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David Avis

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5 papers
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5

JMLR Journal 2014 Journal Article

Ground Metric Learning

  • Marco Cuturi
  • David Avis

Optimal transport distances have been used for more than a decade in machine learning to compare histograms of features. They have one parameter: the ground metric, which can be any metric between the features themselves. As is the case for all parameterized distances, optimal transport distances can only prove useful in practice when this parameter is carefully chosen. To date, the only option available to practitioners to set the ground metric parameter was to rely on a priori knowledge of the features, which limited considerably the scope of application of optimal transport distances. We propose to lift this limitation and consider instead algorithms that can learn the ground metric using only a training set of labeled histograms. We call this approach ground metric learning. We formulate the problem of learning the ground metric as the minimization of the difference of two convex polyhedral functions over a convex set of metric matrices. We follow the presentation of our algorithms with promising experimental results which show that this approach is useful both for retrieval and binary/multiclass classification tasks. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2014. ( edit, beta )

YNIMG Journal 2000 Journal Article

Automated 3-D Extraction of Inner and Outer Surfaces of Cerebral Cortex from MRI

  • David MacDonald
  • Noor Kabani
  • David Avis
  • Alan C. Evans

Automatic computer processing of large multidimensional images such as those produced by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is greatly aided by deformable models, which are used to extract, identify, and quantify specific neuroanatomic structures. A general method of deforming polyhedra is presented here, with two novel features. First, explicit prevention of self-intersecting surface geometries is provided, unlike conventional deformable models, which use regularization constraints to discourage but not necessarily prevent such behavior. Second, deformation of multiple surfaces with intersurface proximity constraints allows each surface to help guide other surfaces into place using model-based constraints such as expected thickness of an anatomic surface. These two features are used advantageously to identify automatically the total surface of the outer and inner boundaries of cerebral cortical gray matter from normal human MR images, accurately locating the depths of the sulci, even where noise and partial volume artifacts in the image obscure the visibility of sulci. The extracted surfaces are enforced to be simple two-dimensional manifolds (having the topology of a sphere), even though the data may have topological holes. This automatic 3-D cortex segmentation technique has been applied to 150 normal subjects, simultaneously extracting both the gray/white and gray/cerebrospinal fluid interface from each individual. The collection of surfaces has been used to create a spatial map of the mean and standard deviation for the location and the thickness of cortical gray matter. Three alternative criteria for defining cortical thickness at each cortical location were developed and compared. These results are shown to corroborate published postmortem and in vivo measurements of cortical thickness.

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