Quantitative comparison of mitotic spindles by confocal image analysis

Jeffery R. Price; Deniz Aykac; Shaun S. Gleason; Karuna Chourey; Yie Liu

doi:10.1117/1.1955531

1 July 2005 Quantitative comparison of mitotic spindles by confocal image analysis

Jeffery R. Price, Deniz Aykac, Shaun S. Gleason, Karuna Chourey, Yie Liu

Author Affiliations +

Journal of Biomedical Optics, Vol. 10, Issue 4, 044012 (July 2005). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.1955531

Abstract

The mitotic spindle is a subcellular protein structure that facilitates chromosome segregation and is crucial to cell division. We describe an image processing approach to quantitatively characterize and compare mitotic spindles that have been imaged three dimensionally using confocal microscopy with fixed-cell preparations. The proposed approach is based on a set of features that are computed from each image stack representing a spindle. We compare several spindle datasets of varying biological (genotype) and/or environmental (drug treatment) conditions. The goal of this effort is to aid biologists in detecting differences between spindles that may not be apparent under subjective visual inspection, and furthermore, to eventually automate such analysis in high-throughput scenarios (thousands of images) where manual inspection would be unreasonable. Experimental results on positive- and negative-control data indicate that the proposed approach is indeed effective. Differences are detected when it is known they do exist (positive control) and no differences are detected when there are none (negative control). In two other experimental comparisons, results indicate structural spindle differences that biologists had not observed previously.

©(2005) Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

Citation Download Citation

Jeffery R. Price, Deniz Aykac, Shaun S. Gleason, Karuna Chourey, and Yie Liu "Quantitative comparison of mitotic spindles by confocal image analysis," Journal of Biomedical Optics 10(4), 044012 (1 July 2005). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.1955531

Published: 1 July 2005

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

JOURNAL ARTICLE
12 PAGES

DOWNLOAD PAPER SAVE TO MY LIBRARY