika
Choquet integral is a widely used aggregation operator on one-dimensional and interval-valued information, since it is able to take into account the possible interaction among data. However, there are many cases where the information taken into account is vectorial, such as Long Short-Term Memories (LSTM). LSTM units are a kind of Recurrent Neural Networks that have become one of the most powerful tools to deal with sequential information since they have the power of controlling the information flow. In this paper, we first generalize the standard Choquet integral to admit an input composed by $n$-dimensional vectors, which produces an $n$-dimensional vector output. We study several properties and construction methods of vector Choquet integrals. Then, we use this integral in the place of the summation operator, introducing in this way the new VCI-LSTM architecture. Finally, we use the proposed VCI-LSTM to deal with two problems: sequential image classification and text classification.
Open Access
Local properties of strengthened ordered directional and other forms of monotonicity
(Springer, 2019) Sesma Sara, Mikel; Miguel Turullols, Laura de; Mesiar, Radko; Fernández Fernández, Francisco Javier; Bustince Sola, Humberto; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa, PJUPNA13
In this study we discuss some of the recent generalized forms of monotonicity, introduced in the attempt of relaxing the monotonicity condition of aggregation functions. Specifically, we deal with weak, directional, ordered directional and strengthened ordered directional monotonicity. We present some of the most relevant properties of the functions that satisfy each of these monotonicity conditions and, using the concept of pointwise directional monotonicity, we carry out a local study of the discussed relaxations of monotonicity. This local study enables to highlight the differences between each notion of monotonicity. We illustrate such differences with an example of a restricted equivalence function.
Open Access
Sugeno integral generalization applied to improve adaptive image binarization
(Elsevier, 2021) Bardozzo, Francesco; Osa Hernández, Borja de la; Horanská, Lubomíra; Fumanal Idocin, Javier; Priscoli, Mattia delli; Troiano, Luigi; Tagliaferri, Roberto; Fernández Fernández, Francisco Javier; Bustince Sola, Humberto; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Gobierno de Navarra / Nafarroako Gobernua, PI043-2019; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa, PC093-094 TFIPDL
Classic adaptive binarization methodologies threshold pixels intensity with respect to adjacent pixels exploiting integral images. In turn, integral images are generally computed optimally by using the summed-area-table algorithm (SAT). This document presents a new adaptive binarization technique based on fuzzy integral images. Which, in turn, this technique is supported by an efficient design of a modified SAT for generalized Sugeno fuzzy integrals. We define this methodology as FLAT (Fuzzy Local Adaptive Thresholding). Experimental results show that the proposed methodology produced a better image quality thresholding than well-known global and local thresholding algorithms. We proposed new generalizations of different fuzzy integrals to improve existing results and reaching an accuracy ≈0.94 on a wide dataset. Moreover, due to high performances, these new generalized Sugeno fuzzy integrals created ad hoc for adaptive binarization, can be used as tools for grayscale processing and more complex real-time thresholding applications.
Open Access
Gated local adaptive binarization using supervised learning
(CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org), 2021) Fumanal Idocin, Javier; Uriarte Barragán, Juan; Osa Hernández, Borja de la; Bardozzo, Francesco; Fernández Fernández, Francisco Javier; Bustince Sola, Humberto; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika
Image thresholding is one of the most popular problems in image processing. However, changes inlightning and contrast in an image can cause trouble for the existing algorithms that use a global threshold for all the image. A solution for this problem is the adaptive thresholding, in which an image canhave different thresholds for different parts of the image. Yet, the problem of choosing the most suitable threshold for each region of the image is still open. In this paper we present the Gated Local Adaptive Binarization algorithm, in which we choose the most appropriate threshold for each region of the image using a logistic regression. Our results show that this algorithm can effectively learn the most appropriate threshold in each situation, and beats other adaptive binarization solutions for a standard dataset in the literature.
Open Access
Motor-imagery-based brain-computer interface using signal derivation and aggregation functions
(IEEE, 2021) Fumanal Idocin, Javier; Wang, Yu-Kai; Lin, Chin-Teng; Fernández Fernández, Francisco Javier; Sanz Delgado, José Antonio; Bustince Sola, Humberto; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas
Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technologies are popular methods of communication between the human brain and external devices. One of the most popular approaches to BCI is Motor Imagery (MI). In BCI applications, the ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) is a very popular measurement for brain dynamics because of its non-invasive nature. Although there is a high interest in the BCI topic, the performance of existing systems is still far from ideal, due to the difficulty of performing pattern recognition tasks in EEG signals. This difficulty lies in the selection of the correct EEG channels, the signal-tonoise ratio of these signals and how to discern the redundant information among them. BCI systems are composed of a wide range of components that perform signal pre-processing, feature extraction and decision making. In this paper, we define a new BCI Framework, named Enhanced Fusion Framework, where we propose three different ideas to improve the existing MI-based BCI frameworks. Firstly, we include an additional pre-processing step of the signal: a differentiation of the EEG signal that makes it time-invariant. Secondly, we add an additional frequency band as feature for the system: the Sensory Motor Rhythm band, and we show its effect on the performance of the system. Finally, we make a profound study of how to make the final decision in the system. We propose the usage of both up to six types of different classifiers and a wide range of aggregation functions (including classical aggregations, Choquet and Sugeno integrals and their extensions and overlap functions) to fuse the information given by the considered classifiers. We have tested this new system on a dataset of 20 volunteers performing motor imagery-based braincomputer interface experiments. On this dataset, the new system achieved a 88.80% of accuracy. We also propose an optimized version of our system that is able to obtain up to 90, 76%. Furthermore, we find that the pair Choquet/Sugeno integrals and overlap functions are the ones providing the best results.
Open Access
Unbalanced interval-valued OWA operators
(Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2016) Miguel Turullols, Laura de; Bustince Sola, Humberto; Barrenechea Tartas, Edurne; Pagola Barrio, Miguel; Fernández Fernández, Francisco Javier; Automatika eta Konputazioa; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Automática y Computación
In this work, we introduce a new class of functions defned on the interval-valued setting. These functions extend classical OWA operators but allow for diferent weighting vectors to handle the lower bounds and the upper bounds of the considered intervals. As a consequence, the resulting functions need not be an interval-valued aggregation function, so we study, in the case of the lexicographical order, when these operators give an interval as output and are monotone. We also discuss an illustrative example on a decision making problem in order to show the usefulness of our developments.
Open Access
Supervised penalty-based aggregation applied to motor-imagery based brain-computer-interface
(Elsevier, 2024) Fumanal Idocin, Javier; Vidaurre Arbizu, Carmen; Fernández Fernández, Francisco Javier; Gómez Fernández, Marisol; Andreu-Pérez, Javier; Prasad, M.; Bustince Sola, Humberto; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Institute for Advanced Materials and Mathematics - INAMAT2; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC
In this paper we propose a new version of penalty-based aggregation functions, the Multi Cost Aggregation choosing functions (MCAs), in which the function to minimize is constructed using a convex combination of two relaxed versions of restricted equivalence and dissimilarity functions instead of a penalty function. We additionally suggest two different alternatives to train a MCA in a supervised classification task in order to adapt the aggregation to each vector of inputs. We apply the proposed MCA in a Motor Imagery-based Brain- Computer Interface (MI-BCI) system to improve its decision making phase. We also evaluate the classical aggregation with our new aggregation procedure in two publicly available datasets. We obtain an accuracy of 82.31% for a left vs. right hand in the Clinical BCI challenge (CBCIC) dataset, and a performance of 62.43% for the four-class case in the BCI Competition IV 2a dataset compared to a 82.15% and 60.56% using the arithmetic mean. Finally, we have also tested the goodness of our proposal against other MI-BCI systems, obtaining better results than those using other decision making schemes and Deep Learning on the same datasets.