Imma Boada

• Computer Science, Phd
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Girona

Serious games combine education and entertainment to create engaging and effective learning experiences, potentially contributing to science literacy and environmental awareness. This research aims to investigate the effectiveness of a particular serious game, H2OeduK, in educating children aged 10 to 11 years on the urban water cycle. Specifically...

Virtual reality (VR) rehabilitation has been proven to be a very promising method to increase the focus and attention of patients by immersing them in a virtual world, and through that, improve the effectiveness of the rehabilitation. One of the biggest challenges in designing VR Rehabilitation exercises is in choosing feedback strategies that guid...

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Virtual reality (VR) and head-mounted displays (HMDs) are increasingly popular in rehabilitation. However, for its efficient use in real clinical settings proposed systems require extra functionalities to support not only rehabilitation, telerehabilitation, and different rehabilitator-patient ratios but also rehabilitators’ capability to monitor an...

Mirror therapy is applied to reduce phantom pain and as a rehabilitation technique in post-stroke patients. Using Virtual Reality and head-mounted displays this therapy can be performed in virtual scenarios. However, for its efficient use in clinical settings, some hardware limitations need to be solved. A new system to perform mirror therapy in vi...

Background: Rapid primary angioplasty is the most effective reperfusion strategy for acute ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) patients. Since not all hospitals have a catheterization laboratory to perform this intervention, adequate coordination of all medical professionals involved in the management of STEMI patients from the emergency ro...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Purpose : Lingual exercises based on tongue movements are common in speech therapy. These exercises can be tedious for patients, but gamification and virtual reality (VR) with head-mounted displays (HMD) can serve as effective strategies to enhance the...

Given a set of irregularly sampled 3D polygonal curves representing composite fibres within a micro-computed tomography volume, a new approach based on the Frenet–Serret formulas is proposed to measure the point curvature and waviness along a polyline even when its oscillations are not coplanar. However, a direct computation of the measures would l...

Background: SJD a Casa is an acute pediatric hospital-at-home program that was initiated in 2019. For a thorough understanding of acute pediatric homecare programs, an analysis of all related factors, including the medical, social, and economic aspects as well as the family's experience, is essential. However, no previous study has attempted a com...

To the Editor, The use of new technologies applied to cardiology has proven effective for the patients’ clinical improvement,1 especially in certain situations like arrhythmias, heart failure or secondary prevention.2,3 In particular, the use of smartphones applied to the healthcare networks of patients with ST-segment elevation acute myocardial in...

The risk of contagion and the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic forced a change in teaching methodologies in radiology. New knowledge about the disease that was being acquired on a daily basis needed to be rapidly spread worldwide, but the restrictions imposed made it difficult to share this information. This paper describes the methodology...

Sr. Editor: El uso de las nuevas tecnologías aplicadas a la cardiología se ha mostrado eficaz en la mejora clínica de los pacientes1, en especial en determinadas situaciones, como las arritmias, la insuficiencia cardiaca o la prevención secundaria2,3. Específicamente, el uso de los teléfonos inteligentes aplicados a las redes asistenciales de los p...

Background Hospital Sant Joan de Déu (Barcelona) initiated a pediatric acute home-hospitalization program. Due to high patient turnover and the health staff's lack of planning training, daily scheduling was a time-consuming task. Home-hospitalization planning is a vehicle routing problem that can be solved with a technological solution. It was ther...

In this paper, we present TAECon, a web-based platform designed to support STEM promotion sessions carried out by the Polytechnic School of Girona's University at higher schools. The platform combines gamification, serious games, content editors, and automatic correction strategies in a single framework. TAECon is used to prepare game sessions that...

A method for reconstructing polygonal paths of fibres in reinforced composites imaged using micro-computed tomography is formally described, implemented and tested. The algorithm has been crafted to be explicable, require no training data and behave uniformly in all axes or orientations. It consists of four phases: (1) segmenting fibre regions usin...

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of e-Learning technologies as an alternative to classical face-to-face teaching. Teachers have had to quickly adapt to virtual technologies and transform their material to online content in order to minimise the impact on students’ education. In studies such as Architecture, where visual and graphical r...

Patient compliance is one of the key factors for rehabilitation programs to be effective. To increase patients’ engagement game technologies and virtual reality can be applied. However, the advantages provided by these techniques are not enough to be applied in real scenarios since experts do not always have the required technological skills. To ov...

Closure and seal inspection is one of the key steps in quality control of pizza packages. This is generally carried out by human operators that are not able to inspect all the packages due to cadence restrictions. To overcome this limitation, a computer vision system that automatically performs 100% inline seal and closure inspection is proposed. I...

Quality control is a key process designed to ensure that only products satisfying the defined quality requirements reach the end consumer or the next step in a production line. In the food industry, in the packaging step, there are many products that are still evaluated by human operators. To automate the process and improve efficiency and effectiv...

Computer vision systems have become a key element of modern companies. However, its implantation not only requires specialized hardware components but also software to control the correct performance of all these components. The purpose of this article is to present the design and deployment of a software created to manage the different computer vi...

Although low cost red-green-blue-depth (RGB-D) cameras are factory calibrated, to meet the accuracy requirements needed in many industrial applications proper calibration strategies have to be applied. Generally, these strategies do not consider the effect of temperature on the camera measurements. The aim of this paper is to evaluate this effect c...

Background Choking is one of the causes of unintentional injury death. Gaining the knowledge of the first-aid procedure that has to be applied in case of choking can increase the chances of survival of persons with choking. Serious games can be a good channel for educating people about choking scenarios and the actions to be taken to save the perso...

Objective The impact of weight loss induced by bariatric surgery (BS) and nonsurgical approaches on cardiovascular risk factors (CVRF) has not been fully elucidated. We assessed the effects of BS and a nonsurgical approach on carotid intima‐media thickness (CIMT) and CVRF in participants with class 3 obesity. Methods A total of 87 participants wit...

The aim of this study was to determine whether e-learning as a new teaching methodology was acceptable for general practitioners in continuous education courses of radiology. Generally, these courses are face-to-face with the corresponding time and place limitations. To overcome these limitations, we transformed one of these courses to an online on...

Methods: The aim of the paper is twofold. First, we present Starviewer, a DICOM viewer developed in C++ with a core component built on top of open-source libraries. The viewer supports extensions that implement functionalities and front-ends for specific use cases. Second, we propose an adaptable evaluation framework based on a set of criteria wei...

BACKGROUND Choking is one of the causes of unintentional injury death. Gaining the knowledge of the first-aid procedure that has to be applied in case of choking can increase the chances of survival of persons with choking. Serious games can be a good channel for educating people about choking scenarios and the actions to be taken to save the perso...

The use of e-learning tools for medical teaching is a common practice, but similar tools do not exist for veterinary teaching. In this paper we present a fully web-based e-learning platform, denoted Interactive Veterinary Education Tool (IVET), which is designed to support teaching and learning in veterinary science. To make content creation easier...

Blind players have many difficulties to access video games since most of them rely on impressive graphics and immersive visual experiences. To overcome this limitation, we propose a device designed for visually impaired people to interact with virtual scenes of video games. The device has been designed considering usability, economic cost, and adap...

The quality of a pig carcass is mainly measured by the lean meat percentage (LMP), which can be virtually estimated from computed tomography (CT) scans. Different strategies exist to classify the CT voxels into tissues such as fat, lean and bone, being the thresholding-based methods the most commonly used. However, these methods are usually affecte...

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is a first aid survival technique used to recover victims of cardiac arrest. To learn CPR different handheld device applications have been proposed. Most of them are based on sophisticated graphics and interaction techniques that make them inaccessible to visually impaired people. In this paper, we propose CPRfor...

Brain networks are widely used models to understand the topology and organization of the brain. These networks can be represented by a graph, where nodes correspond to brain regions and edges to structural or functional connections. Several measures have been proposed to describe the topological features of these networks, but unfortunately, it is...

Background and objective: Virtual simulations recreate scenarios where student nurses can practice procedures in a safe and supervised manner and with no risk to the patient. Virtual scenarios include digital characters that reproduce human actions. Generally, these characters are modeled as males and restricted roles are assigned to females. Our...

To improve the damage resistance and tolerance of thin laminates manufactured with thin-ply non-crimp-fabrics, we interleaved non-woven veils into the interlaminar regions (two different types of co-polyamide veil were studied). We devised a low velocity impact and compression after impact (CAI) experimental campaign, where quasi-static indentation...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: In computational neuroimaging, brain parcellation methods subdivide the brain into individual regions that can be used to build a network to study its structure and function. Using anatomical or functional connectivity, hierarchical clustering methods aim to offer a meaningful parcellation of the brain at each level of gra...

How to extract relevant information from large data sets has become a main challenge in data visualization. Clustering techniques that classify data into groups according to similarity metrics are a suitable strategy to tackle this problem. Generally, these techniques are applied in the data space as an independent step previous to visualization. I...

Removal of internal organs such as lungs, liver, and kidneys is a key step required to compute the lean meat percentage from Computed Tomography (CT) scans of live animals. In this paper, we propose two segmentation techniques to remove these organs focusing on pigs. The first method is semi-automatic, and it starts with the first CT slice and a ma...

Automatic correction of problems that are solved using diagrams through educational platforms is of great importance, especially in the field of engineering studies. In this paper, we present a new strategy to automatically assess diagrams. The proposed approach is described in detail as well as its application to assess entity/relationship diagram...

Serious game provides an instructional tool to make the learning process more enjoyable, easier to memorize and effective. It combines pedagogy goals and game play to increase the participant interest and engagement compared to traditional methods. In this paper, we compare several methodologies of game design relative to our classification proposa...

Automatic correction of problems that are solved using diagrams through educational platforms is of great importance, especially in the field of engineering studies. In this paper, we present a new strategy to automatically assess diagrams. The proposed approach is described in detail as well as its application to assess entity/relationship diagram...

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is a first-aid key survival technique used to stimulate breathing and keep blood flowing to the heart. Its effective administration can significantly increase the survival chances of cardiac arrest victims. We propose 30 : 2, a videogame designed to introduce the main steps of the CPR protocol. It is not intended...

One of the key elements of e-learning platforms is the content provided to the students. Content creation is a time demanding task that requires teachers to prepare material taking into account that it will be accessed on-line.Moreover, the teacher is restricted by the functionalities provided by the e-learning platforms. In contexts such as radiol...

Solving problems is one of the key tasks of the mathematics learning process. It requires teachers to prepare problems, correct them and return feedback to the students. The capability to automate all these steps would be a powerful tool for teachers, especially in courses with a lot of students. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically...

One of the key parameters that has to be considered in wound treatment is the size of the wound. Usually, this is monitored by an expert at regular intervals. To carry out this process, image-based approaches can be applied. Generally, these approaches start applying a segmentation technique to isolate the wound from the rest of the image. Due to t...

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is a first aid key survival technique used to stimulate breathing and keep blood flowing to the heart. Its effective administration can significantly increase the chances of survival for victims of cardiac arrest. LISSA is a serious game designed to complement CPR teaching and also to refresh CPR skills in an enj...

Clustering techniques aim organizing data into groups whose members are similar. A key element of these techniques is the definition of a similarity measure. The information bottleneck method provides us a full solution of the clustering problem with no need to define a similarity measure, since a variable \(X\) is clustered depending on a control...

Maintaining and restoring health is a basic aspect of well being. On the other hand, serious games is an emerging technology growing in importance for specialized training, taking advantage of 3D games and game engines in order to improve the realistic experience of users. Thus, according to the advancement of technology and the desire to achieve g...

Videoconferencing (VCF) is of key relevance for the development of many real-time eHealth applications and its adoption is increasing thanks to the advantages it provides. However, for a successful implementation, several issues need to be faced. In this paper we focus on VCF integration into existing or new eHealth applications. We analyze the mai...

Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) training is a crucial procedure to reduce the decease from cardiac arrest in pre–hospital situation. Due to the importance of CPR its knowledge is required not only by professions prescribing CPR certification such as fire fighter, life guard, police or daycare, but also by laypersons. To learn CPR skill, practic...

In this paper, we present a new framework for multimodal volume visualization that combines several information-theoretic strategies to define both colors and opacities of the multimodal transfer function. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully automatic scheme to visualize multimodal data. To define the fused color, we set an inform...

The grading of farmed animal carcasses depends on the con- tent of lean meat, fat and bone. Current imaging technologies are able to detect and represent carcass composition in images. To extract infor- mation from these images, specialized image processing techniques are required. In this paper, we propose a new segmentation method to ac- curately...

Different quality metrics have been proposed in the literature to evaluate how well a visualization represents the underlying data. In this paper, we present a new information-theoretic framework that quantifies the information transfer between the source data set and the rendered image. This approach is based on the definition of an observation ch...

Background and purpose: The role of diffusion tensor imaging in determining stroke age remains unclear. We tested the ability of diffusion tensor imaging metrics to discriminate ischemic stroke <4.5 hours of onset. Methods: We enrolled 60 consecutive patients for multimodal 1.5 T MRI within 12 hours of middle cerebral artery ischemic stroke onse...

In this paper we present the framework of a LIfe Support Simulation Application (LISSA) designed to teach and learn cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) skills. DLISSA exploits video game technology to link in a single framework computer-based simulations of CPR emergencies with the functionalities of e-learning platforms. DEmergency situations are...

Fiber tracking is the most popular technique for creating white matter connectivity maps from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). This approach requires a seeding process which is challenging because it is not clear how and where the seeds have to be placed. On the other hand, to enhance the interpretation of fiber maps, segmentation and clustering tec...

Little is known about the factors that determine recanalization after intravenous thrombolysis. We assessed the value of thrombus Hounsfield unit quantification as a predictive marker of stroke subtype and MCA recanalization after intravenous rtPA treatment. NCCT scans and CTA were performed on patients with MCA acute stroke within 4.5 hours of sym...

In this article we present a set of functionalities that we consider to be of fundamental importance for an e-learning platform that has to be applied in the context of engineering studies. As a practical case we describe the ACME platform, highlighting the automatic generation and assignation of problems with open solutions, the on-line correction...

In this paper we present a framework to define transfer functions from a target distribution provided by the user. A target distribution can reflect the data importance, or highly relevant data value interval, or spatial segmentation. Our approach is based on a communication channel between a set of viewpoints and a set of bins of a volume data set...

Multimodal visualization aims at fusing different data sets so that the resulting combination provides more information and understanding to the user. To achieve this aim, we propose a new information-theoretic approach that automatically selects the most informative voxels from two volume data sets. Our fusion criteria are based on the information...

PURPOSE Over 50% of acute ischemic stroke (AIS) patients have motor deficit. We aim to determine the accuracy of variables in predicting long-term motor outcome after AIS and whether the structural integrity of the corticospinal tract (CST) at diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) correlates with motor outcome. METHOD AND MATERIALS Consecutive patients w...

The majority of Computer Based Assessment (CBA) environments have been designed for fixed-response questions. This feature is not enough for the university context since not all the skills can be reduced to this typology of questions and free response exercises are required. In this paper, we present a web-based tool designed to automatically corre...

This paper presents a new approach for image registration based on the partitioning of the two source images in binary-space and quadtree structures, obtained with a maximum mutual information gain algorithm. Two different implementation approaches that differ in the level at which information is considered have been studied. The first works at pix...

Early prediction of motor outcome is of interest in stroke management. We aimed to determine whether lesion location at DTT is predictive of motor outcome after acute stroke and whether this information improves the predictive accuracy of the clinical scores. We evaluated 60 consecutive patients within 12 hours of middle cerebral artery stroke onse...

Infarct volume is used as a surrogate outcome measure in clinical trials of therapies for acute ischemic stroke. ABC/2 is a fast volumetric method, but its accuracy remains to be determined. We aimed to study the accuracy and reproducibility of ABC/2 in determining acute infarct volume with diffusion-weighted imaging. We studied 86 consecutive pati...

ACME-DB is a web-based e-learning platform designed for giving support to the teaching and learning of main database course topics. The platform is composed of a set of correction modules capable of automatically correcting different types of database problems such as entity-relationship diagrams, relational database schemas, normalization, relatio...

The kernel of an automatic correction tool developed to practice exercises of nomenclature and formulation of inorganic chemistry at the technical/engineering degrees at Girona Polytechnic University is presented. Such tool consists on two parts: nomenclature and formulation. This tool was developed inside a previous e-learning platform that has tw...

Database design is one of the main topics of any introductory database course. Traditionally, for teaching it entity-relationship diagrams (ERD) are used. However, in the last years, Unified Modeling Language (UML) has emerged as an effective modeling tool for database design. In this paper we present a web-based tool designed to give support to te...

This paper introduces a volume rendering framework based on the information channel constructed between the volumetric data set and a set of viewpoints. From this channel, the information associated to each voxel can be interpreted as an ambient occlusion value that allows to obtain illustrative volume visualizations. The use of the voxel informati...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The quantification and clinical significance of WD in CSTs following supratentorial stroke are not well understood. We evaluated the anisotropy by using DTI and signal-intensity changes on conventional MR imaging in the CST to determine whether these findings are correlated with limb motor deficit in patients with MCA ischem...

Estamos viviendo una época de cambios profundos en la educación universitaria. La implantación del plan de Bolonia nos ha llevado a plantear nuevas metodologías docentes, a revisar el papel del estudiante, la evaluación por competencias, la incorporación de las TIC. Hechos impensables hace poco más de una década. Entre las diferentes plataformas in...

To evaluate diffusion anisotropy from diffusion tensor imaging using new measures derived from Hellinger divergences and from compositional data distances. New anisotropy measures obtained from the diffusion tensor imaging were measured and compared with classic ones such as fractional anisotropy (FA) and relative anisotropy (RA). The evaluation wa...

The paper presents a web-based tool designed to give support to teaching and learning of UML class diagrams. The proposed UML environment is capable to correct automatically UML class diagrams exercises providing feedback to the student immediately. The tool is part of a more general framework, denoted ACME, which provides the main functionalities...

This paper presents new algorithms to compute ambient occlusion for volumetric data. Ambient occlusion is used in video-games and film animation to mimic the indirect lighting of global illumination. We extend a novel interpretation of ambient occlusion to volumetric models that measures how big portion of the tangent sphere of a surface belongs to...

Image registration consists in finding the transformation that brings one image into the best possible spatial correspondence with another image. In this paper, we present a new framework for image registration based on compression. The basic idea underlying our approach is the conjecture that two images are correctly registered when we can maximal...

The quantification and clinical significance of WD in CSTs following supratentorial stroke are not well understood. We evaluated the anisotropy by using DTI and signal-intensity changes on conventional MR imaging in the CST to determine whether these findings are correlated with limb motor deficit in patients with MCA ischemic stroke. We studied 60...

We propose a simple and interactive technique for volume illustration by using the difference between the original intensity values and a low-pass filtered copy. This difference, known as unsharped mask, provides us with a spatial importance map that captures salient and separability information about regions in the volume. We integrate this map in...

Ischemic stroke is associated with a high rate of disability and death. Establishing valid biomarkers could help accelerate the approval of promising new therapies for stroke. Whereas many serum biomarkers have been evaluated, possible imaging biomarkers of stroke lack validation. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a very sensitive technique to st...

In this paper, a semi-automated method for brain hematoma and edema segmentation, and volume measurement using computed tomography imaging is presented. This method combines a region growing approach to segment the hematoma and a level set segmentation technique to segment the edema. The main novelty of this method is the strategy applied to define...

Resumen Una de las competencias básicas en torno a la materia de bases de datos consiste en realizar el diseño conceptual y lógico de una base de datos relacional. En este artículo se presenta la experiencia realizada en el diseño de una base de datos con un número considerable de tablas y en relación a la organización y gestión de una empresa real...

PURPOSE/AIM 1. To review the underlying pathologic changes that create the imaging appearances of Wallerian degeneration (WD) at conventional MRI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), 2. To show the additional value of DTI in the quantification of WD and how it predicts patient outcome. CONTENT ORGANIZATION 1. Pathologic changes in WD 2. Imaging fea...

In image processing, segmentation algorithms constitute one of the main focuses of research. In this paper, new image segmentation algorithms based on a hard version of the information bottleneck method are presented. The objective of this method is to extract a compact representation of a variable, considered the input, with minimal loss of mutual...

We present a novel information-theoretic approach for thresholding-based segmentation that uses the excess entropy to measure the structural information of a 2D or 3D image and to locate the optimal thresholds. This approach is based on the conjecture that the optimal thresholding corresponds to the segmentation with maximum structure, i.e., maximu...

Exploded views are often used in illustration to overcome the problem of occlusion when depicting complex structures. In this paper, we propose a volume visualization technique inspired by exploded views that partitions the volume into a number of parallel slabs and shows them apart from each other. The thickness of slabs is driven by the similarit...