BACKGROUND: Retinal ganglion cell (RGC) loss is one of the earliest and most important cellular changes in glaucoma. The DARC (Detection of Apoptosing Retinal Cells) technology enables in vivo real-time non-invasive imaging of single apoptosing retinal cells in animal models of glaucoma and Alzheimer's disease. To date, apoptosing RGCs imaged using DARC have been counted manually. This is time-consuming, labour-intensive, vulnerable to bias, and has considerable inter- and intra-operator variability. RESULTS: A semi-automated algorithm was developed which enabled automated identification of apoptosing RGCs labeled with fluorescent Annexin-5 on DARC images. Automated analysis included a pre-processing stage involving local-luminance and local-contrast "gain control", a "blob analysis" step to differentiate between cells, vessels and noise, and a method to exclude non-cell structures using specific combined 'size' and 'aspect' ratio criteria. Apoptosing retinal cells were counted by 3 masked operators, generating 'Gold-standard' mean manual cell counts, and were also counted using the newly developed automated algorithm. Comparison between automated cell counts and the mean manual cell counts on 66 DARC images showed significant correlation between the two methods (Pearson's correlation coefficient 0.978 (p < 0.001), R Squared = 0.956. The Intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.986 (95% CI 0.977-0.991, p < 0.001), and Cronbach's alpha measure of consistency = 0.986, confirming excellent correlation and consistency. No significant difference (p = 0.922, 95% CI: -5.53 to 6.10) was detected between the cell counts of the two methods. CONCLUSIONS: The novel automated algorithm enabled accurate quantification of apoptosing RGCs that is highly comparable to manual counting, and appears to minimise operator-bias, whilst being both fast and reproducible. This may prove to be a valuable method of quantifying apoptosing retinal cells, with particular relevance to translation in the clinic, where a Phase I clinical trial of DARC in glaucoma patients is due to start shortly.

An obvious asset of the Android platform is the tremendous number and variety of available apps. There is a less obvious, but potentially even more important, benefit to the fact that nearly all apps are developed using a common platform. We can leverage the relatively uniform nature of Android apps to allow users to tweak applications for improved security, usability, and functionality with relative ease (compared to desktop applications). We design and implement an Android app rewriting framework for customizing behavior of existing applications without requiring source code or app-specific guidance. Following app-agnostic transformation policies, our system rewrites applications to insert, remove, or modify behavior. The rewritten application can run on any unmodified Android device, without requiring rooting or other custom software. This paper describes RetroSkeleton, our app rewriting framework, including static and dynamic interception of method invocations, and creating policies that integrate with each target app. We show that our system is capable of supporting a variety of useful policies, including providing flexible fine-grained network access control, building HTTPS-Everywhere functionality into apps, implementing automatic app localization, informing users of hidden behavior in apps, and updating apps depending on outdated APIs. We evaluate these policies by rewriting and testing more than one thousand real-world apps from Google Play.

This video demonstrates one potential application of RetroSkeleton, which is a system for specifying and applying transformations to Android apps via bytecode rewriting. These transformation policies are app-agnostic and can be applied to Android apps without any manual guidance. In this video, we show how RetroSkeleton can be used to automatically add custom fine-grained network access controls into an existing app, giving users more control over their apps. We also show the use of the RetroSkeleton web interface, available at http://retroskeleton.com.

An alibi provides evidence of a person's past location and can be critical in proving ones innocence. An alibi involves two parties: the owner, who benefits from the alibi, and the corroborator, who testifies for the owner. As mobile devices become ubiquitous, they can determine where we are and what we are doing, and help us to establish evidence of our location as they accompany us on our daily activities. Existing location-based services like Google Latitude can already track and record our every move, but these systems require us to reveal our identity when recording our location. This leaves our privacy at risk, and requires a trusted third party to maintain our location information.