Cell detection by functional inverse diffusion and non-negative group sparsity – Part I: Modeling and Inverse Problems

• In this two-part paper, we present a novel framework and methodology to analyze data from certain image-based biochemical assays, e.g., ELISPOT and Fluorospot assays. In this first part, we start by presenting a physical partial differential equations (PDE) model up to image acquisition for these biochemical assays. Then, we use the PDEs' Green function to derive a novel parametrization of the acquired images. This parametrization allows us to propose a functional optimization problem to address inverse diffusion. In particular, we propose a non-negative group-sparsity regularized optimization problem with the goal of localizing and characterizing the biological cells involved in the said assays. We continue by proposing a suitable discretization scheme that enables both the generation of synthetic data and implementable algorithms to address inverse diffusion. We end Part I by providing a preliminary comparison between the results of our methodology and an expert human labeler on real data. Part II is devoted to providing an accelerated proximal gradient algorithm to solve the proposed problem and to the empirical validation of our methodology.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Signalbehandling (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Signal Processing (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Medicinteknik -- Medicinsk bildbehandling (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Medical Engineering -- Medical Image Processing (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Inverse problems

Biomedical imaging

Convex optimization

Source localization

Biological modeling

Electrical Engineering

Elektro- och systemteknik

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)