| 1. |
- Azar, Jimmy, et al.
(author)
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Automated Classification of Glandular Tissue by Statistical Proximity Sampling
- 2015
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In: International Journal of Biomedical Imaging. - : Hindawi Limited. - 1687-4188 .- 1687-4196.
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Due to the complexity of biological tissue and variations in staining procedures, features that are based on the explicit extraction of properties from subglandular structures in tissue images may have difficulty generalizing well over an unrestricted set of images and staining variations. We circumvent this problem by an implicit representation that is both robust and highly descriptive, especially when combined with a multiple instance learning approach to image classification. The new feature method is able to describe tissue architecture based on glandular structure. It is based on statistically representing the relative distribution of tissue components around lumen regions, while preserving spatial and quantitative information, as a basis for diagnosing and analyzing different areas within an image. We demonstrate the efficacy of the method in extracting discriminative features for obtaining high classification rates for tubular formation in both healthy and cancerous tissue, which is an important component in Gleason and tubule-based Elston grading. The proposed method may be used for glandular classification, also in other tissue types, in addition to general applicability as a region-based feature descriptor in image analysis where the image represents a bag with a certain label (or grade) and the region-based feature vectors represent instances.
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| 2. |
- Lidayová, Kristína, et al.
(author)
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Fast vascular skeleton extraction algorithm
- 2016
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In: Pattern Recognition Letters. - : Elsevier. - 0167-8655 .- 1872-7344. ; 76, s. 67-75
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Vascular diseases are a common cause of death, particularly in developed countries. Computerized image analysis tools play a potentially important role in diagnosing and quantifying vascular pathologies. Given the size and complexity of modern angiographic data acquisition, fast, automatic and accurate vascular segmentation is a challenging task.In this paper we introduce a fully automatic high-speed vascular skeleton extraction algorithm that is intended as a first step in a complete vascular tree segmentation program. The method takes a 3D unprocessed Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) scan as input and produces a graph in which the nodes are centrally located artery voxels and the edges represent connections between them. The algorithm works in two passes where the first pass is designed to extract the skeleton of large arteries and the second pass focuses on smaller vascular structures. Each pass consists of three main steps. The first step sets proper parameters automatically using Gaussian curve fitting. In the second step different filters are applied to detect voxels - nodes - that are part of arteries. In the last step the nodes are connected in order to obtain a continuous centerline tree for the entire vasculature. Structures found, that do not belong to the arteries, are removed in a final anatomy-based analysis. The proposed method is computationally efficient with an average execution time of 29s and has been tested on a set of CTA scans of the lower limbs achieving an average overlap rate of 97% and an average detection rate of 71%.
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| 3. |
- Moshavegh, Ramin, et al.
(author)
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Automated segmentation of free-lying cell nuclei in Pap smears for malignancy-associated change analysis
- 2012
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In: Proceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBS. - 1557-170X. - 9781424441198 ; , s. 5372-5375
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper presents an automated algorithm for robustly detecting and segmenting free-lying cell nuclei in bright-field microscope images of Pap smears. This is an essential initial step in the development of an automated screening system for cervical cancer based on malignancy associated change (MAC) analysis. The proposed segmentation algorithm makes use of gray-scale annular closings to identify free-lying nuclei-like objects together with marker-based watershed segmentation to accurately delineate the nuclear boundaries. The algorithm also employs artifact rejection based on size, shape, and granularity to ensure only the nuclei of intermediate squamous epithelial cells are retained. An evaluation of the performance of the algorithm relative to expert manual segmentation of 33 fields-of-view from 11 Pap smear slides is also presented. The results show that the sensitivity and specificity of nucleus detection is 94.71% and 85.30% respectively, and that the accuracy of segmentation, measured using the Dice coefficient, of the detected nuclei is 97.30±1.3%.
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| 4. |
- Allalou, Amin, 1981-
(author)
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Methods for 2D and 3D Quantitative Microscopy of Biological Samples
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- New microscopy techniques are continuously developed, resulting in more rapid acquisition of large amounts of data. Manual analysis of such data is extremely time-consuming and many features are difficult to quantify without the aid of a computer. But with automated image analysis biologists can extract quantitative measurements and increases throughput significantly, which becomes particularly important in high-throughput screening (HTS). This thesis addresses automation of traditional analysis of cell data as well as automation of both image capture and analysis in zebrafish high-throughput screening. It is common in microscopy images to stain the nuclei in the cells, and to label the DNA and proteins in different ways. Padlock-probing and proximity ligation are highly specific detection methods that produce point-like signals within the cells. Accurate signal detection and segmentation is often a key step in analysis of these types of images. Cells in a sample will always show some degree of variation in DNA and protein expression and to quantify these variations each cell has to be analyzed individually. This thesis presents development and evaluation of single cell analysis on a range of different types of image data. In addition, we present a novel method for signal detection in three dimensions. HTS systems often use a combination of microscopy and image analysis to analyze cell-based samples. However, many diseases and biological pathways can be better studied in whole animals, particularly those that involve organ systems and multi-cellular interactions. The zebrafish is a widely-used vertebrate model of human organ function and development. Our collaborators have developed a high-throughput platform for cellular-resolution in vivo chemical and genetic screens on zebrafish larvae. This thesis presents improvements to the system, including accurate positioning of the fish which incorporates methods for detecting regions of interest, making the system fully automatic. Furthermore, the thesis describes a novel high-throughput tomography system for screening live zebrafish in both fluorescence and bright field microscopy. This 3D imaging approach combined with automatic quantification of morphological changes enables previously intractable high-throughput screening of vertebrate model organisms.
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| 5. |
- Azar, Jimmy, 1984-
(author)
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Automated Tissue Image Analysis Using Pattern Recognition
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Automated tissue image analysis aims to develop algorithms for a variety of histological applications. This has important implications in the diagnostic grading of cancer such as in breast and prostate tissue, as well as in the quantification of prognostic and predictive biomarkers that may help assess the risk of recurrence and the responsiveness of tumors to endocrine therapy.In this thesis, we use pattern recognition and image analysis techniques to solve several problems relating to histopathology and immunohistochemistry applications. In particular, we present a new method for the detection and localization of tissue microarray cores in an automated manner and compare it against conventional approaches.We also present an unsupervised method for color decomposition based on modeling the image formation process while taking into account acquisition noise. The method is unsupervised and is able to overcome the limitation of specifying absorption spectra for the stains that require separation. This is done by estimating reference colors through fitting a Gaussian mixture model trained using expectation-maximization.Another important factor in histopathology is the choice of stain, though it often goes unnoticed. Stain color combinations determine the extent of overlap between chromaticity clusters in color space, and this intrinsic overlap sets a main limitation on the performance of classification methods, regardless of their nature or complexity. In this thesis, we present a framework for optimizing the selection of histological stains in a manner that is aligned with the final objective of automation, rather than visual analysis.Immunohistochemistry can facilitate the quantification of biomarkers such as estrogen, progesterone, and the human epidermal growth factor 2 receptors, in addition to Ki-67 proteins that are associated with cell growth and proliferation. As an application, we propose a method for the identification of paired antibodies based on correlating probability maps of immunostaining patterns across adjacent tissue sections.Finally, we present a new feature descriptor for characterizing glandular structure and tissue architecture, which form an important component of Gleason and tubule-based Elston grading. The method is based on defining shape-preserving, neighborhood annuli around lumen regions and gathering quantitative and spatial data concerning the various tissue-types.
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| 6. |
- Azar, Jimmy C., et al.
(author)
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Image segmentation and identification of paired antibodies in breast tissue
- 2014
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In: Computational & Mathematical Methods in Medicine. - : Hindawi Limited. - 1748-670X .- 1748-6718. ; , s. 647273:1-11
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Comparing staining patterns of paired antibodies designed towards a specific protein but toward different epitopes of the protein provides quality control over the binding and the antibodies' ability to identify the target protein correctly and exclusively. We present a method for automated quantification of immunostaining patterns for antibodies in breast tissue using the Human Protein Atlas database. In such tissue, dark brown dye 3,3'-diaminobenzidine is used as an antibody-specific stain whereas the blue dye hematoxylin is used as a counterstain. The proposed method is based on clustering and relative scaling of features following principal component analysis. Our method is able (1) to accurately segment and identify staining patterns and quantify the amount of staining and (2) to detect paired antibodies by correlating the segmentation results among different cases. Moreover, the method is simple, operating in a low-dimensional feature space, and computationally efficient which makes it suitable for high-throughput processing of tissue microarrays.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Bengtsson, Ewert, 1948-, et al.
(author)
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Detection of Malignancy-Associated Changes Due to Precancerous and Oral Cancer Lesions: A Pilot Study Using Deep Learning
- 2018
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In: CYTO2018.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Background: The incidence of oral cancer is increasing and it is effecting younger individuals. PAP smear-based screening, visual, and automated, have been used for decades, to successfully decrease the incidence of cervical cancer. Can similar methods be used for oral cancer screening? We have carried out a pilot study using neural networks for classifying cells, both from cervical cancer and oral cancer patients. The results which were reported from a technical point of view at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshop (ICCVW), were particularly interesting for the oral cancer cases, and we are currently collecting and analyzing samples from more patients. Methods: Samples were collected with a brush in the oral cavity and smeared on glass slides, stained, and prepared, according to standard PAP procedures. Images from the slides were digitized with a 0.35 micron pixel size, using focus stacks with 15 levels 0.4 micron apart. Between 245 and 2,123 cell nuclei were manually selected for analysis for each of 14 datasets, usually 2 datasets for each of the 6 cases, in total around 15,000 cells. A small region was cropped around each nucleus, and the best 2 adjacent focus layers in each direction were automatically found, thus creating images of 100x100x5 pixels. Nuclei were chosen with an aim to select well preserved free-lying cells, with no effort to specifically select diagnostic cells. We therefore had no ground truth on the cellular level, only on the patient level. Subsets of these images were used for training 2 sets of neural networks, created according to the ResNet and VGG architectures described in literature, to distinguish between cells from healthy persons, and those with precancerous lesions. The datasets were augmented through mirroring and 90 degrees rotations. The resulting networks were used to classify subsets of cells from different persons, than those in the training sets. This was repeated for a total of 5 folds. Results: The results were expressed as the percentage of cell nuclei that the neural networks indicated as positive. The percentage of positive cells from healthy persons was in the range 8% to 38%. The percentage of positive cells collected near the lesions was in the range 31% to 96%. The percentages from the healthy side of the oral cavity of patients with lesions ranged 37% to 89%. For each fold, it was possible to find a threshold for the number of positive cells that would correctly classify all patients as normal or positive, even for the samples taken from the healthy side of the oral cavity. The network based on the ResNet architecture showed slightly better performance than the VGG-based one. Conclusion: Our small pilot study indicates that malignancyassociated changes that can be detected by neural networks may exist among cells in the oral cavity of patients with precancerous lesions. We are currently collecting samples from more patients, and will present those results as well, with our poster at CYTO 2018.
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