배아 데이터의 효율적 검색을 위한 계층적 구조화 방법

Abstract

Embryo is a very early stage of the development of multicellular organism such as animals and plants. It is an important research target for studying ontogeny because the fundamental body system of multicellular organism is determined during an embryo state. Researchers in the developmental biology have a large volume of embryo image databases for studying embryos and they frequently search for an embryo image efficiently from those databases. Thus, it is crucial to organize databases for their efficient search. Hierarchical clustering methods have been widely used for database organization. However, most of previous algorithms tend to produce a highly skewed tree as a result of clustering because they do not simultaneously consider both the size of a cluster and the number of objects within the cluster. The skewed tree requires much time to be traversed in users’ search process. In this paper, we propose a method that effectively organizes a large volume of embryo image data in a balanced tree structure. We first represent embryo image data as a similarity-based graph. Next, we identify clusters by performing a graph partitioning algorithm repeatedly. We check constantly the size of a cluster and the number of objects, and partition clusters whose size is too large or whose number of objects is too high, which prevents clusters from growing too large or having too many objects. We show the superiority of the proposed method by extensive experiments. Moreover, we implement the visualization tool to help users quickly and easily navigate the embryo image database.