Abstract
Cell migration is crucial in many processes of development and maintenance of multicellular organisms and it can also be related to disease, e.g., Cancer metastasis, when cells migrate to organs different to where they originate. A precise analysis of the cell shapes in biological studies could lead to insights about migration. However, in some cases, the interaction and overlap of cells can complicate the detection and interpretation of their shapes. This paper describes an algorithm to segment and analyse the shape of macrophages in fluorescent microscopy image sequences, and compares the segmentation of overlapping cells through different algorithms. A novel 2D matrix with multiscale angle variation, called the anglegram, based on the angles between points of the boundary of an object, is used for this purpose. The anglegram is used to find junctions of cells and applied in two different applications: (i) segmentation of overlapping cells and for non-overlapping cells; (ii) detection of the “corners” or pointy edges in the shapes. The functionalities of the anglegram were tested and validated with synthetic data and on fluorescently labelled macrophages observed on embryos of Drosophila melanogaster. The information that can be extracted from the anglegram shows a good promise for shape determination and analysis, whether this involves overlapping or non-overlapping objects.
Highlights
The migration of cells is of great importance in many biological processes, one of them is within the immune system [1,2]
Experiments were performed on synthetic data of both overlapping and single objects, allowing the determination of limits of the junction detection methodologies presented in this work
For the macrophages data, the junction detection is presented and compared against the Harris junction detector [15], which was applied on the binary images using the detectHarrisFeatures in M ATLAB®
Summary
The migration of cells is of great importance in many biological processes, one of them is within the immune system [1,2]. Macrophages are one of the cells within the immune system that settle in lymphoid tissues and the liver, serving as filters for trapping microbes and foreign particles [1]. The model organism Drosophila melanogaster can offer insights into how macrophages integrate cues to migration and other tasks [2]. It has been shown that interactions among the cells’ structures appear to anticipate the direction of migration [4]. Precise analyses of cell shapes as they evolve through time, as well as the correct identification of interacting cells that overlap could provide information for specific cells in biological studies; where sharp corners suggest an active migrating cell and rounded corners inactivity [4]
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