Thesis – Page 3 – Soft Matter Lab

Kevin Andersson and Eric Lindgren defended their Master thesis on 2 June 2021. Congrats!

Kevin Andersson and Eric Lindgren defended their Master thesis on 2 June 2021. Congrats!

Title: Saliency mapping of RS-fMRI data in GCNs for sex and brain age prediction
Subtitle: Identifying important functional brain networks using explainability in Graph Convolutional Networks

Insights into how biological sex and healthy ageing affects the human brain are important for an increased understanding of the brain. Healthy ageing insights are also useful for clinical applications, for instance in identifying unhealthy ageing due to neurodegenerative disease. To this end, several studies in the last few years have used machine learning methods on neuroscientific data to predict subject sex and brain age. One particularly interesting approach has been to represent functionally connected networks in the brain as graphs, and apply Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). To investigate which functional brain networks are connected with sex and age, we develop and analyse GCN-based models that predicts sex and age from resting-state fMRI data. The analysis of the models is done using saliency mapping techniques which gives insight into what functional brain networks in the data are relevant for the predictions. With this approach, we obtain a sex prediction accuracy of up to 79% and an age prediction MAE of 5.9 years. Furthermore, we find indications that the Sensory Motor Network and the cerebellum are among the more important functional brain networks for predicting sex and brain age.

Master programme: Physics
Supervisor: Alice Neimante Diemante (Syntronic AB)
Examiner: Giovanni Volpe, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg
Opponent: Rasmus Svensson

Place: Online via Zoom
Time: 2 June, 2021, 16:00

Pernilla Huynh, Hannes Johansson, Olof Lind Stefansson, Oskar More Arvidsson, William Olsson, Filip Sterner defended their Bachelor Thesis at Chalmers University of Technology on 27 May 2021. Congrats!

Pernilla Huynh, Hannes Johansson, Olof Lind Stefansson, Oskar More Arvidsson, William Olsson, Filip Sterner defended their Bachelor Thesis at Chalmers University of Technology on 27 May 2021. Congrats!

Title: Kollektiva beteenden hos aktiva agenter i komplexa system
Topologiska interaktioner och skillnader med tidsfördröjning

Sammandrag:
Studierna av aktiva agenters beteende i komplexa system har rönt stort intresse den senaste tiden. Dels då det är en passande modell för att beskriva många biologiska system, men också för deras för potentiella tillämpningar. Syftet med studien är att undersöka skillnader mellan beteendet för agenter som interagerar genom metriska interaktioner (det vill säga beroende av det metriska avståndet mellan agenter) och agenter som interagerar genom topologiska interaktioner (beroende på ett bestämt antal närliggande agenter). Framförallt studeras hur de båda modellerna förändras då en tidsfördröjning mellan agenternas uppfattning och reaktion introduceras. Undersökningen utförs genom analys av tre olika komplexa system: (1) agenter som rör sig bland periodiska hinder; (2) agenter som följer en ledare genom en labyrint; och (3) aktiva agenters interaktioner med passiva agenter. Utifrån de resultat som erhålls kan det framgångsrikt observeras skillnader i interaktionerna hos den topologiska modellen gentemot den metriska modellen: de aktiva agenterna kan i den topologiska modellen interagera mer med varandra trots periodiska hinder, en större andel agenter tar sig genom labyrinten och klusterbildningen är oftast lägre i systemet med ett lågt antal passiva agenter. Resultaten tyder också på att den topologiska interaktionen i många fall är mindre känslig för tidsfördröjning.

Abstract:
Studies of the behavior of active agents in complex systems have received a lot of interest recently. This interest derives from the fact that active agents provide an ideal model to describe many biological systems and also because of their potential applications. The purpose of this study is to explore which differences there are between the behaviour of agents that interact through metric interactions (i.e. depending on the metric distance between agents) and those of agents that interact through topological interactions (i.e. depending on a certain number of surrounding agents). This report also discusses how the interaction models for active agents change when a time delay between sensing and acting is introduced. These investigations were made by analyzing three different complex environments: (1) agents moving in the presence of periodic obstacles; (2) agents following a leader in a maze; and (3) active agents interacting with passive agents. Based on the results obtained from this study, we could successfully observe differences in the topological interaction compared to the metric model: the active agents interacted more frequently with each other when using the topological model despite periodic obstacles, a larger proportion of agents managed to pass through the maze and the cluster formation was usually smaller in the system with a low number of passive agents. The result also shows that the topological interaction is less sensitive to time delay.

Supervisor: Giovanni Volpe, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg
Examiner: Lena Falk, Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology
Time: 27 May, 2021

Gustaf Sjösten defended his Master thesis on 17 May 2021. Congrats!

Gustaf Sjösten defended his Master thesis in MPCAS at the Chalmers University of Technology on 17 May 2021. Congrats!

Artistic rendering of a light source illumination a single biomolecule and scattered photons. *(Image by Gustaf Sjösten, inspired by an image created by Barbora Spackova)*

Title: Deep Learning for Nanofluidic Scattering Microscopy

A novel technique for label-free, real-time characterization of single biomolecules called Nanofluidic Scatter Microscopy (NSM) has recently been developed by the Langhammer research group at Chalmers. We have created a machine learning (ML) framework consisting of deep convolutional neural networks such as U-nets, ResNets and YOLO in order to characterize single biomolecules through kymographs collected through NSM, as an alternative approach to a standard data analysis method (SA). As a laser irradiates visible light onto single biomolecules freely diffusing in solution inside nanofluidic channels, the biomolecule and the nanochannel scatter light coherently into the collection optics, such that the nanochannels improve the optical contrast of the imaged biomolecules by several orders of magnitude. A video of the total scattering intensity is then recorded with a high frame rate camera (capturing 200 fps) in order to capture the movement of the molecules as well as the optical contrast of the biomolecules with respect to the nanochannel. From the movement of one single biomolecule, it is possible to predict its diffusion constant, which can then be used to infer the hydrodynamic radius of the biomolecule. Additionally, the predicted optical contrast of one single biomolecule can in turn be used to infer its molecular weight. From the combination of hydrodynamic radius and molecular weight, information about the conformal state of single biomolecules can be inferred. In this thesis, we show that the ML approach yields results comparable to the SA which was developed independently of the ML technique for biomolecules in the weight span 66-669 kDa, and we also show that the ML technique is superior to the SA in other regards, such as computational speed and potential to characterize smaller molecules. The results of the data analysis performed with the ML framework will also make an appearance in the first paper on the NSM technique which has been submitted for publication and is currently under review.

Name of the master programme: MPCAS – Complex Adaptive Systems
Supervisor: Giovanni Volpe, Daniel Midtvedt
Examiner: Giovanni Volpe, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg
Opponent: Anton Jansson

Place: Online via Zoom
Time: 17 May, 2021, 16:00

Nils Jacobson defended his Master thesis on 16 February 2021. Congrats!

Nils Jacobson defended his Master thesis in MPCAS at the Chalmers University of Technology on 16 February 2021. Congrats!

Screenshot of Nils Jacobson’s Master Thesis defence.

Title: Vascular Bifurcation Detection in Cerebral CT Angiography Using CNN and Frangi Filters

Segmentation and feature extraction are important tools for analysing and visualizing information in medical image data, particularly in vascular image data which relates to widely spread vascular diseases. Vessel segmentation is extensively featured in research, recently adapting trends in deep learning image processing. This paper aims to develop a vessel bifurcation detection method to support a seed point based segmentation approach. The suggested approach is a combination of classification, with a convolutional neural network (DenseNet), local vessel segmentation, with Frangi filters, and 3D morphological skeletonization. A small data set is produced for network training and evaluation. Results indicate a high classification accuracy which filters problematic samples for the Frangi filter. Thus the combination is able to suggest quality branch seed points under most circumstances. Next step would be to expand the data set to enable further optimization and more rigid evaluation. In any case a combination of a high performance classifier followed by qualitative assessment of local samples show potential.

Name of the master programme: MPCAS – Complex Adaptive Systems
Supervisor: Jonna Hellström and Giovanni Volpe
Examiner: Giovanni Volpe, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg
Opponent: Eva Škvor

Place: Online via Zoom
Time: 16 February, 2021, 16:00

Link: Master thesis presentation Nils Jacobson

Falko Schmidt defended his PhD Thesis in Physics on 15 January 2021. Congrats!

Falko Schmidt defended his PhD Thesis in Physics on Friday, 15 January 2021. Congrats!

The disputation took place at 9 a.m., in PJ salen, Fysikgården.
Falko Schmidt’s opponent, Peer Fischer, gave an introductory presentation with title “Microswimmers and motile active matter”.

Link: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/66807

Title: Active Matter in a Critical State: From passive building blocks to active molecules, engines and droplets

The motion of microscopic objects is strongly affected by their surrounding environment. In quiescent liquids, motion is reduced to random fluctuations known as Brownian motion. Nevertheless, microorganisms have been able to develop mechanisms to generate active motion. This has inspired researchers to understand and artificially replicate active motion. Now, the field of active matter has developed into a multi-disciplinary field, with researchers developing artificial microswimmers, producing miniaturized versions of heat engines and showing that individual colloids self-assemble into larger microstructures. This thesis taps into the development of artificial microscopic and nanoscopic systems and demonstrates that passive building blocks such as colloids are transformed into active molecules, engines and active droplets that display a rich set of motions. This is achieved by combining optical manipulation with a phase-separating environment consisting of a critical binary mixture. I first show how simple absorbing particles are transformed into fast rotating microengines using optical tweezers, and how this principle can be scaled down to nanoscopic particles. Transitioning then from single particles to self-assembled modular swimmers, such colloidal molecules exhibit diverse behaviour such as propulsion, orbital rotation and spinning, and whose formation process I can control with periodic illumination. To characterize the molecules dynamics better, I introduce a machine-learning algorithm to determine the anomalous exponent of trajectories and to identify changes in a trajectory’s behaviour. Towards understanding the behaviour of larger microstructures, I then investigate the interaction of colloidal molecules with their phase-separating environment and observe a two-fold coupling between the induced liquid droplets and their immersed colloids. With the help of simulations I gain a better physical picture and can further analyse the molecules’ and droplets’ emergence and growth dynamics. At last, I show that fluctuation-induced forces can solve current limitations in microfabrication due to stiction, enabling a further development of the field towards smaller and more stable nanostructures required for nowadays adaptive functional materials. The insights gained from this research mark the path towards a new generation of design principles, e.g., for the construction of flexible micromotors, tunable micromembranes and drug delivery in health care applications.

Benjamin Midtvedt defended his Master Thesis on June 15, 2020. Congrats!

Benjamin Midtvedt defended his Master Thesis in Engineering Mathematics and Computer Science at Chalmers University of Technology on 15 June 2020. Congrats!

Screenshot of Benjamin Midtvedt’s Master Thesis defence.

Title: DeepTrack: A comprehensive deep learning framework for digital microscopy

Despite the rapid advancement of deep-learning methods for image analysis, they remain underutilized for the analysis of microscopy images. State of the art methods require expertise in deep-learning to implement, disconnecting the development of new methods from end-users. The packages that are available are typically highly specialized, challenging to reappropriate, and almost impossible to interface with other methods. Finally, training deep-learning models often requires large datasets of manually annotated images, making it prohibitively difficult to procure training data that accurately represents the problem.

DeepTrack is a deep-learning framework targeting optical microscopy, designed to account for each of these issues. Firstly, it is packaged with an easy-to-use graphical user interface, solving standard microscopy problems with no required programming experience. Secondly, it bypasses the need for manually annotated experimental data by providing a comprehensive programming API for creating representative synthetic data, designed to exactly suit the problem. DeepTrack creates physical simulations of samples described by refractive index or fluorophore distributions, using fully customizable optical systems. To accurately represent the data to be analyzed, DeepTrack supports arbitrary optical aberration and experimental noise. Thirdly, many standard deep-learning methods are packaged with DeepTrack, including architectures such as U-NET, and regularization techniques such as augmentations, decreasing the barrier to entry. Finally, the framework is fully modular and easily extendable to implement new methods, providing both longevity and a centralized foundation to deploy new deep-learning solutions.

We demonstrate the versatility of DeepTrack by training networks to solve a broad range of common microscopy problems, including particle tracking, cell-counting in dense biological samples, multi-particle 3-dimensional tracking, and cell segmentation and classification.

Master Programme: Engineering Mathematics and Computer Science
Supervisor: Giovanni Volpe
Examiner: Giovanni Volpe
Opponents: Aykut Argun and Saga Helgadóttir

Time: 15 June 2020, 16:00
Place: Online via Zoom

Tobias Sandström and Lars Jansson defended their Master Thesis on 15 June, 2020. Congrats!

Tobias Sandström and Lars Jansson defended their Master Thesis in Complex Adaptive Systems at Chalmers University of Technology on 15 June 2020. Congrats!

Screenshot of Tobias Sandström and Lars Jansson’s Master Thesis defence.

Title: Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Brain Connectivity Analysis

We explore the strengths and limitations of Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNs) for classification of graph structured data. GCNs differs from regular Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in that they operate directly on graph structures by defining convolutional operators in a non-euclidean space. We show that GCNs perform well on graph structured data, where regular ANNs typically fail due to the arbitrary ordering of nodes. Different GCN architectures are examined and compared to simplistic ANNs. Tests are initially performed on simulated data sets with implicit class-dissimilarities in regards to graph structures. We demonstrate that GCNs is vital in accurately classifying the simulated data. Network performance is later evaluated on structured MRI-data, displaying cortical thicknesses for 68 regions in the brain of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and a healthy control group. On the structured MRI-data, both GCNs and regular ANNs are shown to be able classifiers. However, it is crucial for the performance of ANNs that an order of nodes can be imposed on the MRI-data from labeled brain regions.

Supervisors: Jonas Andersson & Alice Deimante Neimantaite, Syntronic AB
Examiner: Giovanni Volpe, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg
Opponent: Jonathan Bergqvist

Time: 15 June, 2020, 14:00
Place: Online via Zoom

Hillevi Wachtmeister defended her Master Thesis on June 11, 2020. Congrats!

Hillevi Wachtmeister defend her Master Thesis in Physics at Chalmers University of Technology on 11 June 2020. Congrats!

Screenshot of Hillevi Wachtmeister’s Master Thesis defence.

Title: Tracking marine micro organisms using deep learning

The goal of this project is to develop a software that can be used to study swimming patterns of marine micro organisms. The software is based on a neural network, which is trained to recognize different types of plankton. The predictions from the network are then used to find the positions of the plankton, and then track their movements.

The project is divided into two parts. First, videos containing only one type of plankton, Lingulodinium polyedra and Alexandrium tamarense respectively, are analyzed. A type of neural network, called U-net, is trained to segment the input images into background and plankton sections. From the segmented images, positions can be obtained and then connected to form a trajectory for each plankton. The drift of the plankton movements is calculated and subtracted from the trajectories, and finally the speed and net displacement is calculated. The results from the single plankton experiments are compared to a previous analysis that was made using the algorithmic method TrackMate.

Secondly, videos containing two types of plankton are analyzed. Two experiments are conducted using Strombidium arenicola and Rhodomonas baltica in the first experiment, and Alexandrium tamarense and Rhodomonas baltica in the second. The segmented images, obtained from the U-net, consists of an additional plankton section for the second type of plankton present in the experiment.

The analysis of the single plankton experiments yields longer and fewer trajectories using the U-net method, compared to the previous TrackMate results. This shows that the TrackMate method is losing plankton at more positions, compared to the U-net method. The U-net method is therefore able to track each plankton for a longer time. The multi-plankton experiments proves the network’s ability to distinguish and track multiple plankton at the same time.

Master programme: MPPHYS – Physics
Supervisor: Daniel Midtvedt
Examiner: Giovanni Volpe
Opponent: Frida Eriksson

Date: 11 June 2020, 9:00
Place: Nexus + Online via Zoom

Sofia Lundborg defended her Master Thesis on June 4, 2020. Congrats!

Sofia Lundborg defended her Master Thesis in Complex Adaptive Systems at Chalmers University of Technology on 4 June 2020. Congrats!

Screenshot of Sofia Lundborg’s Master Thesis defence.

Title: Training Binary Deep Neural Networks Using Knowledge Distillation

Binary networks can be used to speed up inference time and make image analysis possible on less powerful devices. When binarizing a network the accuracy drops.
The thesis aimed to investigate how the accuracy of a binary network can be improved by using knowledge distillation.
Three different knowledge distillation methods were tested for various network types. Additionally, different architectures of a residual block in ResNet were suggested and tested. Test on CIFAR10 showed an 1.5% increase in accuracy when using knowledge distillation and an increase of 1.1% when testing on ImageNet dataset. The results indicate that the suggested knowledge distillation method can improve the accuracy of a binary network. Further testing needs to be done to verify the results, especially longer training. However, there is great potential that knowledge distillation can be used to boost the accuracy of binary networks.

Master programme: MPCAS – Complex Adaptive Systems
Supervisor: Giovanni Volpe
Supervisors @ Bit Addict: Karl Svensson, Fredrik Ring and Niclas Wikström
Examiner: Giovanni Volpe
Opponent: Viktor Olsson, Wilhelm Tranheden

Time: June 4, 2020 at 15:00
Place: Online via Zoom

Dennis Kristiansson, Adrian Lundell, Fredrik Meisingseth, David Tonderski defended their Bachelor Thesis. Congrats!

Dennis Kristiansson, Adrian Lundell, Fredrik Meisingseth and David Tonderski defended their Bachelor Thesis at Chalmers University of Technology on 27 May 2020. Congrats!

Title: Deep learning for particle tracking

Abstract: The use of machine learning for classication has in recent years spread into a wide range of disciplines, amongst them the detection of particles for particle tracking on microscopy data. We modified the Python package DeepTrack, which makes use of deep learning to detect particles, creating a package called U-Track. By using a new network architecture based on a U-Net, better performance and higher computational efficiency than DeepTrack was achieved on images with multiple particles. Furthermore, functionality to track detected particles over series of frames was developed. The application of U-Track on experimental data from two-dimensional flow nanometry produced tracks consistent with theory, as well as tracking larger quantities of particles over longer periods of time compared to a digital filter based benchmark algorithm.

Supervisors: Daniel Midtvedt, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg
Examiner: Lena Falk, Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg
Opponents: Patrik Wallin, Isak Pettersson, Alexei Orekhov, Anna Wisakanto

Place: Online Meeting
Time: 27 May, 2020, 9:00