Natalia P. García-de-la-Puente

Andrés Laveda-Martínez, Natalia P. García-de-la-Puente, Fernando García-Torres et al.

Non-destructive testing (NDT) is essential in ceramic manufacturing to ensure the quality of components without compromising their integrity. In this context, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) enables high-resolution internal imaging, revealing defects such as pores, delaminations, or inclusions. This paper presents an automatic defect detection system based on Deep Learning (DL), trained on OCT images with manually segmented annotations. A neural network based on the U-Net architecture is developed, evaluating multiple experimental configurations to enhance its performance. Post-processing techniques enable both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the predictions. The system shows an accurate behavior of 0.979 Dice Score, outperforming comparable studies. The inference time of 18.98 seconds per volume supports its viability for detecting inclusions, enabling more efficient, reliable, and automated quality control.

Ivan Slootweg, Natalia P. García-De-La-Puente, Geert Litjens et al.

Kidney abnormality detection is required for all preclinical drug development. It involves a time-consuming and costly examination of hundreds to thousands of whole-slide images per drug safety study, most of which are normal, to detect any subtle changes indicating toxic effects. In this study, we present the first large-scale self-supervised abnormality detection model for kidney toxicologic pathology, spanning drug safety assessment studies from 158 compounds. We explore the complexity of kidney abnormality detection on this scale using features extracted from the UNI foundation model (FM) and show that a simple k-nearest neighbor classifier on these features performs at chance, demonstrating that the FM-generated features alone are insufficient for detecting abnormalities. We then demonstrate that a self-supervised method applied to the same features can achieve better-than-chance performance, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.62 and a negative predictive value of 89%. With further development, such a model can be used to rule out normal slides in drug safety assessment studies, reducing the costs and time associated with drug development.