The relationship between cellular geometry and cellular state and function is apparent, but not yet completely understood. Precise characterization of cellular state is important in many fields, from pathology to synthetic biology. High-content high-throughput microscopy is accessible to researchers now more than ever. This allows for collection of large amounts of cellular images. Naturally, the analysis of this data cannot be left to manual investigation and needs the use of efficient computing algorithms for cellular detection, segmentation, and tracking. Annotation is required for building high quality algorithms. Medical professionals and researchers spend a lot of effort and time in annotating cells. This task has proved to be very repetitive and time consuming. The experts’ time is valuable and should be used effectively. Our hypothesis is that active deep learning will help to share some of the burden that researchers face in their everyday work. In this paper, we focus specifically on the problem of cellular segmentation. We approach the segmentation task using a classification framework. Each pixel in the image is classified based on whether the patch around it resides on the interior, boundary or exterior of the cell. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) are used to perform the classification task. Active learning is the method used to reduce the annotation burden. Uncertainty sampling, a popular active learning framework is used in conjunction with the CNN to segment the cells in the image. Three datasets of mammalian nuclei and cytoplasm are used for this work. We show that active deep learning significantly reduces the number of training samples required and also improves the quality of segmentation.
The cancer diagnostic workflow is typically performed by highly specialized and trained pathologists, for which analysis is expensive both in terms of time and money. This work focuses on grade classification in colon cancer. The analysis is performed over 3 protein markers; namely E-cadherin, beta actin and colagenIV. In addition, we also use a virtual Hematoxylin and Eosin (HE) stain. This study involves a comparison of various ways in which we can manipulate the information over the 4 different images of the tissue samples and come up with a coherent and unified response based on the data at our disposal. Pre- trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is the method of choice for feature extraction. The AlexNet architecture trained on the ImageNet database is used for this purpose. We extract a 4096 dimensional
feature vector corresponding to the 6th layer in the network. Linear SVM is used to classify the data. The
information from the 4 different images pertaining to a particular tissue sample; are combined using the following techniques: soft voting, hard voting, multiplication, addition, linear combination, concatenation and multi-channel feature extraction. We observe that we obtain better results in general than when we use a linear combination of the feature representations. We use 5-fold cross validation to perform the experiments. The best results are obtained when the various features are linearly combined together resulting in a mean accuracy of 91.27%.
As advances in medical imaging technology are resulting in significant growth of biomedical image data, new techniques are needed to automate the process of identifying images of low quality. Automation is needed because it is very time consuming for a domain expert such as a medical practitioner or a biologist to manually separate good images from bad ones. While there are plenty of de-noising algorithms in the literature, their focus is on designing filters which are necessary but not sufficient for determining how useful an image is to a domain expert. Thus a computational tool is needed to assign a score to each image based on its perceived quality. In this paper, we introduce a machine learning-based score and call it the Quality of Image (QoI) score. The QoI score is computed by combining the confidence values of two popular classification techniques—support vector machines (SVMs) and Naïve Bayes classifiers. We test our technique on clinical image data obtained from cancerous tissue samples. We used 747 tissue samples that are stained by four different markers (abbreviated as CK15, pck26, E_cad and Vimentin) leading to a total of 2,988 images. The results show that images can be classified as good (high QoI), bad (low QoI) or ugly (intermediate QoI) based on their QoI scores. Our automated labeling is in agreement with the domain experts with a bi-modal classification accuracy of 94%, on average. Furthermore, ugly images can be recovered and forwarded for further post-processing.
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