GeoSP: A parallel method for a cortical surface parcellation based on geodesic distance

We present GeoSP, a parallel method that creates a parcellation of the cortical mesh based on a geodesic distance, in order to consider gyri and sulci topology. The method represents the mesh with a graph and performs a K-means clustering in parallel. It has two modes of use, by default, it performs the geodesic cortical parcellation based on the boundaries of the anatomical parcels provided by the Desikan-Killiany atlas. The other mode performs the complete parcellation of the cortex. Results for both modes and with different values for the total number of sub-parcels show homogeneous sub-parcels. Furthermore, the execution time is 82 s for the whole cortex mode and 18 s for the Desikan-Killiany atlas subdivision, for a parcellation into 350 sub-parcels. The proposed method will be available to the community to perform the evaluation of data-driven cortical parcellations. As an example, we compared GeoSP parcellation with Desikan-Killiany and Destrieux atlases in 50 subjects, obtaining more homogeneous parcels for GeoSP and minor differences in structural connectivity reproducibility across subjects.

Handwritten character recognition using some (anti)-diagonal structural features

In this paper, we present a methodology for off-line handwritten character recognition. The proposed methodology relies on a new feature extraction technique based on structural characteristics, histograms and profiles. As novelty, we propose the extraction of new eight histograms and four profiles from the $32\times 32$ matrices that represent the characters, creating 256-dimension feature vectors. These feature vectors are then employed in a classification step that uses a $k$-means algorithm. We performed experiments using the NIST database to evaluate our proposal. Namely, the recognition system was trained using 1000 samples and 64 classes for each symbol and was tested on 500 samples for each symbol. We obtain promising accuracy results that vary from 81.74\% to 93.75\%, depending on the difficulty of the character category, showing better accuracy results than other methods from the state of the art also based on structural characteristics.