FREELY AVAILABLE TOOL FOR AUTOMATED QUANTIFICATION OF STAINED CELLS MICROSCOPY IMAGES

MASONE, DIEGO; GOJANOVICH, ALDANA; UHART, MARINA; DEL VELIZ, SAMANTA; FRONTINI, YESICA; BUSTOS, DIEGO M.

Mendoza

Congreso; Sociedad de Biología de Cuyo; 2016

Sociedad de Biología de Cuyo

AbstractBackground: Several research and clinical techniques like stem cell differentiation, effects of altered nutritiveculture conditions and insulin resistance require the analysis of Red Oil-O stained microscopy images. Given thatmanual image processing is a subjective time-consuming task, an adaptable, free open-source program, versatileenough to be used either on bright field or fluorescence images, is therefore lacking.Methods: In this study, we propose an automatic procedure implemented in a group of computer programs forRed Oil-O stained cell digital image processing. Fully automated algorithms were implemented in Octave, a freemathematical scientific package.Results: We describe a method that can efficiently quantify and characterize lipid droplets distribution in differenthuman and mouse cell types in culture. Prospectively, the lipid droplets detection method described in this workcould be applied to static or time-lapse data, collected with simple visible light or fluorescence microscopy equip-ment. Experimental results showed that our program can efficiently quantify the multidimensional informationcontained in the images. This was specially tested comparing the results of manually processed images and thoseobtained by our program.