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.

Abstract
The study of cell nuclei is fundamental for plant cell Biology research. To obtain information at; cellular level, researchers image cells' nuclei which were modified with fluorescence proteins, through laser scanning confocal microscopy. These images are normally noisy and suffer from high background fluorescence, making grey-scale segmentation approaches inadequate for a usable detection. To obtain a successful detection even at low contrast we investigate the use of a particular convergence filter, the Symmetric Sliding Band filter (SSBF), for cell detection. This filter is based on gradient convergence and not intensity. As such it can detect low contrast cell nuclei which otherwise would be lost in the background noise. Due to the characteristics of cell nuclei morphology, a symmetry constrain is integrated in the filter which corrects some inadequate detections and results in a filter response that is more discriminative. We evaluate the use of this filter for cell nuclei detection on the Arabidopsis thaliana root tip, where the nuclei were stained using yellow fluorescence protein. The resulting cell nuclei detection precision is 89%.

Abstract
This paper presents a method for automating the selection of the rejection rate of one-class classifiers aiming at optimizing the classifier performance. These classifiers are used in a new classification approach to deal with class imbalance in Thin-Layer Chromatography (TLC) patterns, which is due to the huge difference between the number of normal and pathological cases, as a consequence of the rarity of Lysosomal Storage Disorders (LSD) diseases. The classification is performed in two decision stages, both implemented using optimized one-class classifiers: the first stage aims at recognizing most of the normal samples; the outliers of this first decision level are presented to the second stage, which is a multiclassifier prepared to deal with both pathological and normal patterns. The results that were obtained proved that the proposed methodology is able to overcome some of the difficulties associated with the choice of the rejection rate of one-class classifiers, and generally contribute to the minimization of the imbalance problem in TLC pattern classification.

Abstract
This paper presents a new classification approach to deal with class imbalance in TLC patterns, which is due to the huge difference between the number of normal and pathological cases as a consequence of the rarity of LSD diseases. The proposed architecture is formed by two decision stages: the first is implemented by a one-class classifier aiming at recognizing most of the normal samples; the second stage is a hierarchical classifier which deals with the remaining outliers that are expected to contain the pathological cases and a small percentage of normal samples. We have also evaluated this architecture by a forest of classifiers, using the majority voting as a, rule to generate the final classification. The results that were obtained proved that this approach is able to overcome some of the difficulties associated with class imbalance.