scholarly journals Automated and unbiased classification of motor neuron phenotypes with single cell resolution in ALS tissue

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathleen Hagemann ◽  
Giulia E. Tyzack ◽  
Doaa M. Taha ◽  
Helen Devine ◽  
Linda Greensmith ◽  
...  

SUMMARYHistopathological analysis of tissue sections is an invaluable resource in neurodegeneration research. Importantly, cell-to-cell variation in both the presence and severity of a given phenotype is however a key limitation of this approach, reducing the signal to noise ratio and leaving unresolved the potential of single-cell scoring for a given disease attribute. Here, we developed an image processing pipeline for automated identification and profiling of motor neurons (MNs) in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) pathological tissue sections. This approach enabled unbiased analysis of hundreds of cells, from which hundreds of features were readily extracted. Next by testing different machine learning methods, we automated the identification of phenotypically distinct MN subpopulations in VCP- and SOD1-mutant transgenic mice, revealing common aberrant phenotypes in cellular shape. Additionally we established scoring metrics to rank cells and tissue samples for both disease probability and severity. Finally, by adapting this methodology to human post-mortem tissue analysis, we validated our core finding that morphological descriptors strongly discriminate ALS from control healthy tissue at the single cell level. In summary, we show that combining automated image processing with machine learning methods substantially improves the speed and reliability of identifying phenotypically diverse MN populations. Determining disease presence, severity and unbiased phenotypes at single cell resolution might prove transformational in our understanding of ALS and neurodegenerative diseases more broadly.

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mykola Sysyn ◽  
Ulf Gerber ◽  
Olga Nabochenko ◽  
Dmitri Gruen ◽  
Franziska Kluge

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aswani K ◽  
Menaka D

Abstract IntroductionThe brain tumor is the growth of abnormal cells inside the brain. These cells can be grown into malignant or benign tumors. Segmentation of tumor from MRI images using image processing techniques started decades back. Image processing based brain tumor segmentation can be divided in to three categories conventional image processing methods, Machine Learning methods and Deep Learning methods. Conventional methods lacks the accuracy in segmentation due to complex spatial variation of tumor. Machine Learning methods stand as a good alternative to conventional methods. Methods like SVM, KNN, Fuzzy and a combination of either of these provide good accuracy with reasonable processing speed. The difficulty in processing the various feature extraction methods and maintain accuracy as per the medical standards still exist as a limitation for machine learning methods. In Deep Learning features are extracted automatically in various stages of the network and maintain accuracy as per the medical standards. Huge database requirement and high computational time is still poses a problem for deep learning. MethodTo overcome the limitations specified above we propose an unsupervised dual autoencoder with latent space optimization here. The model require only normal MRI images for its training thus reducing the huge tumor database requirement. With a set of normal class data, an autoencoder can reproduce the feature vector into an output layer. This trained autoencoder works well with normal data while it fails to reproduce an anomaly to the output layer. But a classical autoencoder suffer due to poor latent space optimization. The Latent space loss of classical autoencoder is reduced using an auxiliary encoder along with the feature optimization based on Singular value Decomposition (SVD). The patches used for training are not traditional square patches but we took both horizontal and vertical patches to keep both local and global appearance features on the training set. An Autoencoder is applied separately for learning both horizontal and vertical patches. While training a logistic sigmoid transfer function is used for both encoder and decoder parts. SGD optimizer is used for optimization with an initial learning rate of .001 and the maximum epochs used are 4000. The network is trained in MATLAB 2018a with a processor capacity of 3.7 GHz with NVIDIA GPU and 16 GB of RAM.ResultsThe results are obtained using a patch size of 16x64, 64x16 for horizontal and vertical patches respectively. In Glioma images tumor is not grown from a point rather it spreads randomly. Region filling and connectivity operations are performed to get the final tumor segmentation. Overall the method segments Meningioma better than Gliomas. Three evaluation metrics are considered to measure the performance of the proposed system such as Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Positive Predictive Value (PPV), and Sensitivity.ConclusionAn unsupervised method for the segmentation of brain tumor from MRI images is proposed here. The proposed dual autoencoder with SVD based feature optimization reduce the latent space loss in the classical autoencoder. The proposed method have advantages in computational efficiency, no need of huge database requirement and better accuracy than machine learning methods. The method is compared Machine Learning methods Like SVM, KNN and supervised deep learning methods like CNN and commentable results are obtained.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Aswani ◽  
D. Menaka

Abstract Background The brain tumor is the growth of abnormal cells inside the brain. These cells can be grown into malignant or benign tumors. Segmentation of tumor from MRI images using image processing techniques started decades back. Image processing based brain tumor segmentation can be divided in to three categories conventional image processing methods, Machine Learning methods and Deep Learning methods. Conventional methods lacks the accuracy in segmentation due to complex spatial variation of tumor. Machine Learning methods stand as a good alternative to conventional methods. Methods like SVM, KNN, Fuzzy and a combination of either of these provide good accuracy with reasonable processing speed. The difficulty in processing the various feature extraction methods and maintain accuracy as per the medical standards still exist as a limitation for machine learning methods. In Deep Learning features are extracted automatically in various stages of the network and maintain accuracy as per the medical standards. Huge database requirement and high computational time is still poses a problem for deep learning. To overcome the limitations specified above we propose an unsupervised dual autoencoder with latent space optimization here. The model require only normal MRI images for its training thus reducing the huge tumor database requirement. With a set of normal class data, an autoencoder can reproduce the feature vector into an output layer. This trained autoencoder works well with normal data while it fails to reproduce an anomaly to the output layer. But a classical autoencoder suffer due to poor latent space optimization. The Latent space loss of classical autoencoder is reduced using an auxiliary encoder along with the feature optimization based on singular value decomposition (SVD). The patches used for training are not traditional square patches but we took both horizontal and vertical patches to keep both local and global appearance features on the training set. An Autoencoder is applied separately for learning both horizontal and vertical patches. While training a logistic sigmoid transfer function is used for both encoder and decoder parts. SGD optimizer is used for optimization with an initial learning rate of .001 and the maximum epochs used are 4000. The network is trained in MATLAB 2018a with a processor capacity of 3.7 GHz with NVIDIA GPU and 16 GB of RAM. Results The results are obtained using a patch size of 16 × 64, 64 × 16 for horizontal and vertical patches respectively. In Glioma images tumor is not grown from a point rather it spreads randomly. Region filling and connectivity operations are performed to get the final tumor segmentation. Overall the method segments Meningioma better than Gliomas. Three evaluation metrics are considered to measure the performance of the proposed system such as Dice Similarity Coefficient, Positive Predictive Value, and Sensitivity. Conclusion An unsupervised method for the segmentation of brain tumor from MRI images is proposed here. The proposed dual autoencoder with SVD based feature optimization reduce the latent space loss in the classical autoencoder. The proposed method have advantages in computational efficiency, no need of huge database requirement and better accuracy than machine learning methods. The method is compared Machine Learning methods Like SVM, KNN and supervised deep learning methods like CNN and commentable results are obtained.


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