Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) have developed a system based on computer vision techniques that allows automatic analysis of biomedical videos captured by microscopy in order to characterize and describe the behavior of the cells that appear in the images.
Neutrophil segmentation using the proposed system with ACME software. The segmentation is 3D, but an accumulated 2D version is shown. On the left, original microscopy image: blood vessels (green) and neutrophils (red). On the right, automatic segmentation using ACME (one colour for each cell). Credit: Carlos III University of Madrid These new techniques developed by the UC3M engineering team have been used for measurements on living tissues, in research carried out with scientists from the National Centre for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC in its Spanish acronym). As a result, the team discovered that neutrophils (a type of immune cell) show different behaviors in the blood during inflammatory processes and have identified that one of them, caused by the Fgr molecule, is associated with the development of cardiovascular disease. This work, recently published in the journal Nature, could allow the development of new treatments to minimize the consequences of heart attacks. Researchers from the Vithas Foundation, the University of Castilla-La Mancha, the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (ASTAR) and Harvard University (U.S.), among other centers, have participated in the study. "Our contribution consists of the design and development of a fully automatic system, based on computer vision techniques, which allows us to characterize the cells under study by analyzing videos captured by biologists using the intravital microscopy…