Confocal microscopy

XuvTools (pronounced “ex-you-vee-tools”) is a fully automated 3D stitching software for biomedical image data, typically confocal microscopy images. XuvTools runs on Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, Linux and Apple Mac computers. It supports 32 and 64bit operating systems (with 64bit highly preferred). XuvTools is free and open source software (see Licensing), so you can start using it immediately. Go to Downloads and give it a try. The goal of XuvTools is to provide tools, that combine multiple microscopic recordings to obtain a larger field of view (“stitching”) and a higher dynamic range (“HDR” recombination), or better resolution (multi view reconstruction), and to make these tools publicly available.

Rigid registration of time series in 3D. A video tutorial is available (be careful of sounds, the video automatically starts!): [Sample Drift Correction Following 4D Confocal Time-lapse Imaging](http://www.jove.com/video/51086/sample-drift-correction-following-4d-co…)

The goal of this workflow is to track cells captured in a time-lapse movie of a syncytial blastoderm stage Drosophila embryo and quantify their movement.

This example shows an example of object tracking. This pipeline analyzes a time-lapse experiment to identify the cells and track them from frame to frame, which is challenging since the cells are also moving. In addition, this pipeline also extracts metadata from the filename and uses groups the images by metadata in order to independently process several sequences of images and output the measurements of each.

Sample images

A portion of a time lapse movie of a syncytial blastoderm stage Drosophila embryo with a GFP-histone gene which renders chromatin fluorescent in live embryos. The movie shows nuclear divisions 10 through 13.

Victoria Foe made this movie on a Bio-Rad Radiance 2000 laser scanning confocal microscope using a 40X 1.3NA oil objective. The frames are 7 seconds apart and plays at 30 frames per second

GFP-histone transformed files provided by Rob Saint

V.Foe and G.Odell, . 26 July 2001

Neuron studio is a software package to reconstruct neurons from 3D confocal images. Reconstruction can be done manually, semi-manually or fully automatic. The images as well as the detected objects are rendered in 3D. A spine detection and classification function is also included. Results can be exported as a text file with coords of the spines. It seems that active development has stopped in 2009. NeuronStudio is being developed at the Computational Neurobiology and Imaging Center (CNIC), a research laboratory at the Neuroscience Department of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

NeuronStudio can be used with default parameters or user-defined parameters (Fully or semi-automated).