13th Meeting "Loon. Using Exemplars to Visualize Large-Scale Microscopy Data"

Please join us Friday, 01/13/2023 11AM ET for an invited talk and discussion: “Loon. Using Exemplars to Visualize Large-Scale Microscopy Data”. Which drug is most promising for a cancer patient? A new microscopy-based approach for measuring the mass of individual cancer cells treated with different drugs promises to answer this question in only a few hours. However, the analysis pipeline for extracting data from these images is still far from complete automation: human intervention is necessary for quality control for preprocessing steps such as segmentation, adjusting filters, removing noise, and analyzing the result. To address this workflow, we developed Loon, a visualization tool for analyzing drug screening data based on quantitative phase microscopy imaging. Loon visualizes both derived data such as growth rates and imaging data. Since the images are collected automatically at a large scale, manual inspection of images and segmentations is infeasible. However, reviewing representative samples of cells is essential, both for quality control and for data analysis. We introduce a new approach for choosing and visualizing representative exemplar cells that retain a close connection to the low-level data. By tightly integrating the derived data visualization capabilities with the novel exemplar visualization and providing selection and filtering capabilities, Loon is well suited for making decisions about which drugs are suitable for a specific patient.

About the Speaker.

Devin Lange is a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah in the Kahlert School of Computing. Devin is a member of the Visualization Design Lab, advised by Professor Alexander Lex, and has published Loon, an award-winning visualization system for quantitative phase microscopy data. He is currently working on a similar system that includes cell lineage information.