• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.169-176
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• 2012

Tumor cell morphology is closely related to its migratory behaviors. An active tumor cell has a highly irregular shape, whereas a spherical cell is inactive. Thus, quantitative analysis of cell features is crucial to determine tumor malignancy or to test the efficacy of anticancer treatment. We use 3D time-lapse phase-contrast microscopy to analyze single cell morphology because it enables to observe long-term activity of living cells without photobleaching and phototoxicity, which is common in other fluorescence-labeled microscopy. Despite this advantage, there are image-level drawbacks to phase-contrast microscopy, such as local light effect and contrast interference ring. Therefore, we first corrected for non-uniform illumination artifacts and then we use intensity distribution information to detect cell boundary. In phase contrast microscopy image, cell is normally appeared as dark region surrounded by bright halo ring. Due to halo artifact is minimal around the cell body and has non-symmetric diffusion pattern, we calculate cross sectional plane which intersects center of each cell and orthogonal to first principal axis. Then, we extract dark cell region by analyzing intensity profile curve considering local bright peak as halo area. Finally, we calculated the Fourier descriptor that morphological characteristics of cell to classify tumor cells into active and inactive groups. We validated classification accuracy by comparing our findings with manually obtained results.

• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.138-143
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• 2002

Abstract - Tribofilms formed on won surface protect the DLC coating surface and decrease the fiction coefficient. However it is very difficult to evaluate their micromechanical properties due to their small thickness, inhomogeneity and discontinuity. The phase contrast images in tapping mode atomic farce microscopy allow an estimation of inhomogeneity in micromechanical properties of the sample surface. The purpose of this investigation is to demonstrate how the phase contrast images contribute to the characterization of thin tribofilms.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers Conference
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• 2001.06a
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• pp.299-304
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• 2001

Tribofilms formed on worn surface protect the DLC coating surface and decrease the friction coefficient. However it is very difficult to evaluate their micromechanical properties due to their small thickness, inhomogeneity and discontinuity. The phase contrast images in tapping mode atomic force microscopy allow an estimation of inhomogeneity in micromechanical properties of the sample surface. The purpose of this investigation is to demonstrate how the phase contrast images contribute to the characterization of thin tribofilms.

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.77-89
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• 2010

Digital holography (DH) is a potentially disruptive new technology for many areas of imaging science, especially in microscopy and metrology. DH offers a number of significant advantages such as the ability to acquire holograms rapidly, availability of complete amplitude and phase information of the optical field, and versatility of the interferometric and image processing techniques. This article provides a review of the digital holography, with an emphasis on its applications in biomedical microscopy. The quantitative phase microscopy by DH is described including some of the special techniques such as optical phase unwrapping and holography of total internal reflection. Tomographic imaging by digital interference holography (DIH) and related methods is described, as well as its applications in ophthalmic imaging and in biometry. Holographic manipulation and monitoring of cells and cellular components is another exciting new area of research. We discuss some of the current issues, trends, and potentials.

• Journal of Multimedia Information System
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.87-93
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• 2014

The aim of microscopic image restoration is to recover the image by applying the inverse process of degradation, and the results facilitate automated and improved analysis of the image. In this work, we consider the problem of image restoration as a minimization problem of convex cost function, which consists of a least-squares fitting term and regularization terms with non-negative constraints. The finite step method is proposed to solve this constrained convex optimization problem. We demonstrate the convergence of this method. Efficiency and restoration capability of the proposed method were tested and illustrated through numerical experiments.

• Applied Microscopy
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.63-72
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• 2008

The iterative wave-function reconstruction (IWFR) method developed by Allen et al. (2004) was reviewed with concern for its applicability. The high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) studies of the materials such as GaAs, $YBa_2Cu_3O_7$ and $Al_2CuMg$ reported in the literature were utilized in this review. In this process the basis of validity, the limiting conditions and the information limit of this method were discussed. It was particularly noted that the phase contrast image of the exit plane wave evaluated from this method reveals not only $C_s$-corrected atomic resolution within information limit, but also strong tendency of contrast proportional to the magnitude of the atomic number of compositional atoms in a crystal.

• Proceedings of the Polymer Society of Korea Conference
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• 2006.10a
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• pp.346-346
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• 2006

Several types of dynamic atomic force microscopy such as tapping-mode, force modulation-mode are commonly cooperated by phase-contrast imaging techniques, which were interpreted as elastic contrast by mistake in the past and are nowadays regarded as the representation of energy dissipative processes. However, as theoretically reported, the situation is not so simple when the strong adhesive interaction is involved. Furthermore, elastic and viscous contributions are not easily divided in the case of polymeric systems. Thus, the interpretation of image contrast for them must be very carefully treated. In this study, we will demonstrate how such contrast mechanisms are complicated, using several miscible and immiscible polymer blend systems as model samples.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.1670-1683
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• 2017

Mitotic event recognition is a crucial and challenging task in biomedical applications. In this paper, we introduce the slow feature analysis and propose a fully-automated mitotic event recognition method for cell populations imaged with time-lapse phase contrast microscopy. The method includes three steps. First, a candidate sequence extraction method is utilized to exclude most of the sequences not containing mitosis. Next, slow feature is learned from the candidate sequences using slow feature analysis. Finally, a hidden conditional random field (HCRF) model is applied for the classification of the sequences. We use a supervised SFA learning strategy to learn the slow feature function because the strategy brings image content and discriminative information together to get a better encoding. Besides, the HCRF model is more suitable to describe the temporal structure of image sequences than nonsequential SVM approaches. In our experiment, the proposed recognition method achieved 0.93 area under curve (AUC) and 91% accuracy on a very challenging phase contrast microscopy dataset named C2C12.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.15-19
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• 2015

We developed a high-throughput microscopy (HTM) method which enabled us to replace a conventional phase contrast microscopy (PCM) method that has been used as a standard analytical method for airborne asbestos. We could obtain the concentration of airborne asbestos fibers under detection limit by automated image processing and analysis using HTM method. Here we propose an improved image processing algorithm with variable parameters to enhance the accuracy of the HTM analysis. Since the variable parameters that compensate the difference of the brightness are applied to the individual images in our new image processing method, it is possible to enhance the accuracy of the automatic image analysis method for sample slides with low asbestos concentration that caused errors in binary image processing. We demonstrated that enumeration of fibers by improved image processing algorithm remarkably enhanced the accuracy of HTM analysis in comparison with PCM. The improved HTM method can be a potential alternative to conventional PCM.

• KSTLE International Journal
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.69-75
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• 2000

The paper compares topography, phase contrast and force spectroscopy in atomic force microscopy data for evaluating the microheterogeneity of surface layer. The worn surface of ion-plated TiN coating was measured using both a laboratory-built and a commercial AFM. The results of analysis revealed structural and micromechanical heterogeneity of the worn surfaces. We demonstrated that the phase image allows relatively qualitative estimation of elastic modulus of the sample surface. The tribolayer formed in the worn surface possessed much lower stiffness than the original coating. It is shown that the most stable phase imaging is provided with a stiff cantilever. In this case, phase contrast is well conditioned, first of all, by microheterogeneity of elastic properties of the investigated surfaces. In this study an attempt was also made to correlate the results of phase imaging with that of the farce spectroscopy. The joint analysis of information on the surface properties obtained by the phase imaging and quantitative data measured with the force spectroscopy methods allows a better understanding of the nature of the surface micromechanical heterogeneity.