Compensation Of Photobleached Images For A Cell Dynamics System

Abstract

Progress in the field of medicine attributes to the discoveries in biology that require an extensive knowledge of cell dynamics. Intracellular Cell Dynamics Analysis System (ICellDAS) is a web based tool aimed at automating sub cellular particle motion estimation, tracking and mobility analysis. The purpose of this tool is to develop a better understanding of specific biology problems by visualizing biological data. For reliable analysis as well as visualization of cell dynamics, it is essential that the acquired images reflect the exact information of the specimen. The goal of the thesis is to design an interface for the ICellDAS project and to develop a method to compensate the information loss in photobleached images. Photobleaching is the irreversible destruction of fluorescence within the stained specimen caused due to scattering, absorption of excitation and fluorescence light in a confocal laser scanning microscope. Current approaches to solve this problem are computationally complex, time consuming, restricted to exponential decay model and highly sensitive to noise. The proposed method provides a simple yet effective statistical approach to solve this problem. It aims to overcome the disadvantages of current methods and at the same time provides better visualization of photobleached images. The main idea is to filter the foreground information from a given image by modeling it as a mixture of Gaussians and use this information to compensate the intensity loss of the photobleached images. The experimental results show that the restored images have better contrast and visual value compared to the original stack of photobleached images. The interface for ICellDAS is designed based on the design principles and philosophies for web application development. The interface has helped to identify various constraints such as speed, memory limitations, and security of the images which should be addressed for the success of ICellDAS project.