scholarly journals rhizoTrak: A flexible open source Fiji plugin for user-friendly manual annotation of time-series images from minirhizotrons

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Möller ◽  
Hongmei Chen ◽  
Tino Schmidt ◽  
Axel Zieschank ◽  
Roman Patzak ◽  
...  

AbstractBackground and aimsMinirhizotrons are commonly used to study root turnover which is essential for understanding ecosystem carbon and nutrient cycling. Yet, extracting data from minirhizotron images requires intensive annotation effort. Existing annotation tools often lack flexibility and provide only a subset of the required functionality. To facilitate efficient root annotation in minirhizotrons, we present the user-friendly open source tool rhizoTrak.Methods and resultsrhizoTrak builds on TrakEM2 and is publically available as Fiji plugin. It uses treelines to represent branching structures in roots and assigns customizable status labels per root segment. rhizoTrak offers configuration options for visualization and various functions for root annotation mostly accessible via keyboard shortcuts. rhizoTrak allows time-series data import and particularly supports easy handling and annotation of time series images. This is facilitated via explicit temporal links (connectors) between roots which are automatically generated when copying annotations from one image to the next. rhizoTrak includes automatic consistency checks and guided procedures for resolving conflicts. It facilitates easy data exchange with other software by supporting open data formats.ConclusionsrhizoTrak covers the full range of functions required for user-friendly and efficient annotation of time-series images. Its flexibility and open source nature will foster efficient data acquisition procedures in root studies using minirhizotrons.

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 551-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshman Abhilash ◽  
Vasu Sheeba

Research on circadian rhythms often requires researchers to estimate period, robustness/power, and phase of the rhythm. These are important to estimate, owing to the fact that they act as readouts of different features of the underlying clock. The commonly used tools, to this end, suffer from being very expensive, having very limited interactivity, being very cumbersome to use, or a combination of these. As a step toward remedying the inaccessibility to users who may not be able to afford them and to ease the analysis of biological time-series data, we have written RhythmicAlly, an open-source program using R and Shiny that has the following advantages: (1) it is free, (2) it allows subjective marking of phases on actograms, (3) it provides high interactivity with graphs, (4) it allows visualization and storing of data for a batch of individuals simultaneously, and (5) it does what other free programs do but with fewer mouse clicks, thereby being more efficient and user-friendly. Moreover, our program can be used for a wide range of ultradian, circadian, and infradian rhythms from a variety of organisms, some examples of which are described here. The first version of RhythmicAlly is available on Github, and we aim to maintain the program with subsequent versions having updated methods of visualizing and analyzing time-series data.


2019 ◽  
Vol 444 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 519-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Möller ◽  
Hongmei Chen ◽  
Tino Schmidt ◽  
Axel Zieschank ◽  
Roman Patzak ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 4124
Author(s):  
Baoquan Wang ◽  
Tonghai Jiang ◽  
Xi Zhou ◽  
Bo Ma ◽  
Fan Zhao ◽  
...  

For the task of time-series data classification (TSC), some methods directly classify raw time-series (TS) data. However, certain sequence features are not evident in the time domain and the human brain can extract visual features based on visualization to classify data. Therefore, some researchers have converted TS data to image data and used image processing methods for TSC. While human perceptionconsists of a combination of human senses from different aspects, existing methods only use sequence features or visualization features. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework for TSC based on fusion features (TSC-FF) of sequence features extracted from raw TS and visualization features extracted from Area Graphs converted from TS. Deep learning methods have been proven to be useful tools for automatically learning features from data; therefore, we use long short-term memory with an attention mechanism (LSTM-A) to learn sequence features and a convolutional neural network with an attention mechanism (CNN-A) for visualization features, in order to imitate the human brain. In addition, we use the simplest visualization method of Area Graph for visualization features extraction, avoiding loss of information and additional computational cost. This article aims to prove that using deep neural networks to learn features from different aspects and fusing them can replace complex, artificially constructed features, as well as remove the bias due to manually designed features, in order to avoid the limitations of domain knowledge. Experiments on several open data sets show that the framework achieves promising results, compared with other methods.


2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lindner ◽  
Raul Vicente ◽  
Viola Priesemann ◽  
Michael Wibral

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew MacDonald

PhilDB is an open-source time series database. It supports storage of time series datasets that are dynamic, that is recording updates to existing values in a log as they occur. Recent open-source systems, such as InfluxDB and OpenTSDB, have been developed to indefinitely store long-period, high-resolution time series data. Unfortunately they require a large initial installation investment before use because they are designed to operate over a cluster of servers to achieve high-performance writing of static data in real time. In essence, they have a ‘big data’ approach to storage and access. Other open-source projects for handling time series data that don’t take the ‘big data’ approach are also relatively new and are complex or incomplete. None of these systems gracefully handle revision of existing data while tracking values that changed. Unlike ‘big data’ solutions, PhilDB has been designed for single machine deployment on commodity hardware, reducing the barrier to deployment. PhilDB eases loading of data for the user by utilising an intelligent data write method. It preserves existing values during updates and abstracts the update complexity required to achieve logging of data value changes. PhilDB improves accessing datasets by two methods. Firstly, it uses fast reads which make it practical to select data for analysis. Secondly, it uses simple read methods to minimise effort required to extract data. PhilDB takes a unique approach to meta-data tracking; optional attribute attachment. This facilitates scaling the complexities of storing a wide variety of data. That is, it allows time series data to be loaded as time series instances with minimal initial meta-data, yet additional attributes can be created and attached to differentiate the time series instances as a wider variety of data is needed. PhilDB was written in Python, leveraging existing libraries. This paper describes the general approach, architecture, and philosophy of the PhilDB software.


2017 ◽  
pp. 23-32
Author(s):  
Owen Stuckey

I compare two GIS programs which can be used to create cartographic animations—the commercial Esri ArcGIS and the free and open-source QGIS. ArcGIS implements animation through the “Time Slider” while QGIS uses a plugin called “TimeManager.” There are some key similarities and differences as well as functions unique to each plugin. This analysis examines each program’s capabilities in mapping time series data. Criteria for evaluation include the number of steps, the number of output formats, input of data, processing, output of a finished animation, and cost. The comparison indicates that ArcGIS has more control in input, processing, and output of animations than QGIS, but has a baseline cost of $100 per year for a personal license. In contrast, QGIS is free, uses fewer steps, and enables more output formats. The QGIS interface can make data input, processing, and output of an animation slower.


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