Pattern recognition approaches to compute image similarities: application to age related morphological change

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