Object detection and statistical analysis of microscopy image sequences

"Confocal microscope images are wide useful in medical diagnosis and research. The automatic interpretation of this type of images is very important but it is a challenging endeavor in image processing area, since these images are heavily contaminated with noise, have low contrast and low resolution. This work deals with the problem of analyzing the penetration velocity of a chemotherapy drug in an ocular tumor called retinoblastoma. The primary retinoblastoma cells cultures are exposed to topotecan drug and the penetration evolution is documented by producing sequences of microscopy images. It is possible to quantify the penetration rate of topotecan drug because it produces fluorescence emission by laser excitation which is captured by the camera. In order to estimate the topotecan penetration time in the whole retinoblastoma cell culture, a procedure based on an active contour detection algorithm, a neural network classifier and a statistical model and its validation, is proposed. This new inference model allows to estimate the penetration time. Results show that the penetration mean time strongly depends on tumorsphere size and on chemotherapeutic treatment that the patient has previously received."