NEXT GENERATION INFORMATION PROCESSING OF MICROSCOPY VECTOR-VALUED IMAGES: APPLICATION IN CELL POLARIZED IMAGING – POLARISCOPIA

Unlike conventional fluorescence microscopy, the new generation of polarized light-based microscopy instruments allow one to probe the orientation of fluorescently tagged biomolecules in cells. As the generated data are now 3D+time vector-valued signals encompassing density and orientation of molecules, serious challenges in signal and image processing need to be solved before being able to fully exploit the potential of polarized microscopy in biological studies. The aim of POLARISCOPIA is then to develop the next generation of information processing techniques for microscopy and bioimaging. This will be achieved through the development of a new methodological framework based on the principled approach of aggregation of estimators and sparse representations for vector-valued image data. The new unifying framework will be able to manage heterogeneous data and models in optics and biophysics. Our hope is to build a unique aggregation framework, connected to several theories in statistics, such as Bayesian methods and nonparametric estimation, flexible enough to be combined with machine learning techniques, and able to address tasks going from image reconstruction to spatial high-resolution estimation of molecular motion. Our case-studies in cell biology will be related to the analysis of intracellular trafficking and molecule transport pathways, as they represent a major contributory factor to a number of diseases such as cancer, and viral infection. The advances in POLARISCOPIA will result in a new generation of algorithms for 3D polarized microscopy instruments, which will be widely used in the future for applications in precision medicine, with a high potential impact for other vector-valued image modalities and other inverse problems in bioimaging.