We are studying the genetic influence on rates of age related muscle degeneration in C. elegans. For this, we built pattern recognition tools to calculate a morphological score given an image of muscle tissue. We collected images of body wall muscle and the terminal bulb of the pharynx at four different ages. We extracted a large set of image descriptors (signatures) from both sets of images. Two different methods were used for pattern recognition within these two datasets. Both methods compute a single number that correlates with the known age of the sample. Because aging is a continuous process, the relative age computed from images of tissue can be viewed as a measure of image similarity. The techniques employed and validated in this work can be generalized to other areas such as image-based queries.
Nikita Orlov, Josiah Johnston, Tomasz J. Macura, C