Systematic Analysis of Jurkat T-Cell Deformation in Fluorescence Microscopy Data

Abstract

In the adaptive immune system, Calcium (Ca²⁺) is acting as a fundamental on-switch. Fluorescence microscopy is used to study the underlying mechanisms. However, living cells introduce motion and for the analysis of (sub-)cellular Ca²⁺ activity a precise motion analysis is necessary. We present an image based workflow to detect and analyze cell motion. We evaluate our approach on Jurkat T-cells using cell motion as observed from actual time series of cell images. Results indicate, that our method is able to detect deformation with an error of 0.2222 ± 0.086μm which is in the range of the image resolution, showing that accurate cell deformation detection is possible and feasible.