FluoroCellTrack

FluoroCellTrack analyzes high-throughput droplet microfluidic bright-field and fluorescence microscopy images to detect droplets and cells, quantify encapsulation, and produce quantitative measures of cellular responses and intracellular fluorescence.

Key Features:

• Comprehensive data import: Imports images from bright-field and fluorescence microscopy for analysis of cellular dynamics within individual droplets.
• Implementation: Implemented in Python and operates independently of specific hardware platforms to handle diverse datasets from fluorescence detection systems.
• Dual detection mechanism: Employs Circular Hough Transform (CHT) for droplet detection and edge detection, dilation, erosion, segmentation, and thresholding based on radius and area for cell/contour identification.
• Overlay for encapsulation information: Overlays center maps of detected droplets and contours to determine encapsulation relationships between droplets and detected objects.
• Accuracy and performance: Demonstrates similarity to manual analysis with average accuracy of approximately 92–99% and reduces cohort analysis time to about 30 minutes versus ~20 hours manually.
• Droplet tracking: Provides capability to monitor and track individual droplets over time for dynamic analyses.

Scientific Applications:

• Quantification of cellular response to drugs: Enables measurement and analysis of cellular reactions to pharmacological agents within isolated droplets.
• Droplet tracking: Facilitates temporal monitoring of individual droplets to study dynamic processes.
• Intracellular fluorescence analysis: Supports detailed examination of intracellular fluorescence signals for studies of intracellular dynamics.

Methodology:

Images are imported and preprocessed; droplet detection uses Circular Hough Transform (CHT); cell/contour identification uses edge detection, dilation, erosion, segmentation, and thresholding with radius and area criteria; detected features are overlaid (center maps) and integrated for encapsulation analysis.