Challenges drive the state-of-the-art of automated medical image analysis. The quantity of public training data that they provide can limit the performance of their solutions. Public access to the training methodology for these solutions remains absent. This study implements the Type Three (T3) challenge format, which allows for training solutions on private data and guarantees reusable training methodologies. With T3, challenge organizers train a codebase provided by the participants on sequestered training data. T3 was implemented in the STOIC2021 challenge, with the goal of predicting from a computed tomography (CT) scan whether subjects had a severe COVID-19 infection, defined as intubation or death within one month. STOIC2021 consisted of a Qualification phase, where participants developed challenge solutions using 2000 publicly available CT scans, and a Final phase, where participants submitted their training methodologies with which solutions were trained on CT scans of 9724 subjects. The organizers successfully trained six of the eight Final phase submissions. The submitted codebases for training and running inference were released publicly. The winning solution obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for discerning between severe and non-severe COVID-19 of 0.815. The Final phase solutions of all finalists improved upon their Qualification phase solutions.

Disease forecasting is a longstanding problem for the research community, which aims at informing and improving decisions with the best available evidence. Specifically, the interest in respiratory disease forecasting has dramatically increased since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, rendering the accurate prediction of influenza-like-illness (ILI) a critical task. Although methods for short-term ILI forecasting and nowcasting have achieved good accuracy, their performance worsens at long-term ILI forecasts. Machine learning models have outperformed conventional forecasting approaches enabling to utilize diverse exogenous data sources, such as social media, internet users' search query logs, and climate data. However, the most recent deep learning ILI forecasting models use only historical occurrence data achieving state-of-the-art results. Inspired by recent deep neural network architectures in time series forecasting, this work proposes the Regional Influenza-Like-Illness Forecasting (ReILIF) method for regional long-term ILI prediction. The proposed architecture takes advantage of diverse exogenous data, that are, meteorological and population data, introducing an efficient intermediate fusion mechanism to combine the different types of information with the aim to capture the variations of ILI from various views. The efficacy of the proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art ILI forecasting methods is confirmed by an extensive experimental study following standard evaluation measures.

Computer-aided-diagnosis and stratification of COVID-19 based on chest X-ray suffers from weak bias assessment and limited quality-control. Undetected bias induced by inappropriate use of datasets, and improper consideration of confounders prevents the translation of prediction models into clinical practice. By adopting established tools for model evaluation to the task of evaluating datasets, this study provides a systematic appraisal of publicly available COVID-19 chest X-ray datasets, determining their potential use and evaluating potential sources of bias. Only 9 out of more than a hundred identified datasets met at least the criteria for proper assessment of risk of bias and could be analysed in detail. Remarkably most of the datasets utilised in 201 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, are not among these 9 datasets, thus leading to models with high risk of bias. This raises concerns about the suitability of such models for clinical use. This systematic review highlights the limited description of datasets employed for modelling and aids researchers to select the most suitable datasets for their task.

Spatial transformations are mappings between locations of a $d$-dimensional space and are commonly used in computer vision and image analysis. Many of the spatial transformation sets have a group structure and can be represented by matrix groups. In the computer vision and image analysis fields there is a recent and growing interest in performing analyses on spatial transformations data. Differential and Riemannian geometry have been used as a framework to endow the set of spatial transformations with a metric space structure, allowing the extension of the standard analysis techniques defined on vector spaces. This paper presents a review of the concepts and an overview of approaches to computing Riemannian geodesics on spatial transformation groups. The paper is aimed at providing a bridge for researchers from computer vision and image analysis fields to fill in the gap between differential geometry and computer vision and imaging disciplines. Some application examples are shown to illustrate the use of invariant Riemannian geodesics, such as interpolation of spatial transformations and filtering of matrix-valued images.

Computational Anatomy aims for the study of the statistical variability in anatomical structures. Variability is encoded by the transformations existing among populations of anatomical images. These transformations are usually computed from diffeomorphic registration based on the large deformation paradigm. In this framework diffeomorphisms are usually computed as end points of paths on the Riemannian manifold of diffeomorphisms parameterized by non-stationary vector fields. Recently, an alternative parameterization based on stationary vector fields has been developed. In this article we propose to use this stationary parameterization for diffeomorphic registration. We formulate the variational problem related to this registration scenario and derive the associated Euler-Lagrange equations. We evaluate the performance of the non-stationary vs the stationary parameterizations in real and synthetic 3D-MRI datasets. Compared to the non-stationary parameterization, our proposal provides similar accuracy in terms of image matching and deformation smoothness while drastically reducing memory and time requirements.