BIOCELL: An Integrated and Interactive Tool for the Management of Linguistic and Eidetic Biological Data

Abstract

An exhaustive description of most biological data requires, beside a set of analytic information, an eidetic representation of the data itself. Biocell is a sort of biological atlas containing the linguistic and eidetic description of cell lines, plus a set of tools to correlate, insert, update, manipulate, display and delete such data.

Linguistic data are stored in the tables of a relational data base (Oracle) and include items such as karyotype, culture medium, taxonomic classification and bibliographic references. Eidetic data are stored as an unstructured data base of images (files) of cells cultured “in vitro” and acquired by a standard TV camera via optical microscopy in absorption, fluorescence and phase contrast.

A furnished set of software tools manages the access to the two data bases, both for enquires and updates, takes care of the consistency and completeness of stored data and realizes an image processing shell. With such tools, the user may correlate linguistic and eidetic data, search the relational data base tables for entries that meet various criteria, compare a laboratory image with cell images stored in the eidetic data base and even perform cell image processing in order to extract additional information such as morphometric and densitometric measurements.

Author to whom all the correspondence should be addressed (first author).