18,292 research outputs found
Methods for Analysing Endothelial Cell Shape and Behaviour in Relation to the Focal Nature of Atherosclerosis
The aim of this thesis is to develop automated methods for the analysis of the
spatial patterns, and the functional behaviour of endothelial cells, viewed under
microscopy, with applications to the understanding of atherosclerosis.
Initially, a radial search approach to segmentation was attempted in order to
trace the cell and nuclei boundaries using a maximum likelihood algorithm; it
was found inadequate to detect the weak cell boundaries present in the available
data. A parametric cell shape model was then introduced to fit an equivalent
ellipse to the cell boundary by matching phase-invariant orientation fields of the
image and a candidate cell shape. This approach succeeded on good quality
images, but failed on images with weak cell boundaries. Finally, a support
vector machines based method, relying on a rich set of visual features, and a
small but high quality training dataset, was found to work well on large numbers
of cells even in the presence of strong intensity variations and imaging noise.
Using the segmentation results, several standard shear-stress dependent parameters
of cell morphology were studied, and evidence for similar behaviour
in some cell shape parameters was obtained in in-vivo cells and their nuclei.
Nuclear and cell orientations around immature and mature aortas were broadly
similar, suggesting that the pattern of flow direction near the wall stayed approximately
constant with age. The relation was less strong for the cell and
nuclear length-to-width ratios.
Two novel shape analysis approaches were attempted to find other properties
of cell shape which could be used to annotate or characterise patterns, since a
wide variability in cell and nuclear shapes was observed which did not appear
to fit the standard parameterisations. Although no firm conclusions can yet be
drawn, the work lays the foundation for future studies of cell morphology.
To draw inferences about patterns in the functional response of cells to flow,
which may play a role in the progression of disease, single-cell analysis was performed
using calcium sensitive florescence probes. Calcium transient rates were
found to change with flow, but more importantly, local patterns of synchronisation
in multi-cellular groups were discernable and appear to change with flow.
The patterns suggest a new functional mechanism in flow-mediation of cell-cell
calcium signalling
Fusing image representations for classification using support vector machines
In order to improve classification accuracy different image representations
are usually combined. This can be done by using two different fusing schemes.
In feature level fusion schemes, image representations are combined before the
classification process. In classifier fusion, the decisions taken separately
based on individual representations are fused to make a decision. In this paper
the main methods derived for both strategies are evaluated. Our experimental
results show that classifier fusion performs better. Specifically Bayes belief
integration is the best performing strategy for image classification task.Comment: Image and Vision Computing New Zealand, 2009. IVCNZ '09. 24th
International Conference, Wellington : Nouvelle-Z\'elande (2009
Characterizing neuromorphologic alterations with additive shape functionals
The complexity of a neuronal cell shape is known to be related to its
function. Specifically, among other indicators, a decreased complexity in the
dendritic trees of cortical pyramidal neurons has been associated with mental
retardation. In this paper we develop a procedure to address the
characterization of morphological changes induced in cultured neurons by
over-expressing a gene involved in mental retardation. Measures associated with
the multiscale connectivity, an additive image functional, are found to give a
reasonable separation criterion between two categories of cells. One category
consists of a control group and two transfected groups of neurons, and the
other, a class of cat ganglionary cells. The reported framework also identified
a trend towards lower complexity in one of the transfected groups. Such results
establish the suggested measures as an effective descriptors of cell shape
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