Object counting

ModularImageAnalysis (MIA) is an ImageJ plugin which provides a modular framework for assembling image and object analysis workflows. Detected objects can be transformed, filtered, measured and related. Analysis workflows are batch-enabled by default, allowing easy processing of high-content datasets.

MIA is designed for “out-of-the-box” compatibility with spatially-calibrated 5D images, yielding measurements in both pixel and physical units.  Functionality can be extended both internally, via integration with SciJava’s scripting interface, and externally, with Java modules that extend the MIA framework. Both have full access to all objects and images in the analysis workspace.

Workflows are, by default, compatible with batch processing multiple files within a single folder. Thanks to Bio-Formats, MIA has native support for multi-series image formats such as Leica .lif and Nikon .nd2.

Workflows can be automated from initial image loading through processing, object detection, measurement extraction, visualisation, and data exporting. MIA includes near 200 modules integrated with key ImageJ plugins such as Bio-Formats, TrackMate and Weka Trainable Segmentation.

Module(s) can be turned on/off dynamically in response to factors such as availability of images and objects, user inputs and measurement-based filters. Switches can also be added to “processing view” for easy workflow control.

MIA is developed in the Wolfson Bioimaging Facility at the University of Bristol.

The tool allows to measure the area of the invading spheroïd in a 3D cell invasion assay. It can also count and measure the area of the nuclei within the spheroïd.

QuantiFish is a quantification program intended for measuring fluorescence in images of zebrafish, although use with images of other specimens is possible. This package is geared towards analysis of fluorescent infection models. The software is designed to automate processing of images of single fish, and outputs results as a .csv file. Alongside measures of total fluorescence above a threshold, this package also introduces several measures for dissemination and distribution of fluorescence throughout the specimen.

CLIJ2 is a GPU-accelerated image processing library for ImageJ/Fiji, Icy, Matlab and Java. It comes with hundreds of operations for filtering, binarizing, labeling, measuring in images, projections, transformations and mathematical operations for images. While most of these are classical image processing operations, CLIJ2 also allows performing operations on matrices potentially representing neighborhood relationships between cells and pixels.

CLIJ2 was developed to process images from fluorescence microscopy data of developing cells, tissues, organoids and organisms.

3-D density kernel estimation (DKE-3-D) method, utilises an ensemble of random decision trees for counting objects in 3D images. DKE-3-D avoids the problem of discrete object identification and segmentation, common to many existing 3-D counting techniques, and outperforms other methods when quantification of densely packed and heterogeneous objects is desired. 

This notebook uses the rOMERO-gateway and EBImage to process an Image associated to the paper 'Timing of gene expression in a cell-fate decision system'.

The Image "Pos22" is taken from the dataset idr0040-aymoz-singlecell/experimentA/YDA306_AGA1y_PRM1r_Mating. It is a timelapse Image with 42 timepoints separated by 5 minutes. This Image is used to fit a model for the growth of the yeast cells. The notebook does not replicate any of the analysis of the above mentioned paper.

Its purpose is mainly to demonstrate the use of Jupyter, rOMERO-gateway and EBimage.

What it does:

• For each time point of one movie:
  • Read the image for this time point  from the IDR
  • Threshold the images and count the cells using EBimage functions
• Fit an exponential model to the count of cells against time to get a coefficient of grow (exponential factor)

This one example workflow from the Cell Profiler(CP)  Examples . CP is commonly used to count cells or other objects as well as percent-positives, by measuring the per-cell staining intensity. This pipeline shows how to do both of these tasks, and demonstrates how various modules may be used to accomplish the same result. 

In a few words, it used the IdentifyPrimaryObject module of CellProfiler to detect nuclei from a channel (e.g DAPI), then again the same module on another channel to detect another probe (e.g some particular histone)  .

Then objects (nuclei) are related to the second object (Histone), to create a parent child-relation ship: where nuclei can have histone has child. Nuclei are then filtered according to the property of having histone (positive) or not having histone (negtiveobject) related to them.  If needed, nuclei can be expanded in order to include touching object rather than object inside only.

The percentage of positive nuclei vs total number of nuclei can then be computed using the CalculateMath Module.

An ImageJ plugin for DEFCoN, the fluorescence spot counter based on fully convolutional neural networks