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Surgical resection seems to be the treatment of choice. Local recurrence is scarce. Due to the very limited number of cases, data regarding the long-term survival of patients are lacking.

The analysis of spatial relations between objects in digital images plays a crucial role in various application domains related to pattern recognition and computer vision. Classical models for the evaluation of such relations are usually sufficient for the handling of simple objects, but can lead to ambiguous results in more complex situations. In this article, we investigate the modeling of spatial configurations where the objects can be imbricated in each other. We formalize this notion with the term enlacement, from which we also derive the term interlacement, denoting a mutual enlacement of two objects. Our main contribution is the proposition of new relative position descriptors designed to capture the enlacement and interlacement between two-dimensional objects. These descriptors take the form of circular histograms allowing to characterize spatial configurations with directional granularity, and they highlight useful invariance properties for typical image understanding applications. We also show how these descriptors can be used to evaluate different complex spatial relations, such as the surrounding of objects. Experimental results obtained in the different application domains of medical imaging, document image analysis and remote sensing, confirm the genericity of this approach.

Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) analysis is an important domain with various applications in land study. In the coming years, both high temporal and high spatial resolution SITS will become available. In the classical methodologies, SITS are studied by analyzing the radiometric evolution of the pixels with time. When dealing with high spatial resolution images, object-based approaches are generally used in order to exploit the spatial relationships of the data. However, these approaches require a segmentation step to provide contextual information about the pixels. Even if the segmentation of single images is widely studied, its generalization to series of images remains an open-issue. This article aims at providing both temporal and spatial analysis of SITS. We propose first segmenting each image of the series, and then using these segmentations in order to characterize each pixel of the data with a spatial dimension (i.e., with contextual information). Providing spatially characterized pixels, pixel-based temporal analysis can be performed. Experiments carried out with this methodology show the relevance of this approach and the significance of the resulting extracted patterns in the context of the analysis of SITS.