Automatic Robust Neurite Detection and Morphological Analysis of Neuronal Cell Cultures in High-content Screening

Cell-based high content screening (HCS) is becoming an important and increasingly favored approach in therapeutic drug discovery and functional genomics. In HCS, changes in cellular morphology and biomarker distributions provide an information-rich profile of cellular responses to experimental treatments such as small molecules or gene knockdown probes. One obstacle that currently exists with such cell-based assays is the availability of image processing algorithms that are capable of reliably and automatically analyzing large HCS image sets. HCS images of primary neuronal cell cultures are particularly challenging to analyze due to complex cellular morphology. Here we present a robust method for quantifying and statistically analyzing the morphology of neuronal cells in HCS images. The major advantages of our method over existing software lie in its capability to correct non-uniform illumination using the contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization method; segment neuromeres using Gabor-wavelet texture analysis; and detect faint neurites by a novel phase-based neurite extraction algorithm that is invariant to changes in illumination and contrast and can accurately localize neurites. Our method was successfully applied to analyze a large HCS image set generated in a morphology screen for polyglutaminemediated neuronal toxicity using primary neuronal cell cultures derived from embryos of a Drosophila Huntington’s Disease (HD) model.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant

An Introduction to Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection

none3siThis chapter provides an introduction to Presentation Attack Detection (PAD), also coined anti-spoofing, in fingerprint biometrics, and summarizes key developments for that purpose in the last two decades. After a review of selected literature in the field, we also revisit the potential of quality assessment for presentation attack detection. We believe that, beyond the interest that the described techniques may intrinsically have by themselves, the case study presented may serve as an example of how to develop and validate fingerprint PAD techniques based on common and publicly available benchmarks and following a systematic and replicable protocol.noneGalbally, Javier; Fierrez, Julian; Cappelli, RaffaeleGalbally, Javier; Fierrez, Julian; Cappelli, Raffael