Skoltech is an international graduate research-focused university that was founded by the group of world-renowned scientists in 2011. Skoltech's curriculum focuses on technology and innovation, offering Master's programs in 11 technological disciplines. Students receive rigorous theoretical and practical training, design their own research projects, participate in internships and gain entrepreneurial skills in English. The faculty is comprised of current researchers with international accreditation and achievements.

Neural networks restore microscopic images 

Skoltech PhD student Valeriya Pronina presented her work on microscopy image restoration at the prestigious computer vision conference ECCV 2020.  For the idea behind this research Valeriya was awarded the Ostrogradski scholarship from the French government and invited to conduct a joint research in a laboratory at the Lyon National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA Lyon) in France.

Valeriya Pronina’s research, under the guidance of Assistant Professor Dmitry Dylov at the Skoltech Center for Scientific and Engineering Computational Technologies for Large Datasets (CDISE), demonstrates how deep Wiener-Kolmogorov filters can be applied to reconstruct microscopy images. The fact is that the quality of images obtained by microscopy of biological objects usually suffers from an excess of noise, and the images are often blurry. This interferes with the adequate perception of the information presented in the image and can lead, for example, to an erroneous diagnosis. The use of deep learning algorithms provides images that are clearer and more noise-free.

 

Dmitry Dylov:

In many modern deep learning articles authors try to improve images using somewhat straightforward and “agnostic” methods. That is, the model uses some data and tries to directly approximate the desired result. In our work, we were inspired by variational and optimization problems, where the apparatus for noise filtering and image restoration is already well studied. Knowing how classical filters work, we used deep neural networks not to “clean” the images themselves, but to “learn” the filtering parameters. As a result, Valeriya’s model was able to outperform the current models of other researchers.

 

Valeria Pronina: 

The CREATIS laboratory research team led by Dr. Françoise Peyrin, deals with the study of tomographic images and radiotherapy, as well as inverse problems in medical imaging. They became interested in the developed algorithms for noise reduction of signals on specific laboratory microscopes with a small number of pixels. I am very happy to spend three months of joint research in the CREATIS laboratory and in particular in the group of Françoise Peyrin and apply the developed methods on the most modern microscopes.

 

The developed algorithms combine both classical optimization and deep learning methodologies. These approaches are ready for easy tuning and a trade-off between computational efficiency and image recovery accuracy. In the future, we plan to integrate the proposed methods into the general scheme of processing images exposed to blur and noise, and obtained with the help of specific microscopes studied in the laboratory.

 

 

 

Other organizations involved in this research include University College London and Q Bio Inc.

Contact information:
Skoltech Communications
+7 (495) 280 14 81

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