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An Image Processing Algorithm for Facile and Reproducible Quantification of Vomocytosis
Neeraj Senthil1, Noah Pacifici1, Melissa Cruz-Acuña1
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California - Davis, Davis, California 95616, United States.
Chemical & Biomedical Imaging
|December 29, 2023
Summary
A new MATLAB algorithm automates the quantification of vomocytosis, a fungal pathogen escape process. This high-throughput tool significantly reduces analysis time and human error, accelerating research into fungal infections like Cryptococcus neoformans.
Area of Science:
- Immunology
- Microbiology
- Computational Biology
Background:
- Vomocytosis is the escape of fungal pathogens from host phagocytes without cell death.
- Manual analysis of time-lapse microscopy for vomocytosis is time-consuming and labor-intensive.
- Studying vomocytosis is crucial for understanding host-pathogen interactions and fungal virulence.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop an automated algorithm for high-throughput quantification of vomocytosis.
- To reduce the time and human error associated with analyzing vomocytosis in microscopy videos.
- To enable faster characterization of fungal strains, such as Cryptococcus neoformans (CN), for epidemiological and virulence studies.
Main Methods:
- A MATLAB algorithm was designed to analyze multichannel, time-lapse microscopy videos.
- The algorithm measures colocalization between phagocytes and fungal cells (CN).
- Fluorescently stained immune cells and CN were cocultured and imaged.
Main Results:
- The algorithm quantifies vomocytosis events with high throughput.
- Analysis time was reduced by 83%, from over 1 hour to 10 minutes per video.
- The tool minimizes human error in vomocytosis quantification.
Conclusions:
- The developed algorithm significantly streamlines the vomocytosis analysis pipeline.
- This tool accelerates research into the mechanisms of vomocytosis and fungal pathogenesis.
- Automated analysis facilitates rapid characterization of fungal strains for virulence and epidemiology research.
