The 'Confocal' project

The biological aspect

Confocal miscrosopy is a leading edge microscopy technique which allows to obtain 3D/multi-channel images, thanks to a laser beam slicing through (3D) the substrat with different wave lengths (multi-channel).

A typical 'confocal' image, with a neural cell surrounded by clusters of markers (proteins) of variable densities.

As part of the understanding effort of the neural system working and growing mechanism, IBCM biologists are interested in studying the various proteins appearing at the surface of the neural cell and the way one protein may be related to another.

The image processing aspect

The LTS has been asked to develop an automatic segmentation algorithm, able to isolate the markers (proteins) clusters.

The program output: segmented image, where each different color identifies an individual cluster of markers.

Once a segmented (labeled) image has been extracted, it is an easy task to compute the various features the biologists are asking for, such as: the overall clusters quantity, their size distribution, the spatial correlation between the clusters of the different channels, etc…

This application has been built using Matlab® and external C++ routines.