Vinculin functions as a molecular clutch that organizes leading edge F-actin, generates traction, and promotes focal adhesion formation and turnover but not adhesion growth.
This paper presents a general method for detecting curvilinear structures, like filaments or edges, in noisy images. This method relies on a novel technique, the feature-adapted beamlet transform (FABT) which is the main contribution of this paper. It combines the well-known Beamlet transform (BT), introduced by Donoho , with local filtering techniques in order to improve both detection performance and accuracy of the BT. Moreover, as the desired feature detector is chosen to belong to the class of steerable filters, our transform requires only O(Nlog(N)) operations, where N = n(2) is the number of pixels. Besides providing a fast implementation of the FABT on discrete grids, we present a statistically controlled method for curvilinear objects detection. To extract significant objects, we propose an algorithm in four steps: 1) compute the FABT, 2) normalize beamlet coefficients, 3) select meaningful beamlets thanks to a fast energy-based minimization, and 4) link beamlets together in order to get a list of objects. We present an evaluation on both synthetic and real data, and demonstrate substantial improvements of our method over classical feature detectors.
Background. In recent years, deep learning has been increasingly applied to a vast array of ophthalmological diseases. Inherited retinal diseases (IRD) are rare genetic conditions with a distinctive phenotype on fundus autofluorescence imaging (FAF). Our purpose was to automatically classify different IRDs by means of FAF images using a deep learning algorithm. Methods. In this study, FAF images of patients with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), Best disease (BD), Stargardt disease (STGD), as well as a healthy comparable group were used to train a multilayer deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to differentiate FAF images between each type of IRD and normal FAF. The CNN was trained and validated with 389 FAF images. Established augmentation techniques were used. An Adam optimizer was used for training. For subsequent testing, the built classifiers were then tested with 94 untrained FAF images. Results. For the inherited retinal disease classifiers, global accuracy was 0.95. The precision-recall area under the curve (PRC-AUC) averaged 0.988 for BD, 0.999 for RP, 0.996 for STGD, and 0.989 for healthy controls. Conclusions. This study describes the use of a deep learning-based algorithm to automatically detect and classify inherited retinal disease in FAF. Hereby, the created classifiers showed excellent results. With further developments, this model may be a diagnostic tool and may give relevant information for future therapeutic approaches.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.