SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Noémie Moreau

Publications and source records attributed to Noémie Moreau.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

Characterization of DLBCL cell of origin-phenotypes based on tumor microenvironment features

Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma with a high recurrence rate. The molecular profiling of DLBCL tumors culminated in several immunohistochemistry algorithms for prognostic stratification. Among those, the Hans classifier is widely used for classifying DLBCL into germinal center B-cell-like (GCB) and non-germinal center/activated B-cell-like (non-GCB/ABC) subtypes. The Hans classifier primarily evaluates protein expression of tumor-associated markers, however the tumor microenvironment (TME) of DLBCL includes a myriad of immune and stromal cells, cytokines, and extracellular matrix components that contribute to tumor growth, immune evasion, and recurrence rate. Although the Hans classifier provides a practical method for subtype identification, incorporation of TME information may improve risk stratification and further refine patient groups. Here, we present an unbiased deep learning-based approach to extract meaningful features from TME of DLBCL tumors for the automated processing and analysis of multiplexed images of a DLBCL patient cohort. Our pipeline quantifies a range of features that describe tumor sample cell composition, morphology, and its spatial organization. We point to alterations in the proportions of several cell populations between GCB and ABC tumors including increased immune cell proportions of the ABC and its preferential interaction with the M2-macrophages. Our analysis offers an in-depth characterization of the DLBCL subtypes and is exemplary of how our pipeline can be used for detailed quantitative analysis of a tumor and its subtypes.

q-bio.QM

Self-Supervised ImageNet Representations for In Vivo Confocal Microscopy: Tortuosity Grading without Segmentation Maps

The tortuosity of corneal nerve fibers are used as indication for different diseases. Current state-of-the-art methods for grading the tortuosity heavily rely on expensive segmentation maps of these nerve fibers. In this paper, we demonstrate that self-supervised pretrained features from ImageNet are transferable to the domain of in vivo confocal microscopy. We show that DINO should not be disregarded as a deep learning model for medical imaging, although it was superseded by two later versions. After careful fine-tuning, DINO improves upon the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy (84,25%) and sensitivity (77,97%). Our fine-tuned model focuses on the key morphological elements in grading without the use of segmentation maps.

cs.CV

ActiTect: A Generalizable Machine Learning Pipeline for REM Sleep Behavior Disorder Screening through Standardized Actigraphy

Isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is a major prodromal marker of $α$-synucleinopathies, often preceding the clinical onset of Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, or multiple system atrophy. While wrist-worn actimeters hold significant potential for detecting RBD in large-scale screening efforts by capturing abnormal nocturnal movements, they become inoperable without a reliable and efficient analysis pipeline. This study presents ActiTect, a fully automated, open-source machine learning tool to identify RBD from actigraphy recordings. To ensure generalizability across heterogeneous acquisition settings, our pipeline includes robust preprocessing and automated sleep-wake detection to harmonize multi-device data and extract physiologically interpretable motion features characterizing activity patterns. Model development was conducted on a cohort of 78 individuals, yielding strong discrimination under nested cross-validation (AUROC = 0.95). Generalization was confirmed on a blinded local test set (n = 31, AUROC = 0.86) and on two independent external cohorts (n = 113, AUROC = 0.84; n = 57, AUROC = 0.94). To assess real-world robustness, leave-one-dataset-out cross-validation across the internal and external cohorts demonstrated consistent performance (AUROC range = 0.84-0.89). A complementary stability analysis showed that key predictive features remained reproducible across datasets, supporting the final pooled multi-center model as a robust pre-trained resource for broader deployment. By being open-source and easy to use, our tool promotes widespread adoption and facilitates independent validation and collaborative improvements, thereby advancing the field toward a unified and generalizable RBD detection model using wearable devices.

cs.LG

Understanding Cell Fate Decisions with Temporal Attention

Understanding non-genetic determinants of cell fate is critical for developing and improving cancer therapies, as genetically identical cells can exhibit divergent outcomes under the same treatment conditions. In this work, we present a deep learning approach for cell fate prediction from raw long-term live-cell recordings of cancer cell populations under chemotherapeutic treatment. Our Transformer model is trained to predict cell fate directly from raw image sequences, without relying on predefined morphological or molecular features. Beyond classification, we introduce a comprehensive explainability framework for interpreting the temporal and morphological cues guiding the model's predictions. We demonstrate that prediction of cell outcomes is possible based on the video only, our model achieves balanced accuracy of 0.94 and an F1-score of 0.93. Attention and masking experiments further indicate that the signal predictive of the cell fate is not uniquely located in the final frames of a cell trajectory, as reliable predictions are possible up to 10 h before the event. Our analysis reveals distinct temporal distribution of predictive information in the mitotic and apoptotic sequences, as well as the role of cell morphology and p53 signaling in determining cell outcomes. Together, these findings demonstrate that attention-based temporal models enable accurate cell fate prediction while providing biologically interpretable insights into non-genetic determinants of cellular decision-making. The code is available at https://github.com/bozeklab/Cell-Fate-Prediction.

cs.CV

Context-aware Skin Cancer Epithelial Cell Classification with Scalable Graph Transformers

Whole-slide images (WSIs) from cancer patients contain rich information that can be used for medical diagnosis or to follow treatment progress. To automate their analysis, numerous deep learning methods based on convolutional neural networks and Vision Transformers have been developed and have achieved strong performance in segmentation and classification tasks. However, due to the large size and complex cellular organization of WSIs, these models rely on patch-based representations, losing vital tissue-level context. We propose using scalable Graph Transformers on a full-WSI cell graph for classification. We evaluate this methodology on a challenging task: the classification of healthy versus tumor epithelial cells in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC), where both cell types exhibit very similar morphologies and are therefore difficult to differentiate for image-based approaches. We first compared image-based and graph-based methods on a single WSI. Graph Transformer models SGFormer and DIFFormer achieved balanced accuracies of $85.2 \pm 1.5$ ($\pm$ standard error) and $85.1 \pm 2.5$ in 3-fold cross-validation, respectively, whereas the best image-based method reached $81.2 \pm 3.0$. By evaluating several node feature configurations, we found that the most informative representation combined morphological and texture features as well as the cell classes of non-epithelial cells, highlighting the importance of the surrounding cellular context. We then extended our work to train on several WSIs from several patients. To address the computational constraints of image-based models, we extracted four $2560 \times 2560$ pixel patches from each image and converted them into graphs. In this setting, DIFFormer achieved a balanced accuracy of $83.6 \pm 1.9$ (3-fold cross-validation), while the state-of-the-art image-based model CellViT256 reached $78.1 \pm 0.5$.

cs.CV

AMAP-APP: Efficient Segmentation and Morphometry Quantification of Fluorescent Microscopy Images of Podocytes

Background: Automated podocyte foot process quantification is vital for kidney research, but the established "Automatic Morphological Analysis of Podocytes" (AMAP) method is hindered by high computational demands, a lack of a user interface, and Linux dependency. We developed AMAP-APP, a cross-platform desktop application designed to overcome these barriers. Methods: AMAP-APP optimizes efficiency by replacing intensive instance segmentation with classic image processing while retaining the original semantic segmentation model. It introduces a refined Region of Interest (ROI) algorithm to improve precision. Validation involved 365 mouse and human images (STED and confocal), benchmarking performance against the original AMAP via Pearson correlation and Two One-Sided T-tests (TOST). Results: AMAP-APP achieved a 147-fold increase in processing speed on consumer hardware. Morphometric outputs (area, perimeter, circularity, and slit diaphragm density) showed high correlation (r>0.90) and statistical equivalence (TOST P<0.05) to the original method. Additionally, the new ROI algorithm demonstrated superior accuracy compared to the original, showing reduced deviation from manual delineations. Conclusion: AMAP-APP democratizes deep learning-based podocyte morphometry. By eliminating the need for high-performance computing clusters and providing a user-friendly interface for Windows, macOS, and Linux, it enables widespread adoption in nephrology research and potential clinical diagnostics.

cs.CV

TransientTrack: Advanced Multi-Object Tracking and Classification of Cancer Cells with Transient Fluorescent Signals

Tracking cells in time-lapse videos is an essential technique for monitoring cell population dynamics at a single-cell level. Current methods for cell tracking are developed on videos with mostly single, constant signals and do not detect pivotal events such as cell death. Here, we present TransientTrack, a deep learning-based framework for cell tracking in multi-channel microscopy video data with transient fluorescent signals that fluctuate over time following processes such as the circadian rhythm of cells. By identifying key cellular events - mitosis (cell division) and apoptosis (cell death) our method allows us to build complete trajectories, including cell lineage information. TransientTrack is lightweight and performs matching on cell detection embeddings directly, without the need for quantification of tracking-specific cell features. Furthermore, our approach integrates Transformer Networks, multi-stage matching using all detection boxes, and the interpolation of missing tracklets with the Kalman Filter. This unified framework achieves strong performance across diverse conditions, effectively tracking cells and capturing cell division and death. We demonstrate the use of TransientTrack in an analysis of the efficacy of a chemotherapeutic drug at a single-cell level. The proposed framework could further advance quantitative studies of cancer cell dynamics, enabling detailed characterization of treatment response and resistance mechanisms. The code is available at https://github.com/bozeklab/TransientTrack.

cs.CV

Kidney tumor segmentation using an ensembling multi-stage deep learning approach. A contribution to the KiTS19 challenge

Precise characterization of the kidney and kidney tumor characteristics is of outmost importance in the context of kidney cancer treatment, especially for nephron sparing surgery which requires a precise localization of the tissues to be removed. The need for accurate and automatic delineation tools is at the origin of the KiTS19 challenge. It aims at accelerating the research and development in this field to aid prognosis and treatment planning by providing a characterized dataset of 300 CT scans to be segmented. To address the challenge, we proposed an automatic, multi-stage, 2.5D deep learning-based segmentation approach based on Residual UNet framework. An ensembling operation is added at the end to combine prediction results from previous stages reducing the variance between single models. Our neural network segmentation algorithm reaches a mean Dice score of 0.96 and 0.74 for kidney and kidney tumors, respectively on 90 unseen test cases. The results obtained are promising and could be improved by incorporating prior knowledge about the benign cysts that regularly lower the tumor segmentation results.

eess.IV