Abstract
This paper proposes a non-parametric method for the classification of thin-layer chromatographic (TLC) images from patterns represented in a dissimilarity space. Each pattern corresponds to a mixture of Gaussian approximation of the intensity profile. The methodology comprises various phases, including image processing and analysis steps to extract the chromatographic profiles and a classification phase to discriminate among two groups, one corresponding to normal cases and the other to three pathological classes. We present an extensive study of several dissimilarity-based approaches analysing the influence of the dissimilarity measure and the prototype selection method on the classification performance. The main conclusions of this paper are that, Match and Profile-difference dissimilarity measures present better results, and a new prototype selection methodology achieves a performance similar or even better than conventional methods. Furthermore, we also concluded that simplest classifiers, such as k-NN and linear discriminant classifiers (LDCs), present good performance being the overall classification error less than 10% for the four-class problem.

Abstract
Computational methods used in microscopy cell image analysis have largely augmented the impact of imaging techniques, becoming fundamental for biological research. The understanding of cell regulation processes is very important in biology, and in particular confocal fluorescence imaging plays a relevant role for the in vivo observation of cells. However, most biology researchers still analyze cells by visual inspection alone, which is time consuming and prone to induce subjective bias. This makes automatic cell image analysis essential for large scale, objective studies of cells. While the classic approach for automatic cell analysis is to use image segmentation, for in vivo confocal fluorescence microscopy images of plants, such approach is neither trivial nor is it robust to image quality variations. To analyze plant cells in in vivo confocal fluorescence microscopy images with robustness and increased performance, we propose the use of local convergence filters (LCF). These filters are based in gradient convergence and as such can handle illumination variations, noise and low contrast. We apply a range of existing convergence filters for cell nuclei analysis of the Arabidopsis thaliana plant root tip. To further increase contrast invariance, we present an augmentation to local convergence approaches based on image phase information. Through the use of convergence index filters we improved the results for cell nuclei detection and shape estimation when compared with baseline approaches. Using phase congruency information we were able to further increase performance by 11% for nuclei detection accuracy and 4% for shape adaptation. Shape regularization was also applied, but with no significant gain, which indicates shape estimation was good for the applied filters.

Abstract
Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is employed in medicine to improve radiologists' diagnostic performance. Today effective medical CBIR systems are limited to specific applications, as to reduce the amount of medical knowledge to model. Although supervised approaches could ease the incorporation of medical expertise, its application is not common due to the scarce number of available user annotations. This paper introduces the application of radiology reports to supervise CBIR systems. The concept is to make use of the textual distances between reports to build a transformation in image space through a manifold learning algorithm. A comparison was made between the presented approach and non-supervised CBIR systems, using a Leave-One-Patient-Out evaluation in a database of computer tomography scans of interstitial lung diseases. Supervised CBIR augmented the mean average precision consistently with an increase between 3 to 8 points, which suggests supervision by radiology reports increases CBIR performance.

Abstract
This paper proposes a method for automating the detection of lanes in Thin-Layer Chromatography images. Our approach includes a preprocessing step to detect the image region of interest, followed by background estimation and removal. This image is then projected onto the horizontal direction to integrate the information into a one-dimensional profile. A smoothing filter is applied to this profile and the outcome is the input of the lane detection process, which is performed in three phases. The first one aims at obtaining an initial set of candidate lanes that are further validated or removed in the second phase. The last phase is a refinement step that allows the inclusion of lanes that are not clearly distinguishable in the profile and that were not included in the initial set. The method was evaluated in 66 chromatography images and achieved values of recall, precision and F-beta-measure of 97.0%, 99.4% and 98.2%, respectively.

Abstract
This paper proposes a classification-based method for automating the segmentation of the region of interest (ROI) in digital images of chromatographic plates. Image segmentation is performed in two phases. In the first phase an unsupervised learning method classifies the image pixels into three classes: frame, ROI or unknown. In the second phase, distance features calculated for the members of the three classes are used for deciding on the new label, ROI or frame, for each individual connected segment previously classified as unknown. The segmentation result is post-processed using a sequence of morphological operators beforeobtaining the final ROI rectangular area. The proposed methodology, which is the initial step for the development of a screening tool for Fabry disease, was successfully evaluated in a dataset of 58 chromatographic images.

Abstract
In plant development biology, the study of the structure of the plant's root is fundamental for the understanding of the regulation and interrelationships of cell division and cellular differentiation. This is based on the high connection between cell length and progression of cell differentiation and the nuclear state. However, the need to analyse a large amount of images from many replicate roots to obtain reliable measurements motivates the development of automatic tools for root structure analysis. We present a novel automatic approach to detect cell files, the main structure in plant roots, and extract the length of the cells in those files. This approach is based on the detection of local cell file characteristic symmetry using a wavelet based image symmetry measure. The resulting detection enables the automatic extraction of important data on the plant development stage and of characteristics for individual cells. Furthermore, the approach presented reduces in more than 90% the time required for the analysis of each root, improving the work of the biologist and allowing the increase of the amount of data to be analysed for each experimental condition. While our approach is fully automatic a user verification and editing stage is provided so that any existing errors may be corrected. Given five test images it was observed that user did not correct more than 20% of all automatically detected structure, while taking no more than 10% of manual analysis time to do so.