We present an agent-based distributed decision support system for the diagnosis and prognosis of brain tumours developed by the HealthAgents project. HealthAgents is a European Union funded research project, which aims to enhance the classification of brain tumours using such a decision support system based on intelligent agents to securely connect a network of clinical centres. The HealthAgents system is implementing novel pattern recognition discrimination methods, in order to analyse in vivo Magnetic HealthAgents intends not only to apply forefront agent technology to the biomedical field, but also develop the HealthAgents network, a globally distributed information and knowledge repository for brain tumour diagnosis and prognosis.

Abstract.Quantitative magnetic resonance analysis often requires accurate, robust and reliable automatic extraction of anatomical structures. Recently, template-warping methods incorporating a label fusion strategy have demonstrated high accuracy in segmenting cerebral structures. In this study, we propose a novel patch-based method using expert segmentation priors to achieve this task. Inspired by recent work in image denoising, the proposed nonlocal patch-based label fusion produces accurate and robust segmentation. During our experiments, the hippocampi of 80 healthy subjects were segmented. The influence on segmentation accuracy of different parameters such as patch size or number of training subjects was also studied. Moreover, a comparison with an appearance-based method and a template-based method was carried out. The highest median kappa value obtained with the proposed method was 0.884, which is competitive compared with recently published methods.

Multisite and temporal variability in data distributions affects DQ, hindering data reuse, and an assessment of such variability should be a part of systematic DQ procedures.

Knowledge discovery on biomedical data can be based on on-line, data-stream analyses, or using retrospective, timestamped, off-line datasets. In both cases, changes in the processes that generate data or in their quality features through time may hinder either the knowledge discovery process or the generalization of past knowledge. These problems can be seen as a lack of data temporal stability. This work establishes the temporal stability as a data quality dimension and proposes new methods for its assessment based on a probabilistic framework. Concretely, methods are proposed for 1) monitoring changes, and 2) characterizing changes, trends and detecting temporal subgroups. First, a probabilistic change detection algorithm is proposed based on the Statistical Process Control of the posterior Beta distribution of the Jensen-Shannon distance, with a memoryless forgetting mechanism. This algorithm (PDF-SPC) classifies the degree of current change in three states: In-Control, Warning, and Out-of-Control. Second, a novel method is proposed to visualize and characterize the temporal changes of data based on the projection of a non-parametric information-geometric statistical manifold of time windows. This projection facilitates the exploration of temporal trends using the proposed IGT-plot and, by means of unsupervised learning methods, discovering conceptually-related temporal subgroups. Methods are evaluated using real and simulated data based on the National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS) dataset.