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.Comment: published, 15 page

Jump-sparse and sparse recovery using Potts functionals

We recover jump-sparse and sparse signals from blurred incomplete data corrupted by (possibly non-Gaussian) noise using inverse Potts energy functionals. We obtain analytical results (existence of minimizers, complexity) on inverse Potts functionals and provide relations to sparsity problems. We then propose a new optimization method for these functionals which is based on dynamic programming and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). A series of experiments shows that the proposed method yields very satisfactory jump-sparse and sparse reconstructions, respectively. We highlight the capability of the method by comparing it with classical and recent approaches such as TV minimization (jump-sparse signals), orthogonal matching pursuit, iterative hard thresholding, and iteratively reweighted $\ell^1$ minimization (sparse signals)