Abstract
Background: Understanding the cellular architecture is a fundamental problem in various biological studies. C. elegans is widely used as a model organism in these studies because of its unique fate determinations. In recent years, researchers have worked extensively on C. elegans to excavate the regulations of genes and proteins on cell mobility and communication. Although various algorithms have been proposed to analyze nucleus, cell shape features are not yet well recorded. This paper proposes a method to systematically analyze three-dimensional morphological cellular features. Results: Three-dimensional Membrane Morphological Segmentation (3DMMS) makes use of several novel techniques, such as statistical intensity normalization, and region filters, to pre-process the cell images. We then segment membrane stacks based on watershed algorithms. 3DMMS achieves high robustness and precision over different time points (development stages). It is compared with two state-of-the-art algorithms, RACE and BCOMS. Quantitative analysis shows 3DMMS performs best with the average Dice ratio of 97.7% at six time points. In addition, 3DMMS also provides time series of internal and external shape features of C. elegans. Conclusion: We have developed the 3DMMS based technique for embryonic shape reconstruction at the single-cell level. With cells accurately segmented, 3DMMS makes it possible to study cellular shapes and bridge morphological features and biological expression in embryo research.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 176 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | BMC Bioinformatics |
Volume | 20 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 8 Apr 2019 |
Scopus Subject Areas
- Structural Biology
- Biochemistry
- Molecular Biology
- Computer Science Applications
- Applied Mathematics
User-Defined Keywords
- 3D morphological segmentation
- C. elegans
- Shape features
- Watershed segmentation