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Help Conquer Cancer
What are the potential benefits of the "Help Conquer Cancer" project? There are several direct and indirect benefits of the project. For the first time, scientists will execute a comprehensive image analysis and classification of crystallography images. This will lead to better understanding of the crystallization process, and will enable scientists to improve the accuracy and speed of CrystalVision. Improved understanding of the crystallization process and improved CrystalVision also will enable more disease proteins to be crystallized faster. Finally, more 3D structures will improve our understanding of disease and potentially its treatment, and will lead to improved in silico (performed on a computer or via computer simulation) structure prediction.
What computers can run the "Help Conquer Cancer" Project? Due to the inherent granularity of our image analysis problem, there are very modest memory and CPU requirements for the compute nodes. However, without access to thousands of CPUs, researchers would not be able to process 80 million images in a reasonable amount of time. Multiple platforms will be able to run the project; World Community Grid is launching Linux and Windows compiled code first, with Macintosh OS to follow.
What will World Community Grid's calculations produce? On the lowest level, CrystalVision will compute thousands of image features for each crystallography image. This data objectively measures characteristics of the image, which will enable scientists to use a system to discern image classification. In turn, this will allow them to automatically and objectively characterize results from the high-throughput crystallization screens, and then apply data mining techniques to optimize future crystallization experiments.
What will happen with the data generated by all these calculations? After careful analysis, evaluation and interpretation, all results will be published in the public domain. The scientists' first goal is to improve the CrystalVision system to enable automated, accurate and fast crystallography image classification. This algorithm will then be deployed at Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute to ensure that this public high-throughput crystallography screening facility will speed up crystallization of many disease-related proteins.
When will this project be completed? Once the project starts, we will have a better idea about the time required to process the images on World Community Grid. This will be determined by the number of suitable computers and the number of projects being concurrently executed on World Community Grid. However, researchers have several interesting subsets of images, which will be analyzed first, thus enabling preliminary results to be available after a few weeks. These images comprise a set previously analyzed by an earlier version of CrystalVision, as well as by multiple human experts.
Screen saver/Graphics: When I look at the Help Conquer Cancer graphic, what is my computer working on? Each work unit is a photograph of a protein crystallization experiment (one out of 1,536 images per protein, photographed six times over a period of one month), a visual record of the state of a protein sample dissolved in a solution of crystallizing agents. This photograph is shown in the background of the agent window. The Grid agent performs a computer vision analysis of the image in order to interpret its contents, first determining important image features, which are then used to classify (or label) the result of the experiment. During the feature image computation, intermediate steps of this analysis are displayed in the colored circles appearing in the foreground of the agent window. The analysis is a search for four large categories of features in the image: microcrystals, straight lines, discrete objects, and textural features. Intermediate steps of the texture analysis are displayed in the colored circles that appear in the foreground of the agent window. As each step is completed, the computed result appears in the agent window. Each circle is a copy of a region of the original image, transformed to highlight a different texture.
Screen saver/Graphics: What is the moon-crater object in the middle of the Help Conquer Cancer graphic background? The background image is a photomicrograph of a protein crystallization experiment. The experiment takes place in a droplet of water the size of a pinhead (200 nl), suspended in an oil-filled chamber. The circular wall of the chamber, and the roughly circular droplet contained within are visible in the photo. Inside the droplet, precipitated protein or salt, or even protein crystal may be visible.
Screen saver/Graphics: In the Help Conquer Cancer graphics: What are the round disks? Each disk has a different color. What does that mean? Each disk is a visualization of a different texture measure applied to the background image. Thus, when two disks are differently colored, it means only that different textures are more or less prominent in different regions of the image. Twenty-six measures of texture are visualized in the Grid agent. Each measure is related to frequencies of the grey-scale values of pairs of pixels found in the image, and summarizes these frequencies according to pixel-pixel contrast, correlation, variance, or entropy. Each of 13 categories of statistics is measured multiple times by changing the distance and relative orientation of the pixel-pairs. Each disk visualizes the results of a search for a particular texture in the original image. The texture search is done in three steps. The first step records fine-grained changes in the grey-tones of the image, the second step records medium-grained changes, and the third step records coarse-grained changes. The three steps are visualized together by using red (step 1), green (step 2), and blue (step 3) colour channels to create a full-colour image representing the whole process. A blue region of the disk would then indicate a region of the original image where the texture is most apparent in coarse-grained grey-tone changes. 
Screen saver/Graphics: I noticed that the right most disk in the Help Conquer Cancer graphic is occasionally replaced by a new disk and all the other disks move to the left and the last one falls off. What is going on? The Grid agent will only display the results of the last 10 image analysis steps. As the next step is completed, its result is displayed, and the oldest is removed.
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