automated characterization of cell shape changes during amoeboid motility by skeletonization自动化特性的细胞形状变化由骨架化变形运动.pdfVIP

Xiong et al. BMC Systems Biology 2010, 4:33 /1752-0509/4/33 M E T H O D O L O G Y A R T I C L E Open Access Methodology article Automated characterization of cell shape changes during amoeboid motility by skeletonization 1 2 2 2 2 Yuan Xiong , Cathryn Kabacoff , Jonathan Franca-Koh , Peter N Devreotes , Douglas N Robinson and Pablo A Iglesias*1 Abstract Background: The ability of a cell to change shape is crucial for the proper function of many cellular processes, including cell migration. One type of cell migration, referred to as amoeboid motility, involves alternating cycles of morphological expansion and retraction. Traditionally, this process has been characterized by a number of parameters providing global information about shape changes, which are insufficient to distinguish phenotypes based on local pseudopodial activities that typify amoeboid motility. Results: We developed a method that automatically detects and characterizes pseudopodial behavior of cells. The method uses skeletonization, a technique from morphological image processing to reduce a shape into a series of connected lines. It involves a series of automatic algorithms including image segmentation, boundary smoothing, skeletonization and branch pruning, and takes into account the cell shape changes between successive frames to detect protrusion and retraction activities. In addition, the activities are clustered into different groups, each representing the protruding and retracting history of an individual pseudopod. Conclusions: We illustrate the algorithms on movies of chemotaxing Dictyostelium cells and show that our method makes it possible to capture the spatial and temporal dynamics as well as the stochastic features of the pseudop