Abstract
BackgroundAutomated image analysis methods are becoming more and more important to extract and quantify image features in microscopy-based biomedical studies and several commercial or open-source tools are available. However, most of the approaches rely on pixel-wise operations, a concept that has limitations when high-level object features and relationships between objects are studied and if user-interactivity on the object-level is desired.ResultsIn this paper we present an open-source software that facilitates the analysis of content features and object relationships by using objects as basic processing unit instead of individual pixels. Our approach enables also users without programming knowledge to compose “analysis pipelines“ that exploit the object-level approach. We demonstrate the design and use of example pipelines for the immunohistochemistry-based cell proliferation quantification in breast cancer and two-photon fluorescence microscopy data about bone-osteoclast interaction, which underline the advantages of the object-based concept.ConclusionsWe introduce an open source software system that offers object-based image analysis. The object-based concept allows for a straight-forward development of object-related interactive or fully automated image analysis solutions. The presented software may therefore serve as a basis for various applications in the field of digital image analysis.
Highlights
Automated image analysis methods are becoming more and more important to extract and quantify image features in microscopy-based biomedical studies and several commercial or open-source tools are available
CognitionMaster is a software tool designed to serve as a basis for various interactive and/or fully automated image analysis tasks
Image analysis algorithms may be selected from the Process menu (Figure 3), whereas results of prior executed algorithms may be used as input for consecutive processing steps
Summary
Automated image analysis methods are becoming more and more important to extract and quantify image features in microscopy-based biomedical studies and several commercial or open-source tools are available. A common feature of the aforementioned solutions is that the basic visualization of feature statistics Another important question is the topological relationship between objects of the different classes. We present an object-based open-source software platform that may be used for a broad spectrum of tasks in the field of (biomedical) image analysis: Ranging from algorithm development with an integrated C# compiler to (pipeline-style) one-click analysis provided through a powerful plug-in interface. The tool provides flexible and interactive functionality with a variety of image analysis algorithms that may be combined in process chains, an object model editor and visualization/statistics functions. A second example shows the advantages of the object-based software design for the analysis of relationships between objects for the quantification of osteoclast–bone interactions in two-photon fluorescence microscopy data [19,20]
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