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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><b><span style='font-size:16.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>MS Thesis Defense<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><b><span style='font-size:16.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Automated Extraction of Brain Cell Layers using Cell Networks and Active Machine Learning<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto;text-align:center;line-height:150%'><b><span style='font-size:14.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>Vinay Somasundar</span></b><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Date:</span></b><span style='font-size:12.0pt'> <b>Friday, November 16th, 2012</b><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal'><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Location:</span></b><span style='font-size:12.0pt'> ECE Conference Room<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Time:</span></b><span style='font-size:12.0pt'> 10:00 am<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Committee Chair:<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal'><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Dr. Badrinath Roysam<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><b><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></b></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal'><b><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Committee Members: </span></b><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal'>Dr. Thomas Hebert<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal'>Dr. Shishir Shah<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height:normal'><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal'><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%'><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%;background:white'>The cortex of the brain consists of layers of cells which differ in morphology and spatial distribution.<span class=apple-converted-space>&nbsp;</span>The thesis contributes <span style='color:#222222'>methods and tools to quantify the spatial distributional&nbsp;properties of the neurons such as their density and the distance from the&nbsp;cortical surface using efficient graphical data structures. It also presents the application&nbsp;of an actively trained logistic regression classifier to the problem of &nbsp;delineating&nbsp;the layers by classifying the neurons as belonging different layers based&nbsp;on the morphological and spatial properties.&nbsp;The proposed approach is applied to diverse datasets acquired from different&nbsp;cortical areas and it consistently achieves an accuracy of around 90% in&nbsp;delineating the laminar boundaries. It also proves to perform better than unsupervised&nbsp;learning methods and &nbsp;to be more efficient and accurate compared to&nbsp;unaided manual training of classifier.</span></span><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%;color:#1F497D'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;line-height:200%'><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%;color:#1F497D'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;line-height:200%'><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='text-align:justify;line-height:200%'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></p></div></body></html>