Mei Yang

Yang Jiao, Hananeh Derakhshan, Barbara St. Pierre Schneider et al.

White blood cells (WBCs) are the most diverse cell types observed in the healing process of injured skeletal muscles. In the course of healing, WBCs exhibit dynamic cellular response and undergo multiple protein expression changes. The progress of healing can be analyzed by quantifying the number of WBCs or the amount of specific proteins in light microscopic images obtained at different time points after injury. In this paper, we propose an automated quantifying and analysis framework to analyze WBCs using light microscopic images of uninjured and injured muscles. The proposed framework is based on the Localized Iterative Otsu's threshold method with muscle edge detection and region of interest extraction. Compared with the threshold methods used in ImageJ, the LI Otsu's threshold method has high resistance to background area and achieves better accuracy. The CD68-positive cell results are presented for demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed work.

Binayak Tiwari, Mei Yang, Xiaohang Wang et al.

The increasing popularity of deep neural network (DNN) applications demands high computing power and efficient hardware accelerator architecture. DNN accelerators use a large number of processing elements (PEs) and on-chip memory for storing weights and other parameters. As the communication backbone of a DNN accelerator, networks-on-chip (NoC) play an important role in supporting various dataflow patterns and enabling processing with communication parallelism in a DNN accelerator. However, the widely used mesh-based NoC architectures inherently cannot support the efficient one-to-many and many-to-one traffic largely existing in DNN workloads. In this paper, we propose a modified mesh architecture with a one-way/two-way streaming bus to speedup one-to-many (multicast) traffic, and the use of gather packets to support many-to-one (gather) traffic. The analysis of the runtime latency of a convolutional layer shows that the two-way streaming architecture achieves better improvement than the one-way streaming architecture for an Output Stationary (OS) dataflow architecture. The simulation results demonstrate that the gather packets can help to reduce the runtime latency up to 1.8 times and network power consumption up to 1.7 times, compared with the repetitive unicast method on modified mesh architectures supporting two-way streaming.

Yang Jiao, Mo Weng, Mei Yang

3D fluorescence microscopy of living organisms has increasingly become an essential and powerful tool in biomedical research and diagnosis. An exploding amount of imaging data has been collected, whereas efficient and effective computational tools to extract information from them are still lagging behind. This is largely due to the challenges in analyzing biological data. Interesting biological structures are not only small, but are often morphologically irregular and highly dynamic. Although tracking cells in live organisms has been studied for years, existing tracking methods for cells are not effective in tracking subcellular structures, such as protein complexes, which feature in continuous morphological changes including split and merge, in addition to fast migration and complex motion. In this paper, we first define the problem of multi-object portion tracking to model the protein object tracking process. A multi-object tracking method with portion matching is proposed based on 3D segmentation results. The proposed method distills deep feature maps from deep networks, then recognizes and matches object portions using an extended search. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method achieves 2.96% higher on consistent tracking accuracy and 35.48% higher on event identification accuracy than the state-of-art methods.