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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.

"we present a new fully automated 3D reconstruction algorithm, called TReMAP, short for Tracing, Reverse Mapping and Assembling of 2D Projections. Instead of tracing a 3D image directly in the 3D space as seen in majority of the tracing methods, we first trace the 2D projection trees in 2Dplanes, followed by reverse-mapping the resulting 2D tracing results back into the 3D space as 3D curves; then we use a minimal spanning tree (MST) method to assemble all the 3D curves to generate the final 3D reconstruction. Because we simplify a 3D reconstruction problem into 2D, the computational costs are reduced dramatically." 

Suitable for high throughput neuron image analysis (image sizes >10GB). This plugin can be used with default parameters or user-defined parameters.

"We have developed an automatic graph algorithm, called the all-path pruning (APP), to trace the 3D structure of a neuron. To avoid potential mis-tracing of some parts of a neuron, an APP first produces an initial over-reconstruction, by tracing the optimal geodesic shortest path from the seed location to every possible destination voxel/pixel location in the image. Since the initial reconstruction contains all the possible paths and thus could contain redundant structural components (SC), we simplify the entire reconstruction without compromising its connectedness by pruning the redundant structural elements, using a new maximal- covering minimal-redundant (MCMR) subgraph algorithm. We show that MCMR has a linear computational complexity and will converge. We examined the performance of our method using challenging 3D neuronal image datasets of model organisms (e.g. fruit fly)"

This plugin can be used with default parameters or user-defined parameters.

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).

SRRF is a high-performance analytical approach for Live-cell Super-Resolution Microscopy, provided as a fast GPU-enabled ImageJ plugin. SRRF is capable of extracting high-fidelity super-resolution information from TIRF, widefield and confocals using conventional fluorophores such as GFP. SRRF is capable of live-cell imaging over timescales ranging from minutes to hours.