Is the Vascular Network Discriminant Enough to Classify Renal Cell Carcinoma?

International audienceThe renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is the most frequent type of kidney cancer (between 90% and 95%). Twelve subtypes of RCC can be distinguished, among which the clear cell carcinoma (ccRCC) and the papillary carcinoma (pRCC) are the two most common ones (75% and 10% of the cases, respectively). After resection (i.e., surgical removal), the tumor is prepared for histological examination (fixation, slicing, staining, observation with a microscope). Along with protein expression and genetic tests, the histological study allows to classify the tumor and define its grade in order to make a prognosis and to take decisions for a potential additional chemotherapy treatment. Digital histology is a recent domain, since routinely, histological slices are studied directly under the microscope. The pioneer works deal with the automatic analysis of cells. However, a crucial factor for RCC classification is the tumoral architecture relying on the structure of the vascular network. For example, coarsely speaking, ccRCC is characterized by a ``fishnet'' structure while the pRCC has a tree-like structure. To our knowledge, no computerized analysis of the vascular network has been proposed yet. In this context, we developed a complete pipeline to extract the vascular network of a given histological slice and compute features of the underlying graph structure. Then, we studied the potential of such a feature-based approach in classifying a tumor into ccRCC or pRCC. Preliminary results on patient data are encouraging

A Recursive Approach For Multiclass Support Vector Machine: Application to Automatic Classification of Endomicroscopic Videos

International audienceThe two classical steps of image or video classification are: image signature extraction and assignment of a class based on this image signature. The class assignment rule can be learned from a training set composed of sample images manually classified by experts. This is known as supervised statistical learning. The well-known Support Vector Machine (SVM) learning method was designed for two classes. Among the proposed extensions to multiclass (three classes or more), the one-versus-one and one-versus-all approaches are the most popular ones. This work presents an alternative approach to extending the original SVM method to multiclass. A tree of SVMs is built using a recursive learning strategy, achieving a linear worst-case complexity in terms of number of classes for classification. During learning, at each node of the tree, a bi-partition of the current set of classes is determined to optimally separate the current classification problem into two sub-problems. Rather than relying on an exhaustive search among all possible subsets of classes, the partition is obtained by building a graph representing the current problem and looking for a minimum cut of it. The proposed method is applied to classification of endomicroscopic videos and compared to classical multiclass approaches

Extraction de caractéristiques et apprentissage statistique pour l'imagerie biomédicale cellulaire et tissulaire

The purpose of this Ph.D. thesis is to study the classification based on morphological features of cells and tissues taken from biomedical images. The goal is to help medical doctors and biologists better understand some biological phenomena. This work is spread in three main parts corresponding to the three typical problems in biomedical imaging tackled. The first part consists in analyzing endomicroscopic videos of the colon in which the pathological class of the polyps has to be determined. This task is performed using a supervised multiclass machine learning algorithm combining support vector machines and graph theory tools. The second part concerns the study of the morphology of mice neurons taken from fluorescent confocal microscopy. In order to obtain a rich information, the neurons are imaged at two different magnifications, the higher magnification where the soma appears in details, and the lower showing the whole cortex, including the apical dendrites. On these images, morphological features are automatically extracted with the intention of performing a classification. The last part is about the multi-scale processing of digital histology images in the context of kidney cancer. The vascular network is extracted and modeled by a graph to establish a link between the architecture of the tumor and its pathological class.L'objectif de cette thèse est de s'intéresser à la classification de cellules et de tissus au sein d'images d'origine biomédicales en s'appuyant sur des critères morphologiques. Le but est de permettre aux médecins et aux biologistes de mieux comprendre les lois qui régissent certains phénomènes biologiques. Ce travail se décompose en trois principales parties correspondant aux trois problèmes typiques des divers domaines de l'imagerie biomédicale abordés. L'objet de la première est l'analyse de vidéos d'endomicroscopie du colon dans lesquelles il s'agit de déterminer automatiquement la classe pathologique des polypes qu'on y observe. Cette tâche est réalisée par un apprentissage supervisé multiclasse couplant les séparateurs à vaste marge à des outils de théorie des graphes. La deuxième partie s'intéresse à l'étude de la morphologie de neurones de souris observés par microscopie confocale en fluorescence. Afin de disposer d'une information riche, les neurones sont observés à deux grossissements, l'un permettant de bien caractériser les corps cellulaires, l'autre, plus faible, pour voir les dendrites apicales dans leur intégralité. Sur ces images, des descripteurs morphologiques des neurones sont extraits automatiquement en vue d'une classification. La dernière partie concerne le traitement multi-échelle d'images d'histologie digitale dans le contexte du cancer du rein. Le réseau vasculaire est extrait et mis sous forme de graphe afin de pouvoir établir un lien entre l'architecture vasculaire de la tumeur et sa classe pathologique

Feature extraction and machine learning for cell and tissue biomedical imaging

L'objectif de cette thèse est de s'intéresser à la classification de cellules et de tissus au sein d'images d'origine biomédicales en s'appuyant sur des critères morphologiques. Le but est de permettre aux médecins et aux biologistes de mieux comprendre les lois qui régissent certains phénomènes biologiques. Ce travail se décompose en trois principales parties correspondant aux trois problèmes typiques des divers domaines de l'imagerie biomédicale abordés. L'objet de la première est l'analyse de vidéos d'endomicroscopie du colon dans lesquelles il s'agit de déterminer automatiquement la classe pathologique des polypes qu'on y observe. Cette tâche est réalisée par un apprentissage supervisé multiclasse couplant les séparateurs à vaste marge à des outils de théorie des graphes. La deuxième partie s'intéresse à l'étude de la morphologie de neurones de souris observés par microscopie confocale en fluorescence. Afin de disposer d'une information riche, les neurones sont observés à deux grossissements, l'un permettant de bien caractériser les corps cellulaires, l'autre, plus faible, pour voir les dendrites apicales dans leur intégralité. Sur ces images, des descripteurs morphologiques des neurones sont extraits automatiquement en vue d'une classification. La dernière partie concerne le traitement multi-échelle d'images d'histologie digitale dans le contexte du cancer du rein. Le réseau vasculaire est extrait et mis sous forme de graphe afin de pouvoir établir un lien entre l'architecture vasculaire de la tumeur et sa classe pathologique.The purpose of this Ph.D. thesis is to study the classification based on morphological features of cells and tissues taken from biomedical images. The goal is to help medical doctors and biologists better understand some biological phenomena. This work is spread in three main parts corresponding to the three typical problems in biomedical imaging tackled. The first part consists in analyzing endomicroscopic videos of the colon in which the pathological class of the polyps has to be determined. This task is performed using a supervised multiclass machine learning algorithm combining support vector machines and graph theory tools. The second part concerns the study of the morphology of mice neurons taken from fluorescent confocal microscopy. In order to obtain a rich information, the neurons are imaged at two different magnifications, the higher magnification where the soma appears in details, and the lower showing the whole cortex, including the apical dendrites. On these images, morphological features are automatically extracted with the intention of performing a classification. The last part is about the multi-scale processing of digital histology images in the context of kidney cancer. The vascular network is extracted and modeled by a graph to establish a link between the architecture of the tumor and its pathological class

Comment retrouver une constellation dans la galaxie ?

National audienceIn this paper, we propose an approach to find a subset of n-dimensional points within a larger set. The idea is to match objects detected in images at different resolutions. To do so, we use a complete bipartite graph model whose vertices are weighted by the cost of assignment problems. The proposed method is tested on randomly generated data emphasizing on some particular cases as well as on real data (matching neurons in two different types of 3D microscopic images of mice cortices and automatically detecting a constellation in an image of the night sky).Dans cet article, nous proposons une approche pour retrouver un sous-ensemble de points de Rn dans un ensemble de plus grandetaille. L’idée est de mettre en correspondance des groupes d’objets détectés dans des images à différentes résolutions. Pour cela, nous utilisonsun modèle de graphe biparti complet dont chacune des arêtes est pondérée par le coût d’un problème d’appariement. La méthode proposée est testée sur des données générées aléatoirement mettant en évidence plusieurs cas particuliers ainsi que sur des cas réels de mise en correspondance de neurones entre deux types d’images 3D de cortex de souris extraites par microscopie confocale ainsi que sur une image du ciel sur laquelle une galaxie est automatiquement détectée

Morphological Analysis and Feature Extraction of Neurons from Mouse Cortices Multiscale 3D Microscopic Images

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a framework to analyze the morphology of mouse neurons in the layer V of the cortex from 3D microscopic images. We are given 8 sets of images, each of which is composed of a 10x image showing the whole neurons, and a few (2 to 5) 40x images focusing on the somas. The framework consists in segmenting the neurons on both types of images to compute a set of specific morphological features, and in matching the neurons in the 40x images to their counterparts in the 10x images to combine the features we obtained, in a fully automatic fashion