Maria Ferre

• Universitat Rovira i Virgili

Smart classrooms are physical learning spaces that, using data from the environment, students and teachers, are able to provide timely and valuable information to improve teaching and learning processes and foster decision-making. In this article, we provide an overview of how artificial intelligence techniques are being used to gain insights into...

Critically ill patients that stay in Intensive Care Units (ICU) for long periods suffer from Post-Intensive Care Syndrome or ICU Acquired Weakness, whose effects can decrease patients’ quality of life for years. To prevent such issues and aiming at shortening intensive care treatments, Early Mobilisation (EM) has been proposed as an encouraging tec...

Background Taking care of chronic or long-term patients at home is an arduous task. Non-professional caregivers suffer the consequences of doing so, especially in terms of their mental health. Performing some simple activities through a mobile phone app may improve their mindset and consequently increase their positivity. However, each caregiver ma...

Software projects are amongst the most common professional activities of computer engineers. Gaining competences on the design and development of software projects is, however, a complex issue that cannot be tackled within a single subject. In this article, we detail the design and implementation of a teaching methodology that aims at providing a c...

BACKGROUND Caregivers focus on the caregiver and not themselves. This can negatively affect the caregiver and the person being cared. Intervention programs can help empower caregivers of people with chronic diseases and can develop solutions to decrease the physical and psychological consequences resulting from caregiving. However, most of interven...

Background While nonprofessional caregivers often experience a sense of fulfillment when they provide care, there is also a significant risk of emotional and physical burnout. Consequently, this can negatively affect both the caregiver and the person being cared for. Intervention programs can help empower nonprofessional caregivers of people with c...

Background: To assess the effectiveness of a smartphone app-based intervention compared to a regular intervention of caregivers in primary health care institutions. The intervention is aimed at increasing positive mental health and decreasing caregiver's burden. Methods/design: Randomized and controlled trial with an experimental group and a con...

Resumen En el nuevo marco del espacio europeo de enseñanza superior las competencias transversales se han convertido en una parte importante del aprendizaje universitario. Su inclusión en el currículum requiere un esfuerzo adicional para organizar actividades que permitan al estudiante adquirir estas competencias y sobre todo diseñar mecanismos par...

Resumen En el nuevo marco del espacio europeo de enseñanza superior las competencias transversales se han convertido en una parte importante del aprendizaje universitario. Su inclusión en el currículum requiere un esfuerzo adicional para organizar actividades que permitan al estudiante adquirir estas competencias y sobre todo diseñar mecanismos par...

Resumen En el nuevo marco del espacio europeo de enseñanza superior las competencias transversales se han convertido en una parte importante del aprendizaje universitario. Su inclusión en el currículum requiere un esfuerzo adicional para organizar actividades que permitan al estudiante adquirir estas competencias y sobre todo diseñar mecanismos par...

Mammographic image analysis plays an important role in computer-aided breast cancer diagnosis. To improve the existing knowledge, this paper proposes a new efficient pixel-based methodology for tumor vs non-tumor classification. The proposed method firstly computes a Gabor feature pool from the mammogram. This feature set is calculated through mult...

Breast cancer is one of the most common neoplasms in women and it is a leading cause of worldwide death. However, it is also among the most curable cancer types if it can be diagnosed early through a proper mammographic screening procedure. So, suitable computer aided detection systems can help the radiologists to detect many subtle signs, normally...

Neuropsychological Rehabilitation is a complex clinic process which tries to restore or compensate cognitive and behavioral disorders in people suffering from a central nervous system injury. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Biomedical Engineering play an essential role in this field, allowing improvement and expansion of presen...

The purpose of this study was to clinically validate a new modality of cognitive rehabilitation services based on telemedicine systems (PREVIRNEC platform) for persons with moderate or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Patients and Methods. Eighty patients with moderate or severe TBI; mean age: 36.1 years (SD= 18.19 years) received a 10-week cog...

The conversion of legacy single-user applications to collaborative multi-user tools is a recurrent topic in groupware settings. Many works tried to achieve collaboration transparency: to enable collaborative features without modifying the source code of the single-user application. In this paper, we present a novel blackbox solution that achieves...

In this paper, we describe PREVIRNEC, a distributed system for cognitive telerehabilitation based on virtual environments. Our system allows personalized treatments by means of 2D and 3D exercises that can be built according to single patient's characteristics. Patients realize their exercises remotely. Depending on their obtained results, the syst...

This paper deals with the rendering of segmented unimodal, hybrid and aligned multimodal voxel models. We propose a data structure that classifies the segmented voxels into categories, so that whenever the model has to be traversed, only the selected categories are visited and the empty and non-selected voxels are skipped. This strategy is based o...

The goal of this paper is the proposal and evaluation of a ray-casting strategy that takes advantage of the spatial and temporal coherence in image-space as well as in object-space in order to speed up rendering. It is based on a double structure: in image-space, a temporal buffer that stores for each pixel the next instant of time in which the pix...

Volume rendering is a very active research field in Computer Graphics because of its wide range of applications in various sciences, from medicine to flow mechanics. In this report, we survey a state-of-the-art on time-varying volume rendering. We state several basic concepts and then we establish several criteria to classify the studied works: IVR...

In the last years there is a growing demand of multimodal medical rendering systems able to visualize simultaneously data coming from different sources. This paper addresses the Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) of aligned multimodal data in medical applications. Specifically, it proposes a hierarchical representation of the multimodal data set based o...

Many different direct volume rendering methods have been developed to visualize 3D scalar fields on uniform rectilinear grids. However, little work has been done on rendering simultaneously various properties of the same 3D region measured with different registration devices or at different instants of time. The demand for this type of visualizatio...

Hybrid rendering of volume and polygonal model is an interesting feature of visualization systems, since it helps users to better understand the relationships between internal structures of the volume and fitted surfaces as well as external surfaces. Most of the existing bibliography focuses at the problem of correctly integrating in depth both typ...

Hybrid rendering of volume and polygonal model is an interesting feature of visualization systems, since it helps users to better understand the relationships between internal structures of the volume and fitted surfaces as well as external surfaces. Most of the existing bibliography focuses at the problem of correctly integrating in depth both typ...

This paper addresses the rendering of aligned regular multimodal datasets. It presents a general framework of multimodal data fusion that includes several data merging methods. We also analyze the requirements of a rendering system able to provide these different fusion methods. On the basis of these requirements, we propose a novel design for a mu...

Many different direct volume rendering methods have been developed to visualize 3D scalar fields on uniform rectilinear grids. However, little work has been done on rendering simultaneously various properties of the same 3D region measured with different registration devices or at different instants of time. The demand for this type of visualizatio...

This paper addresses the rendering of 3D multimodal data, specifically SPECT and MR data of the brain. It describes different methods for rendering multimodal data and it analyses their advantages and their drawbacks from a practical point of view. It shows how relevant features of a property as well as relationships between data can be outlined by...

RESUMEN El presente trabajo describe el proceso de constitución de una red de innovación docente, llamada Xarxa d'Innovació Docent en noves metodologies docents, avaluació de procesos formatius i TIC de la Universidad Rovira i Virgili (XID-URV) cuyo objetivo es el de promover y evaluar el uso de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (...