Biomedical subjects

Lucas C Parra

Publications and source records attributed to Lucas C Parra.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Varying complexity in tree-structured image distribution models.

Probabilistic models of image statistics underlie many approaches in image analysis and processing. An important class of such models have variables whose dependency graph is a tree. If the hidden variables take values on a finite set, most computations with the model can be performed exactly, including the likelihood calculation, training with the EM algorithm, etc. Crouse et al. developed one such model, the hidden Markov tree (HMT). They took particular care to limit the complexity of their model. We argue that it is beneficial to allow more complex tree-structured models, describe the use of information theoretic penalties to choose the model complexity, and present experimental results to support these proposals. For these experiments, we use what we call the hierarchical image probability (HIP) model. The differences between the HIP and the HMT models include the use of multivariate Gaussians to model the distributions of local vectors of wavelet coefficients and the use of different numbers of hidden states at each resolution. We demonstrate the broad utility of image distributions by applying the HIP model to classification, synthesis, and compression, across a variety of image types, namely, electrooptical, synthetic aperture radar, and mammograms (digitized X-rays). In all cases, we compare with the HMT.

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PubMed2006

Cortically coupled computer vision for rapid image search.

We describe a real-time electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interface system for triaging imagery presented using rapid serial visual presentation. A target image in a sequence of nontarget distractor images elicits in the EEG a stereotypical spatiotemporal response, which can be detected. A pattern classifier uses this response to reprioritize the image sequence, placing detected targets in the front of an image stack. We use single-trial analysis based on linear discrimination to recover spatial components that reflect differences in EEG activity evoked by target versus nontarget images. We find an optimal set of spatial weights for 59 EEG sensors within a sliding 50-ms time window. Using this simple classifier allows us to process EEG in real time. The detection accuracy across five subjects is on average 92%, i.e., in a sequence of 2500 images, resorting images based on detector output results in 92% of target images being moved from a random position in the sequence to one of the first 250 images (first 10% of the sequence). The approach leverages the highly robust and invariant object recognition capabilities of the human visual system, using single-trial EEG analysis to efficiently detect neural signatures correlated with the recognition event.

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PubMed2005

Cortical origins of response time variability during rapid discrimination of visual objects.

In this paper, we use single-trial analysis of electroencephalography (EEG) to ascertain the cortical origins of response time variability in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. We extract spatial components that maximally discriminate between target and distractor stimulus conditions over specific time windows between stimulus onset and the time of a motor response. We then compute the peak latency of this differential activity on a trial-by-trial basis, and correlate this with response time. We find, for our nine participants, that the majority of the latency is introduced by component activity which begins far-frontally 200 ms prior to the response and proceeds to become parietally distributed near the time of response. This activity is consistent with the hypothesis that cortical networks involved in generating the late positive complexes may be the origins of the observed response time variability in rapid discrimination of visual objects.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Recipes for the linear analysis of EEG.

In this paper, we describe a simple set of "recipes" for the analysis of high spatial density EEG. We focus on a linear integration of multiple channels for extracting individual components without making any spatial or anatomical modeling assumptions, instead requiring particular statistical properties such as maximum difference, maximum power, or statistical independence. We demonstrate how corresponding algorithms, for example, linear discriminant analysis, principal component analysis and independent component analysis, can be used to remove eye-motion artifacts, extract strong evoked responses, and decompose temporally overlapping components. The general approach is shown to be consistent with the underlying physics of EEG, which specifies a linear mixing model of the underlying neural and non-neural current sources.

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PubMed2004

Nonnegative matrix factorization for rapid recovery of constituent spectra in magnetic resonance chemical shift imaging of the brain.

We present an algorithm for blindly recovering constituent source spectra from magnetic resonance (MR) chemical shift imaging (CSI) of the human brain. The algorithm, which we call constrained nonnegative matrix factorization (cNMF), does not enforce independence or sparsity, instead only requiring the source and mixing matrices to be nonnegative. It is based on the nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm, extending it to include a constraint on the positivity of the amplitudes of the recovered spectra. This constraint enables recovery of physically meaningful spectra even in the presence of noise that causes a significant number of the observation amplitudes to be negative. We demonstrate and characterize the algorithm's performance using 31P volumetric brain data, comparing the results with two different blind source separation methods: Bayesian spectral decomposition (BSD) and nonnegative sparse coding (NNSC). We then incorporate the cNMF algorithm into a hierarchical decomposition framework, showing that it can be used to recover tissue-specific spectra given a processing hierarchy that proceeds coarse-to-fine. We demonstrate the hierarchical procedure on 1H brain data and conclude that the computational efficiency of the algorithm makes it well-suited for use in diagnostic work-up.

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PubMed2003

Response error correction--a demonstration of improved human-machine performance using real-time EEG monitoring.

We describe a brain-computer interface (BCI) system, which uses a set of adaptive linear preprocessing and classification algorithms for single-trial detection of error related negativity (ERN). We use the detected ERN as an estimate of a subject's perceived error during an alternative forced choice visual discrimination task. The detected ERN is used to correct subject errors. Our initial results show average improvement in subject performance of 21% when errors are automatically corrected via the BCI. We are currently investigating the generalization of the overall approach to other tasks and stimulus paradigms.

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