Abstract
In vivo observation and tracking of cell division in the Arabidopsis thaliana root meristem, by time-lapse confocal microscopy, is central to biology research. The research herein described is based on large amount of image data, which must be analyzed to determine the location and state of cells. The possibility of automating the process of cell detection/marking is an important step to provide research tools to the biologists in order to ease the search for a special event as cell division. This paper discusses an automatic cell segmentation method, which selects the best cell candidates from a starting watershed based image segmentation. The selection of individual cells is obtained using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, based on the shape and edge strength of the cells' contour. The resulting segmentation is largely pruned of badly segmented cells, which can reduce the false positive detection of cell division. This is a good result on its own and a starting point for improvement of cell segmentation methodology.

Abstract
Plant development is orchestrated by transcription factors whose expression has become observable in living plants through the use of fluorescence microscopy. However, the exact quantification of expression levels is still not solved and most analysis is only performed through visual inspection. With the objective of automating the quantification of cell nuclei fluorescence we present a new approach to detect cell nuclei in 3D fluorescence confocal microscopy, based on the use of the sliding band convergence filter (SBF). The SBF filter detects cell nuclei and estimate their shape with high accuracy in each 2D image plane. For 3D detection, individual 2D shapes are joined into 3D estimates and then corrected based on the analysis of the fluorescence profile. The final nuclei detection's precision/recall are of 0.779/0.803 respectively, and the average Dice's coefficient of 0.773. © 2010 IEEE.

Abstract
In this paper a method for automatic detection of microaneurysms in digital angiograms of the eye fundus is described. These lesions of the human retina, a characteristic of the earliest phases of diabetic retinopathy, present themselves in the angiographic images as small, round, hyperfluorescent objects. The proposed method includes initial pre-processing and enhancement steps, followed by object segmentation. In the final phase, microaneurysms are validated using two new criteria based on local intensity, contrast and shape relations. The combination of these local features with global image parameters makes possible a high degree of independence from image intensity characteristics. © 1999 IEEE.

Abstract
To obtain development information of individual plant cells, it is necessary to perform in vivo imaging of the specimen under study, through time-lapse confocal microscopy. Automation of cell detection/marking process is important to provide research tools in order to ease the search for special events, such as cell division. In this paper we discuss an automatic cell detection approach for Arabidopsis thaliana based on segmentation, which selects the best cell candidates from a starting watershed-based image segmentation and improves the result by merging adjacent regions. The selection of individual cells is obtained using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier, based on a cell descriptor constructed from the shape and edge strength of the cells' contour. In addition we proposed a novel cell merging criterion based on edge strength along the line that connects adjacent cells' centroids, which is a valuable tool in the reduction of cell over-segmentation. The result is largely pruned of badly segmented and over-segmented cells, thus facilitating the study of cells. When comparing the results after merging with the basic watershed segmentation, we obtain 1.5% better coverage (increase in F-measure) and up to 27% better precision in correct cell segmentation.

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.