Drosophila melanogaster

Microtubule end tracking in live cell fluorescent images of Drosophila oocyte involves overcoming the following challenges, which can be tackled by a series of preprocessing steps and tracking described in Parton et al (2011) * **illumination flicker & photobleaching**: suppress by normalising intensities, e.g. using Image->Adjust->Bleach Correction in Fiji/ImageJ * **uneven illumination**: Fourier bandpass filtering (e.g. Process->FFT->Bandpass Filter) preserves features within a selected size range * **high background / poor contrast**: foreground filter, e.g. Temporal Median filter * **tracking**: e.g. TrackMate in Fiji/ImageJ (segmentation using DoG detector)

This macro is meant to segment the cells of a multicellular tissue. It is written for images showing highly contrasted and uniformly stained cell membranes. The geometry of the cells and their organization is automatically extracted and exported to an ImageJ results table. This includes: Cell area, major, minor fitted ellipse radii + major axis orientation and number of neighbors of the cells. Manual correction of the automatic segmentation is supported (merge split cells, split merged cells).

Sample image data is available in the documentation page.