Sydney Anuyah, Mehedi Mahmud Kaushik, Sri Rama Krishna Reddy Dwarampudi, Rakesh Shiradkar, Arjan Durresi, Sunandan Chakraborty. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2025.

Medical imaging is a great asset for modern medicine, since it allows physicians to spatially interrogate a disease site, resulting in precise intervention for diagnosis and treatment, and to observe particular aspect of patients' conditions that otherwise would not be noticeable. Computational analysis of medical images, moreover, can allow the discovery of disease patterns and correlations among cohorts of patients with the same disease, thus suggesting common causes or providing useful information for better therapies and cures. Machine learning and deep learning applied to medical images, in particular, have produced new, unprecedented results that can pave the way to advanced frontiers of medical discoveries. While computational analysis of medical images has become easier, however, the possibility to make mistakes or generate inflated or misleading results has become easier, too, hindering reproducibility and deployment. In this article, we provide ten quick tips to perform computational analysis of medical images avoiding common mistakes and pitfalls that we noticed in multiple studies in the past. We believe our ten guidelines, if taken into practice, can help the computational-medical imaging community to perform better scientific research that eventually can have a positive impact on the lives of patients worldwide.

The surface bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) can be used to distinguish different materials. The BRDFs of many real materials are near isotropic and can be approximated well by a 2D function. When the camera principal axis is coincident with the surface normal of the material sample, the captured BRDF slice is nearly 1D, which suffers from significant information loss. Thus, improvement in classification performance can be achieved by simply setting the camera at a slanted view to capture a larger portion of the BRDF domain. We further use a handheld flashlight camera to capture a 1D BRDF slice for material classification. This 1D slice captures important reflectance properties such as specular reflection and retro-reflectance. We apply these results on ink classification, which can be used in forensics and analyzing historical manuscripts. For the first time, we show that most of the inks on the market can be well distinguished by their reflectance properties.

While most photometric stereo algorithms assume Lambertian reflectance model for its simplicity, surfaces in general are not Lambertian. Some recent photometric stereo algorithms [1, 2] can recover iso-depth and iso-grandient contours for arbitrary isotropic surfaces by exploiting more general reflectance properties. However, further reconstruction of the 3D surface requires additional information, such as the normal at a point or depth along a boundary as suggested in [2]. This paper addresses the problem of reconstructing the surface from iso-depth and iso-gradient contours without such kind of additional information. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.