The main objective of the facial edema evaluation is providing the needed information to determine the effectiveness of the anti-inflammatory drugs in development. This paper presents a system that measures the four main variables present in facial edemas: trismus, blush (coloration), temperature, and inflammation. Measurements are obtained by using image processing and the combination of different devices such as a projector, a PC, a digital camera, a thermographic camera, and a cephalostat. Data analysis and processing are performed using MATLAB. Facial inflammation is measured by comparing three-dimensional reconstructions of inflammatory variations using the fringe projection technique. Trismus is measured by converting pixels to centimeters in a digitally obtained image of an open mouth. Blushing changes are measured by obtaining and comparing the RGB histograms from facial edema images at different times. Finally, temperature changes are measured using a thermographic camera. Some tests using controlled measurements of every variable are presented in this paper. The results allow evaluating the measurement system before its use in a real test, using the pain model approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which consists in extracting the third molar to generate the facial edema.
Image segmentation applied to medical image analysis is still a critical and important task. Although there exist several segmentation algorithms that have been widely studied in literature, these are subject to segmentation problems such as over- and under-segmentation as well as non-closed edges. In this paper, a simple method that combines well-known segmentation algorithms is presented. This method is applied to detect acid-fast bacilli (AFB) in bacilloscopies used to diagnose pulmonary tuberculosis (TB). This diagnosis can be performed through different tests, and the most used worldwide is smear microscopy because of its low cost and effectiveness. This diagnosis technique is based on the analysis and counting of the bacilli in the bacilloscopy observed under an optical microscope. The proposed method is used to segment the bacilli in digital images from bacilloscopies processed using Ziehl-Neelsen (ZN) staining. The proposed method is fast, has a low computational cost and good efficiency compared to other methods. The bacilli image segmentation is performed by image processing and analysis techniques, probability concepts and classifiers. In this work, a Bayesian classifier based on a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used. The segmentations' results are validated by using the Jaccard index, which indicates the efficiency of the classifier.
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