Virtual Tool for High-Speed Analysis of 3D Biomedical Imaging Data
The increasingly powerful microscopes used in biomedical imaging provide biologists with 3D images of hundreds of cells, and cells in these images are often layered on each other. Under these conditions, it can be impossible for traditional computational methods to quickly determine the cells' properties. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a virtual tool called Active Cell that can analyze dozens of images in just an hour. The tool is the result of complex mathematical calculations and sophisticated algorithms. Seen on a computer display, it looks like a flattened sphere that can be squished into various shapes. Users can scroll their mouse over a 3D digital microscopic image, using the globe to detect and segregate single cells from within the image.
Transcript
00:00:04 so in the recent years there's been quite a revolution in biology because they they have more and more sophisticated instrumentation so they have microscopes that can really acquire images in in 3D and so biologists have contacted us because they need to outline structures in those images like cell nuclei and and so therefore in the lab we developed software that can help
00:00:28 them to do that much faster in much more reproducible fashion developed a software that uh allows the biologist to quantify some things of their cell like size intensity it was something that before it was done manually and it took really a lot of time especially when when dealing in 3D data and now it can be analyze automatically in a regular computer or even a tablet what our
00:00:50 software provides is a different visualizations of the image data that the biologist have and from there they have to just choose an initial position from our program to start appear some kind of a sphere and from there they just have to drag it with the mouse close to the cell they want to analyze and click a button and the sphere automatically adjusts to the cell 2D
00:01:12 version of the plugin uh already Works in in tablets so we have been experimenting along lot with it and uh we'll uh in the future uh Port as well the 3D version to these kind of devices so it was very important for us to put it on the web make it available to the community so that as many people as possible can use it and also this is a very interesting research question a
00:01:35 challenging problem that requir the development of rather sophisticated mathematical tools