Automatic mining of fruit fly embryo images

We present FEMine, an automatic system for image-based gene expression analysis. We perform experiments on the largest publicly available collection of Drosophila ISH ( in situ hybridization) images, showing that our FEMine system achieves excellent performance in classification, clustering, and content-based image retrieval. The major innovation of FEMine is the use of automatically discovered latent spatial "themes" of gene expressions, LGEs , in the whole-embryo context, as opposed to patterns in nearly disjoint portions of an embryo proposed in previous methods.