In this paper we present a system for the detection of immunogold particles
and a Transfer Learning (TL) framework for the recognition of these immunogold
particles. Immunogold particles are part of a high-magnification method for the
selective localization of biological molecules at the subcellular level only
visible through Electron Microscopy. The number of immunogold particles in the
cell walls allows the assessment of the differences in their compositions
providing a tool to analise the quality of different plants. For its
quantization one requires a laborious manual labeling (or annotation) of images
containing hundreds of particles. The system that is proposed in this paper can
leverage significantly the burden of this manual task.
For particle detection we use a LoG filter coupled with a SDA. In order to
improve the recognition, we also study the applicability of TL settings for
immunogold recognition. TL reuses the learning model of a source problem on
other datasets (target problems) containing particles of different sizes. The
proposed system was developed to solve a particular problem on maize cells,
namely to determine the composition of cell wall ingrowths in endosperm
transfer cells. This novel dataset as well as the code for reproducing our
experiments is made publicly available.
We determined that the LoG detector alone attained more than 84\% of accuracy
with the F-measure. Developing immunogold recognition with TL also provided
superior performance when compared with the baseline models augmenting the
accuracy rates by 10\%
