Matthew N Dailey | Search PubMed

PubMed2006

Anatomical sketch understanding: recognizing explicit and implicit structure.

OBJECTIVE: Sketching is ubiquitous in medicine. Physicians commonly use sketches as part of their note taking in patient records and to help convey diagnoses and treatments to patients. Medical students frequently use sketches to help them think through clinical problems in individual and group problem solving. Applications ranging from automated patient records to medical education software could benefit greatly from the richer and more natural interfaces that would be enabled by the ability to understand sketches. In this paper we take the first steps toward developing a system that can understand anatomical sketches. METHODS: Understanding an anatomical sketch requires the ability to recognize what anatomical structure has been sketched and from what view (e.g. parietal view of the brain), as well as to identify the anatomical parts and their locations in the sketch (e.g. parts of the brain), even if they have not been explicitly drawn. We present novel algorithms for sketch recognition and for part identification. We evaluate the accuracy of the recognition algorithm on sketches obtained from medical students. We evaluate the part identification algorithm by comparing its results to the judgment of an experienced physician. RESULTS: The sketch recognition algorithm achieves a recognition accuracy of 75.5%, far above the baseline random classification accuracy of 6.7%. Comparison of the results of the part identification algorithm with the judgment of an experienced physician shows close agreement in terms of location, orientation, size, and shape of the identified parts. CONCLUSIONS: The performance of our prototype in terms of accuracy and running time provides strong evidence that development of robust sketch understanding systems for medical domains is an attainable goal. Further work needs to be done to extend the approach to sketches containing multiple and partial anatomical structures, as well as to be able to interpret sketch annotations.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2002

EMPATH: a neural network that categorizes facial expressions.

There are two competing theories of facial expression recognition. Some researchers have suggested that it is an example of "categorical perception." In this view, expression categories are considered to be discrete entities with sharp boundaries, and discrimination of nearby pairs of expressive faces is enhanced near those boundaries. Other researchers, however, suggest that facial expression perception is more graded and that facial expressions are best thought of as points in a continuous, low-dimensional space, where, for instance, "surprise" expressions lie between "happiness" and "fear" expressions due to their perceptual similarity. In this article, we show that a simple yet biologically plausible neural network model, trained to classify facial expressions into six basic emotions, predicts data used to support both of these theories. Without any parameter tuning, the model matches a variety of psychological data on categorization, similarity, reaction times, discrimination, and recognition difficulty, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We thus explain many of the seemingly complex psychological phenomena related to facial expression perception as natural consequences of the tasks' implementations in the brain.

Discrimination, Psychological↗