A spectral graph theoretic approach to quantification and calibration of collective morphological differences in cell images

Automatic quantification of mitochondrial fragmentation from two-photon microscope images of mouse brain tissue

The morphology of mitochondria can inform about their functional state and, thus, about cell vitality. For example, fragmentation of the mitochondrial network is associated with many diseases. Recent advances in neuronal imaging have enabled the observation of mitochondria in live brains for long periods of time, enabling the study of their dynamics in animal models of diseases. To aid these studies, we developed an automatic method, based on supervised learning, for quantifying the degree of mitochondrial fragmentation in tissue images acquired via two-photon microscopy from transgenic mice, which exclusively express Enhanced cyan fluorescent protein (ECFP) under Thy1 promoter, targeted to the mitochondrial matrix in subpopulations of neurons. We tested the method on images prior to and after cardiac arrest, and found it to be sensitive to significant changes in mitochondrial morphology because of the arrest. We conclude that the method is useful in detecting morphological abnormalities in mitochondria and, likely, in other subcellular structures as well.

MitoLoc: A method for the simultaneous quantification of mitochondrial network morphology and membrane potential in single cells

Mitochondria assemble into flexible networks. Here we present a simple method for the simultaneous quantification of mitochondrial membrane potential and network morphology that is based on computational co-localisation analysis of differentially imported fluorescent marker proteins. Established in, but not restricted to, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, MitoLoc reproducibly measures changes in membrane potential induced by the uncoupling agent CCCP, by oxidative stress, in respiratory deficient cells, and in ∆fzo1, ∆ref2, and ∆dnm1 mutants that possess fission and fusion defects. In combination with super-resolution images, MitoLoc uses 3D reconstruction to calculate six geometrical classifiers which differentiate network morphologies in ∆fzo1, ∆ref2, and ∆dnm1 mutants, under oxidative stress and in cells lacking mtDNA, even when the network is fragmented to a similar extent. We find that mitochondrial fission and a decline in membrane potential do regularly, but not necessarily, co-occur. MitoLoc hence simplifies the measurement of mitochondrial membrane potential in parallel to detect morphological changes in mitochondrial networks. Marker plasmid open-source software as well as the mathematical procedures are made openly available.

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MitoLoc is a workflow for measuring changes mitochondrial membrane potential and morphology in parallel.

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Pixel-by pixel co-localisation of two fluorescent reporters is used to detect changes in mitochondrial membrane potential.

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Automated 3D reconstruction of super resolution images to calculate mitochondrial morphological classifiers

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We make fluorescent markers, mathematical procedures and software openly available.

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We demonstrate the application of MitoLoc on several examples.

Ranking of multidimensional drug profiling data by fractional-adjusted bi-partitional scores

Motivation: The recent development of high-throughput drug profiling (high content screening or HCS) provides a large amount of quantitative multidimensional data. Despite its potentials, it poses several challenges for academia and industry analysts alike. This is especially true for ranking the effectiveness of several drugs from many thousands of images directly. This paper introduces, for the first time, a new framework for automatically ordering the performance of drugs, called fractional adjusted bi-partitional score (FABS). This general strategy takes advantage of graph-based formulations and solutions and avoids many shortfalls of traditionally used methods in practice. We experimented with FABS framework by implementing it with a specific algorithm, a variant of normalized cut—normalized cut prime (FABS-NC^′), producing a ranking of drugs. This algorithm is known to run in polynomial time and therefore can scale well in high-throughput applications.

Results: We compare the performance of FABS-NC^′ to other methods that could be used for drugs ranking. We devise two variants of the FABS algorithm: FABS-SVM that utilizes support vector machine (SVM) as black box, and FABS-Spectral that utilizes the eigenvector technique (spectral) as black box. We compare the performance of FABS-NC^′ also to three other methods that have been previously considered: center ranking (Center), PCA ranking (PCA), and graph transition energy method (GTEM). The conclusion is encouraging: FABS-NC^′ consistently outperforms all these five alternatives. FABS-SVM has the second best performance among these six methods, but is far behind FABS-NC^′: In some cases FABS-NC^′ produces over half correctly predicted ranking experiment trials than FABS-SVM.

Availability: The system and data for the evaluation reported here will be made available upon request to the authors after this manuscript is accepted for publication.

Contact:yxy128@berkeley.edu

Recent advances in morphological cell image analysis

This paper summarizes the recent advances in image processing methods for morphological cell analysis. The topic of morphological analysis has received much attention with the increasing demands in both bioinformatics and biomedical applications. Among many factors that affect the diagnosis of a disease, morphological cell analysis and statistics have made great contributions to results and effects for a doctor. Morphological cell analysis finds the cellar shape, cellar regularity, classification, statistics, diagnosis, and so forth. In the last 20 years, about 1000 publications have reported the use of morphological cell analysis in biomedical research. Relevant solutions encompass a rather wide application area, such as cell clumps segmentation, morphological characteristics extraction, 3D reconstruction, abnormal cells identification, and statistical analysis. These reports are summarized in this paper to enable easy referral to suitable methods for practical solutions. Representative contributions and future research trends are also addressed.