Abstract:
Archiving large sets of medical or cell images in digital libraries may require ordering
randomly scattered sets of image data according to specific criteria, such as the spatial extent
of a specific local color or contrast content that reveals different meaningful states of a
physiological structure, tissue, or cell in a certain order, indicating progression or recession of
a pathology, or the progressive response of a cell structure to treatment. Here we used a Self
Organized Map (SOM)-based, fully automatic and unsupervised, classification procedure
described in our earlier work and applied it to sets of minimally processed grayscale and/or
color processed Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) images of CD4+
T-lymphocytes (socalled helper cells) with varying extent of HIV virion infection. It is shown that the
quantization error in the SOM output after training permits to scale the spatial magnitude and
the direction of change (+ or -) in local pixel contrast or color across images of a series with a
reliability that exceeds that of any human expert. The procedure is easily implemented and
fast, and represents a promising step towards low-cost automatic digital image archiving with
minimal intervention of a human operator.
