Abstract
In the development of new regenerative medicine therapies for the treatment of central nervous system and spinal cord injuries, the identification of factors that inhibit or promote cell outgrowth in neurite outgrowth assays is fundamental, and the neurotrophic activity is commonly assessed based on the neurite/cell outgrowth. Neurites are projections from the cell body or the initial neurosphere and typically present low-contrast to background in phase contrast images. The extent of neurites is usually measured in a manual way and fluorescence images are the most used, generally requiring imunofluorescent staining.
We present a novel automatic approach for the quantification of cell outgrowth from neurospheres, based on phase contrast and fluorescence images acquired from samples merely processed for DNA staining.
Our approach detects the neurite/cell outgrowth, and its measures are in high agreement with the ones obtained manually. Furthermore, the image analysis time was reduced in more than 95% allowing the increase of the amount of data to be analyzed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Kovesi, P.: Symmetry and asymmetry from local phase. In: Sattar, A. (ed.) Canadian AI 1997. LNCS, vol. 1342, pp. 2–4. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Ma, W., Tavakoli, T., Derby, E., Serebryakova, Y., Rao, M.S., Mattson, M.P.: Cell-extracellular matrix interactions regulate neural differentiation of human embryonic stem cells. BMC Developmental Biology 8(1), 90 (2008)
Meijering, E.: Neuron tracing in perspective. Cytometry Part A 77(7), 693–704 (2010)
Shinn-Ying, H., Chih-Yuan, C., Hui-Ling, H., Tzai-Wen, C., Phasit, C., Eric, H.: Neurphologyj: An automatic neuronal morphology quantification method and its application in pharmacological discovery. BMC Bioinformatics 12
Tate, M.C., Garcia, A.J., Keselowsky, B.G., Schumm, M.A., Archer, D.R., LaPlaca, M.C.: Specific β1 integrins mediate adhesion, migration, and differentiation of neural progenitors derived from the embryonic striatum. Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience 27(1), 22–31 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bessa, S., Quelhas, P., Amaral, I.F. (2013). Automatic Quantification of Cell Outgrowth from Neurospheres. In: Sanches, J.M., Micó, L., Cardoso, J.S. (eds) Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis. IbPRIA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7887. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38628-2_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38628-2_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38627-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38628-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)