David Damm

Circulation times of prostate cancer and hepatocellular carcinoma cells by in vivo flow cytometry

In metastasis, the cancer cells that travel through the body are capable of establishing new tumors in locations remote from the site of the original disease. To metastasize, a cancer cell must break away from its tumor and invade either the circulatory or lymphatic system, which will carry it to a new location, and establish itself in the new site. Once in the blood stream, the cancer cells now have access to every portion of the body. Here, we have used the “in vivo flow cytometer” to study if there is any relationship between metastatic potential and depletion kinetics of circulating tumor cells. The in vivo flow cytometer has the capability to detect and quantify continuously the number and flow characteristics of fluorescently labelled cells in vivo. We have improved the counting algorithm and measured the depletion kinetics of cancer cells with different metastatic potential. Interestingly, more invasive PC‐3 prostate cancer cells are depleted faster from the circulation than LNCaP cells. In addition, we have measured the depletion kinetics of two related human hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer) cell lines, high‐metastatic HCCLM3 cells, and low‐metastatic HepG2 cells. More than 60% HCCLM3 cells are depleted within the first hour. Interestingly, the low‐metastatic HepG2 cells possess noticeably slower depletion kinetics. In comparison, <40% HepG2 cells are depleted within the first hour. The differences in depletion kinetics might provide insights into early metastasis processes.

Lyrics-based audio retrieval and multimodal navigation in music collections

Modern digital music libraries contain textual, visual, and audio data describing music on various semantic levels. Exploiting the availability of different semantically interrelated representations for a piece of music, this paper presents a query-by-lyrics retrieval system that facilitates multimodal navigation in CD audio collections. In particular, we introduce an automated method to time align given lyrics to an audio recording of the underlying song using a combination of synchronization algorithms. Furthermore, we describe a lyrics search engine and show how the lyrics-audio alignments can be used to directly navigate from the list of query results to the corresponding matching positions within the audio recordings. Finally, we present a user interface for lyrics-based queries and playback of the query results that extends the functionality of our SyncPlayer framework for content-based music and audio navigation.

Multimodal presentation and browsing of music

Recent digitization efforts have led to large music collections, which contain music documents of various modes comprising textual, visual and acoustic data. In this paper, we present a multimodal music player for presenting and browsing digitized music collections consisting of heterogeneous document types. In particular, we concentrate on music documents of two widely used types for representing a musical work, namely visual music representation (scanned images of sheet music) and associated interpretations (audio recordings). We introduce novel user interfaces for multimodal (audio-visual) music presentation as well as intuitive navigation and browsing. Our system offers high quality audio playback with time-synchronous display of the digitized sheet music associated to a musical work. Furthermore, our system enables a user to seamlessly crossfade between various interpretations belonging to the currently selected musical work.

A digital library framework for heterogeneous music collections: from document acquisition to cross-modal interaction

In this paper, we present a digital library system for managing heterogeneous music collections. The heterogeneity refers to various document types and formats as well as to different modalities, e. g., CD-audio recordings, scanned sheet music, and lyrics. The system offers a full-fledged, widely automated document processing chain: digitization, indexing, annotation, access, and presentation. Our system is implemented as a generic and modular music repository based on a service-oriented software architecture. As a particular strength of our approach, the various documents representing aspects of a piece of music are jointly considered in all stages of the document processing chain. Our user interfaces allow for a multimodal and synchronized presentation of documents (WYSIWYH: what you see is what you hear), a score- or lyrics-based navigation in audio, as well as a cross- and multimodal retrieval. Hence, our music repository may be called a truly cross-modal library system. In our paper, we describe the system components, outline the techniques of the document processing chain, and illustrate the implemented functionalities for user interaction. We describe how the system is put into practice at the Bavarian State Library (BSB) Munich as a part of the German PROBADO Digital Library Initiative (PDLI).

The PROBADO project: approach and lessons learned in building a digital library system for heterogeneous non-textual documents

The PROBADO project is a research effort to develop and operate advanced Digital Library support for non-textual documents. The main goal is to contribute to all parts of the Digital Library work flow from content acquisition over indexing to search and presentation. While not limited in terms of supported document types, reference support is developed for classical digital music and 3D architectural models. In this paper, we review the overall goals, approaches taken, and lessons learned so far in a highly integrated effort of university researchers and library experts. We address the problem of technology transfer, aspects of repository compilation, and the problem of inter-domain retrieval. The experiences are relevant for other project efforts in the nontextual Digital Library domain.

A Framework for Managing Multimodal Digitized Music Collections

In this paper, we present a framework for managing heterogeneous, multimodal digitized music collections containing visual music representations (scanned sheet music) as well as acoustic music material (audio recordings). As a first contribution, we propose a preprocessing workflow comprising feature extraction, audio indexing, and music synchronization (linking the visual with the acoustic data). Then, as a second contribution, we introduce novel user interfaces for multimodal music presentation, navigation, and content-based retrieval. In particular, our system offers high quality audio playback with time-synchronous display of the digitized sheet music. Furthermore, our system allows a user to select regions within the scanned pages of a musical score in order to search for musically similar sections within the audio documents. Our novel user interfaces and search functionalities will be integrated into the library service system of the Bavarian State Library as part of the Probado project.

A concept for using combined multimodal queries in digital music libraries

In this paper, we propose a concept for using combined multimodal queries in the context of digital music libraries. Whereas usual mechanisms for content-based music retrieval only consider a single query mode, such as query-by-humming, full-text lyrics-search or query-by-example using short audio snippets, our proposed concept allows to combine those different modalities into one integrated query. Our particular contributions consist of concepts for query formulation, combined content-based retrieval and presentation of a suitably ranked result list. The proposed concepts have been realized within the context of the PROBADO Music Repository and allow for music retrieval based on combining full-text lyrics search and score-based query-by-example search.

Cell Counting for In Vivo Flow Cytometer Signals Using Wavelet-Based Dynamic Peak Picking

We propose the development of new methods to analyze data produced by a so-called in vivo flow cytometer (IVFC). This technology allows to quantify numbers of specific cells in a living organism and is extraordinarily useful for the quantitative study of diseases such as cancer or other phenomena, including immunological processes. Existing computational methods for the analysis of IVFC signals are based on elementary signal processing and require manual user interaction. To overcome such limitations, we propose the development of improved algorithms that may quantify cells in a reliable and efficient manner, while eliminating the need for user interaction. To this end, we propose a method based on wavelet-based deonoising combined with a dynamic peak-picking procedure. This procedure proves to be reliable on real data, and eliminates the need for certain control experiments which were required for earlier approaches.

Unsupervised Techniques for Audio Summarization in Acoustic Environment Monitoring

The detection of relevant audio events is a key task in various monitoring scenarios. Especially in the context of acoustic surveillance of real-life outdoor environments, there is a high demand on effectiveness and reliability of audio signal processing techniques. This paper summarizes key technology used for unsupervised audio summarization and shows how this technology is integrated into an innovative monitoring system.