Cytokinetics, Inc.

Ge Cong

Eugeni Vaisberg

Hsien-Hsun Wu

Methods and apparatus are provided for the analysis of images of cells and extraction biologically-significant shape-related features from the cell images. The extracted features may be correlated with particular conditions induced by biologically-active agents with which cells have been treated, thereby enabling the automated analysis of cells based on cell shape parameters. In particular, the invention provides methods for segmentation of cells in an image using a combination of a reference component image data and cell shape-indicative marker image data in a watershed technique. Further, the invention provides a skeletonization and skeleton analysis technique for extracting biologically-relevant features from cell shapes.

Extracting shape information contained in cell images

Methods, code and apparatus analyze cell images to automatically identify and characterize the Golgi complex in individual cells. This is accomplished by first locating the cells in the image and defining boundaries of those cells that subsume some or all of the Golgi complex of those cells. The Golgi complex in the images typically have intensity values corresponding to the concentration of a Golgi component in the cell (e.g. a polysaccharide associated with the Golgi complex). The method/system then analyzes the Golgi components of the image (typically on a pixel-by-pixel basis) to mathematically characterize the Golgi complex of individual cells. This mathematical characterization represents phenotypic information about the cells' Golgi complex and can be used to classify cells. From this information, mechanism of action and other important biological information can be deduced.

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El Cerrito, CA, United States of America

Ge Cong