Publications by Elisa Ficarra

This study presents a fully automated membrane segmentation technique for immunohistochemical tissue images with membrane staining, which is a critical task in computerized immunohistochemistry (IHC). Membrane segmentation is particularly tricky in immunohistochemical tissue images because the cellular membranes are visible only in the stained tracts of the cell, while the unstained tracts are not visible. Our automated method provides accurate segmentation of the cellular membranes in the stained tracts and reconstructs the approximate location of the unstained tracts using nuclear membranes as a spatial reference. Accurate cell-by-cell membrane segmentation allows per cell morphological analysis and quantification of the target membrane proteins that is fundamental in several medical applications such as cancer characterization and classification, personalized therapy design, and for any other applications requiring cell morphology characterization. Experimental results on real datasets from different anatomical locations demonstrate the wide applicability and high accuracy of our approach in the context of IHC analysis.

In this paper we present a methodology to evaluate the binding free energy of a miRNA-mRNA complex through Molecular Dynamics-Thermodynamic Integration simulations. We applied our method on the C-elegans let-7 miRNA:lin-41 mRNA complex, known to be a validate miRNA:mRNA interaction, in order to evaluate the energetic stability of the structure. The methodology has been designed to face the various challenges of nucleic acid simulations and binding free energy computations and to allow an optimal trade-off between accuracy and computational cost.

The increasing pace of biotechnological advances produced an unprecedented amount of both experimental data and biological information mostly diffused on the web. However, the heterogeneity of the data organization and the different knowledge representations open the ways to new challenges in the integration and the extraction of biological information fundamental for correctly interpreter experimental results. In the present work we introduce a new methodology for quantitatively scoring the degree of biological correlation among biological terms occurring in biomedical abstracts. The proposed flow is based on the latent semantic analysis of biomedical literature coupled with the UMLS Metathesarurs and PubMed literature information. The results demonstrate that the structured and consolidated knowledge in the UMLS and pathway database efficiently improves the accuracy of the latent semantic analysis of biomedical literature. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.

This paper presents two automated methods for the segmentation ofimmunohistochemical tissue images that overcome the limitations of themanual approach aswell as of the existing computerized techniques. The first independent method, based on unsupervised color clustering, recognizes automatically the target cancerous areas in the specimen and disregards the stroma; the second method, based on colors separation and morphological processing, exploits automated segmentation of the nuclear membranes of the cancerous cells. Extensive experimental results on real tissue images demonstrate the accuracy of our techniques compared to manual segmentations; additional experiments show that our techniques are more effective in immunohistochemical images than popular approaches based on supervised learning or active contours. The proposed procedure can be exploited for any applications that require tissues and cells exploration and to perform reliable and standardized measures of the activity of specific proteins involved in multi-factorial genetic pathologies.

Nowadays the need for powerful hardware architectures, which allow for high throughput data analysis and calculus, is fundamental especially for biological applications. We have been focused on utilizing the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) architectures of NVIDIA for accelerating a lipid bilayer simulation tool for biomembranes. ©2010 IEEE.