Analyzing 3D cell data of optical diffraction tomography through volume rendering

Abstract

Optical diffraction tomography (ODT) constitutes a novel approach for acquiring cell images since it is capable of capturing morphology of a living cell without chemical treatment. ODT is an interferometric technique that measures the 3D refractive index (RI) distribution of optically transparent samples such as biological cells. Unlike other cell imaging modalities, naive ODT data do not contain encoded information about the cellular properties such as labeled protein in fluorescent microscopic data or the fixed border of a cell wall in scanning electron microscopic data. Therefore, specifying the region of interest in the raw image is an important and challenging task for a quantitative analysis of ODT cell data. We propose an interactive interface for reconstructing 3D shape of cells from ODT image data based on intervening visualization results of the cell data to guide the investigator observing the overall blueprint of cell morphology. The cell organelles are segmented based on the lookup table referring corresponding transfer function items adopted from volume rendering technique. The final shape of the cell is then constructed as mesh models from the segmentation results for further quantitative analyses. In this paper, we also demonstrate the various modeling options accounting characteristics of target cell.