On-the-fly Raman microscopy guaranteeing the accuracy of discrimination.

Accelerating the measurement for discrimination of samples, such as classification of cell phenotype, is crucial when faced with significant time and cost constraints. Spontaneous Raman microscopy offers label-free, rich chemical information but suffers from long acquisition time due to extremely small scattering cross-sections. One possible approach to accelerate the measurement is by measuring necessary parts with a suitable number of illumination points. However, how to design these points during measurement remains a challenge. To address this, we developed an imaging technique based on a reinforcement learning in machine learning (ML). This ML approach adaptively feeds back "optimal" illumination pattern during the measurement to detect the existence of specific characteristics of interest, allowing faster measurements while guaranteeing discrimination accuracy. Using a set of Raman images of human follicular thyroid and follicular thyroid carcinoma cells, we showed that our technique requires 3,333 to 31,683 times smaller number of illuminations for discriminating the phenotypes than raster scanning. To quantitatively evaluate the number of illuminations depending on the requisite discrimination accuracy, we prepared a set of polymer bead mixture samples to model anomalous and normal tissues. We then applied a home-built programmable-illumination microscope equipped with our algorithm, and confirmed that the system can discriminate the sample conditions with 104 to 4,350 times smaller number of illuminations compared to standard point illumination Raman microscopy. The proposed algorithm can be applied to other types of microscopy that can control measurement condition on the fly, offering an approach for the acceleration of accurate measurements in various applications including medical diagnosis.

Propagation graph estimation from individuals' time series of observed states.

Various things propagate through the medium of individuals. Some individuals follow the others and take the states similar to their states a small number of time steps later. In this paper, we study the problem of estimating the state propagation order of individuals from the real-valued state sequences of all the individuals.We propose a method of constructing a state propagation graph from individuals' time series of observed states. The propagation order estimated by our proposed method is demonstrated to be significantly more accurate than that by a baseline method (optimal constant delay model) for our synthetic datasets, and also to be consistent with visually recognizable propagation orders for the dataset of Japanese stock price time series and biological cell firing state sequences.