The growing on variety, volume and velocity of public biomedical databases in the last years have generate an explosion of big data in biology and medicine. Most of these databases comprise structural, molecular and genetic information from different kind of images acquisition modalities and associated metadata having a great potential, not yet exploited, as a source of information and knowledge which could impact biomedical research in different application fields. In fact, new research areas are emerging in this direction, known as bioimage informatics and computational pathology, which are areas basically attempting to apply different methods of image processing, pattern recognition, machine learning and data mining, in multimodal biomedical databases. However, the proposed tools and methods for image collection analysis have some research challenges coming with deluge of big data in biomedicine such as: visual appearance variability, semantic gap between image content and high-level meaning, structural and interpretable representation of image content, semantic inclusion of multimodal information sources, and scalability support with the increasing volume of databases. In this way, the research proposal is addressing the problem of automatic extraction of knowledge from biomedical image collections. Specifically, the goal is to devise methods to automatically find: visual patterns that compactly explain the visual richness of biomedical images, relationships between visual patterns, and relationships between visual patterns and their meaning in a particular biomedical context. In order to solve it, the proposed methodology has three main stages: part-based bioimage representation, semantic bioimage representation and biomedical knowledge discovery. Each stage of methodology state-of-the-art methods from computer vision, image processing, machine learning and data mining will be explored to provide interpretable learning methods supported by high-performance computing. |