BACKGROUND The gold standard for antinuclear antibody (ANA) screening is the indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) assay with human epithelial cells (HEp-2). However, a number of substantial disadvantages of manual IIF assays have highlighted the need for the automation and standardization of fluorescent ANA (FANA) testing. We evaluated the performance of EUROPattern Suite (Euroimmun AG, Germany), ...

The scope of this work is to develop a technological platform specialized in assessing retinal vessel caliber and describing the relationship of the results obtained to cardiovascular risk. Population studies conducted have found retinal vessel caliber to be related to the risk of hypertension, left ventricular hypertrophy, metabolic syndrome, stroke, and coronary artery disease. The vascular s...

An automated device that recognizes and quantitates neurite outgrowth from goldfish retinal explants is described. The system components include a video camera-inverted microscope and an Apple II microcomputer with an attached Motorola 68000 coprocessor. Values for neurite outgrowth were generated within 30 s, required no user input other than defining the microscopic field, and correlated well...

Thirty-eight urinary bladders from Fischer rats were organ cultured for 7 days in Ham's Medium F12 with varying concentrations of hydrocortisone added. Measurements of cell numbers and relative areas of nuclei and cytoplasm (N/C ratios) were made with an automated image analyzer on 1.5-micronm-thick plastic sections of the tissues. Epithelia cultured in the absence of hydrocortisone became hype...

Aqueous foams occur in several industrial applications including food production. One of the challenging issues in foams study is to evaluate the air bubbles stability. This problem is addressed in the present work using sequences of 2D macroscopic images of aqueous foams carried out in a glass column. Despite commercial softwares that are currently used in microscopy, the automatic analysis of...

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES To compare computer-generated interpretation of coronary computed tomography angiography (cCTA) by commercially available COR Analyzer software with expert human interpretation. MATERIALS AND METHODS This retrospective Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act‑compliant study was approved by the institutional review board. Among 225 consecutive cCTA examinat...

The novel ENEA-INMRI Image Analyzer system has been tested in semi-automated mode for a computer-assisted alpha track counting of electro-chemically etched (ECE) and chemically etched CR-39 Solid State Nuclear Track Detector (SSNTD) chips. A track recognition program based on the Java-Image J processing software was developed. Experimental tests have been carried out to maximize the Field of Vi...

This paper presents a novel algorithm to build hierarchies from independent component analyzer mixtures and its application to image similarity measure. The hierarchy algorithm composes an agglomerative (bottom-up) clustering from the estimated parameters (basis vectors and bias terms) of the ICA mixture. Merging at different levels of the hierarchy is made using the Kullback-Leibler distance b...

Absolute Mean Brightness Error (AMBE) and entropy are two popular Image Quality Analyzer (IQA) metrics used for assessment of Histogram Equalization (HE)-based contrast enhancement methods. However, recent study shows that they have poor correlation with Human Visual Perception (HVP); Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC)<0.4. This paper, proposed a new IQA which takes into account important pr...