Collection

MorphoGraphX is a free Linux application for the visualization and analysis of 3D biological datasets. Developed by researchers, it is primarily used for the analysis and quantification of 3D live-imaged confocal data sets.

The main research interests adressed by MorphoGraphX are:

• Shape extraction
• Growth analysis
• Signal quantification
• Protein localization

hIPNAT (hIPNAT: Image Processing for NeuroAnatomy and Tree-like structures) is a set of tools for the analysis of images of neurons and other tree-like morphologies. It is written for ImageJ, the de facto standard in scientific image processing. It is available through the ImageJ Neuroanatomy update site.

CIDRE is a retrospective illumination correction method for optical microscopy. It is designed to correct collections of images by building a model of the illumination distortion directly from the image data. Larger image collections provide more robust corrections. Details of the method are described in

K. Smith, Y. Li, F. Ficcinini, G. Csucs, A. Bevilacqua, and P. Horvath
CIDRE: An Illumination Correction Method for Optical Microscopy, Nature Methods 12(5), 2015, doi:10.1038/NMETH.3323

Vaa3D is a handy, fast, and versatile 3D/4D/5D Image Visualization and Analysis System for Bioimages and Surface Objects. It also provides many unique functions that you may not find in other software. It is Open Source, and supports a very simple and powerful plugin interface and thus can be extended and enhanced easily.

Vaa3D is cross-platform (Mac, Linux, and Windows). This software suite is powerful for visualizing large- or massive-scale (giga-voxels and even tera-voxels) 3D image stacks and various surface data. Vaa3D is also a container of powerful modules for 3D image analysis (cell segmentation, neuron tracing, brain registration, annotation, quantitative measurement and statistics, etc) and data management. This makes Vaa3D suitable for various bioimage informatics applications, and a nice platform to develop new 3D image analysis algorithms for high-throughput processing. In short, Vaa3D streamlines the workflow of visualization-assisted analysis.

Vaa3D can render 5D (spatial-temporal) data directly in 3D volume-rendering mode; it supports convenient and interactive local and global 3D views at different scales... it comes with a number of plugins and toolboxes. Importantly, you can now write your own plugins to take advantage of the Vaa3D platform, possibly within minutes!

Summary

QuimP is software for tracking cellular shape changes and dynamic distributions of fluorescent reporters at the cell membrane. QuimP's unique selling point is the possibility to aggregate data from many cells in form of spatio-temporal maps of dynamic events, independently of cell size and shape. QuimP has been successfully applied to address a wide range of problems related to cell movement in many different cell types. 

Introduction

In transmembrane signalling the cell membrane plays a fundamental role in localising intracellular signalling components to specific sites of action, for example to reorganise the actomyosin cortex during cell polarisation and locomotion. The localisation of different components can be directly or indirectly visualised using fluorescence microscopy, for high-throughput screening commonly in 2D. A quantitative understanding demands segmentation and tracking of whole cells and fluorescence signals associated with the moving cell boundary, for example those associated with actin polymerisation at the cell front of locomoting cells. As regards segmentation, a wide range of methods can be used (threshold based, region growing, active contours or level sets) to obtain closed cell contours, which then are used to sample fluorescence adjacent to the cell edge in a straightforward manner. The most critical step however is cell edge tracking, which links points on contours at time t to corresponding points at t+1. Optical flow methods have been employed, but usually fail to meet the requirement that total fluorescence must not change. QuimP uses a method (ECMM, electrostatic contour migration method (Tyson et al., 2010) which has been shown to outperform traditional level set methods. ECMM minimises the sum of path lengths connecting all pairs of points, equivalent to minimising the energy required for cell deformation. The original segmentation based on an active contour method and outline tracking algorithms have been described in (Dormann et al., 2002; Tyson et al., 2010; Tyson et al., 2014).