AN EFFECTIVE MITOSIS RECOGNITION AND SEGMENTATION TOOL FOR STEM CELL EXPLORATION

ABSTRACT Stem cells, on regenerative medicine, has enormous potential and impact, lead to the rapidly growing interest for tools to analyze and characterize the behaviors of these cells in-vitro in an automated and high throughput fashion. Measurement of the proliferative behaviors of cells in-vitro is important to many biomedical applications for the measurement of the accurate counting and localization of occurrences of mitosis, or cell division, in a cell culture. In this paper, the performance analysis of clustering for segmenting the mitosis detection is proposed. It is possible to manually identify incidents of mitosis because mitotic cells in culture tend to exhibit intensified surrounding halos under phase contrast illumination. This halo artifact is eliminated by using Diffusion corona filter. Using this method of segmentation precision of 97.1% is obtained which is 1.3% higher when compared with the semi Markov process of segmentation

Accurate cell segmentation in microscopy images using membrane patterns

Motivation: Identifying cells in an image (cell segmentation) is essential for quantitative single-cell biology via optical microscopy. Although a plethora of segmentation methods exists, accurate segmentation is challenging and usually requires problem-specific tailoring of algorithms. In addition, most current segmentation algorithms rely on a few basic approaches that use the gradient field of the image to detect cell boundaries. However, many microscopy protocols can generate images with characteristic intensity profiles at the cell membrane. This has not yet been algorithmically exploited to establish more general segmentation methods. Results: We present an automatic cell segmentation method that decodes the information across the cell membrane and guarantees optimal detection of the cell boundaries on a per-cell basis. Graph cuts account for the information of the cell boundaries through directional cross-correlations, and they automatically incorporate spatial constraints. The method accurately segments images of various cell types grown in dense cultures that are acquired with different microscopy techniques. In quantitative benchmarks and comparisons with established methods on synthetic and real images, we demonstrate significantly improved segmentation performance despite cell-shape irregularity, cell-to-cell variability and image noise. As a proof of concept, we monitor the internalization of green fluorescent protein-tagged plasma membrane transporters in single yeast cells. Availability and implementation: Matlab code and examples are available at http://www.csb.ethz.ch/tools/cellSegmPackage.zip. Contact: [email protected] or [email protected] Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics onlin

p38 MAPK and JNK Antagonistically Control Senescence and Cytoplasmic p16INK4A Expression in Doxorubicin-Treated Endothelial Progenitor Cells

Patients treated with low-dose anthracyclines often show late onset cardiotoxicity. Recent studies suggest that this form of cardiotoxicity is the result of a progenitor cell disease. In this study we demonstrate that Cord Blood Endothelial Progenitor Cells (EPCs) exposed to low, sub-apoptotic doses of doxorubicin show a senescence phenotype characterized by increased SA-b-gal activity, decreased TRF2 and chromosomal abnormalities, enlarged cell shape, and disarrangement of F-actin stress fibers accompanied by impaired migratory ability. P16 INK4A localizes in the cytoplasm of doxorubicin-induced senescent EPCs and not in the nucleus as is the case in EPCs rendered senescent by different stimuli. This localization together with the presence of an arrest in G2, and not at the G1 phase boundary, which is what usually occurs in response to the cell cycle regulatory activity of p16INK4A, suggests that doxorubicin-induced p16 INK4A does not regulate the cell cycle, even though its increase is closely associated with senescence. The effects of doxorubicin are the result of the activation of MAPKs p38 and JNK which act antagonistically. JNK attenuates the senescence, p16 INK4A expression and cytoskeleton remodeling that are induced by activated p38. We also found that conditioned medium from doxorubicin-induced senescent cardiomyocytes does not attract untreated EPCs, unlike conditioned medium from apoptotic cardiomyocytes which has a strong chemoattractant capacity. In conclusion, this study provides a better understanding of the senescence of doxorubicin-treated EPCs, which may be helpful in preventing and treating late onset cardiotoxicity

Limbostomy: Longitudinal Intravital Microendoscopy in Murine Osteotomies

Bone healing involves the interplay of immune cells, mesenchymal cells, and vasculature over the time course of regeneration. Approaches to quantify the spatiotemporal aspects of bone healing at cellular resolution during long bone healing do not yet exist. Here, a novel technique termed Limbostomy is presented, which combines intravital microendoscopy with an osteotomy. This design allows a modular combination of an internal fixator plate with a gradient refractive index (GRIN) lens at various depths in the bone marrow and can be combined with a surgical osteotomy procedure. The field of view (FOV) covers a significant area of the fracture gap and allows monitoring cellular processes in vivo. The GRIN lens causes intrinsic optical aberrations which have to be corrected. The optical system was characterized and a postprocessing algorithm was developed. It corrects for wave front aberration-induced image plane deformation and for background and noise signals, enabling us to observe subcellular processes. Exemplarily, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze angiogenesis in bone regeneration. We make use of a transgenic reporter mouse strain with nucleargreen fluorescent protein and membrane-bound tdTomato under the Cadherin-5 promoter. We observe two phases of vascularization. First, rapid vessel sprouting pervades the FOV within 3-4 days after osteotomy. Second, the vessel network continues to be dynamically remodeled until the end of our observation time, 14 days after surgery. Limbostomy opens a unique set of opportunities and allows further insight on spatiotemporal aspects of bone marrow biology, for example, hematopoiesis, analysis of cellular niches, immunological memory, and vascularization in the bone marrow during health and disease

Bone Marrow-Derived Cells from Male Donors Do Not Contribute to the Endometrial Side Population of the Recipient

Accumulated evidence demonstrates the existence of bone marrow-derived cells origin in the endometria of women undergoing bone marrow transplantation (BMT). In these reports, cells of a bone marrow (BM) origin are able to differentiate into endometrial cells, although their contribution to endometrial regeneration is not yet clear. We have previously demonstrated the functional relevance of side population (SP) cells as the endogenous source of somatic stem cells (SSC) in the human endometrium. The present work aims to understand the presence and contribution of bone marrow-derived cells to the endometrium and the endometrial SP population of women who received BMT from male donors. Five female recipients with spontaneous or induced menstruations were selected and their endometrium was examined for the contribution of XY donor-derived cells using fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH), telomapping and SP method investigation. We confirm the presence of XY donor-derived cells in the recipient endometrium ranging from 1.7% to 2.62%. We also identify 0.45–0.85% of the donor-derived cells in the epithelial compartment displaying CD9 marker, and 1.0–1.83% of the Vimentin-positive XY donor-derived cells in the stromal compartment. Although the percentage of endometrial SP cells decreased, possibly being due to chemotherapy applied to these patients, they were not formed by XY donor-derived cells, donor BM cells were not associated with the stem cell (SC) niches assessed by telomapping technique, and engraftment percentages were very low with no correlation between time from transplant and engraftment efficiency, suggesting random terminal differentiation. In conclusion, XY donor-derived cells of a BM origin may be considered a limited exogenous source of transdifferentiated endometrial cells rather than a cyclic source of BM donor-derived stem cells

Transmission Electron Microscopy of Platelets FROM Apheresis and Buffy-Coat-Derived Platelet Concentrates

Platelet concentrates are produced in order to treat bleeding disorders. They can be provided by apheresis machines or by pooling of buffy coats from four blood donations. During their manufacturing and storage, morphological alterations of platelets occur which can be demonstrated by transmission electron microscopy. Alterations range from slight and reversible changes, such as formation of small cell protrusions and swelling of the surface-connected open canalicular system, to severe structural changes, where platelets undergo transitions from discoid to ameboid shapes as a consequence of platelet activation. These alterations end in delivery of the contents of platelet granules as well as platelet involution caused by apoptosis and necrosis processes denoted as the platelet release reaction. Hereby, the involvement of the network of the open canalicular system, helping to deliver the contents of platelet granules into the surrounding milieu via pores, is distinctly shown by electron tomography. As a consequence of platelet activation, a delivery of differently sized microparticles takes place which is thought to play an important role in the adverse reactions in some recipients of platelet concentrates. In this article, the formation and delivery of platelet microparticles is illustrated by electron tomography. Above all, the ultrastructural features of platelets and megakaryocytes are discussed in the context of the molecular characteristics of the plasma membrane and organelles including the different granules and the expression of receptors engaged in signaling during platelet activation. Starting from the knowledge of the ultrastructure of resting and activated platelets, a score classification is presented, allowing the evaluation of different activation stages in a reproducible manner. Examples of evaluations of platelet concentrates using electron microscopy are briefly reviewed. In the last part, experiments showing the interaction of platelets with bacteria are presented. Using the tracer ruthenium red, for staining of the plasma membrane and the open canalicular system of platelets as well as the bacterial wall, the ability of platelets to adhere and sequestrate bacteria by formation of small aggregates, but also to incorporate them into compartments of the open canalicular system which are separated from the surrounding milieu, was shown. In conclusion, electron microscopy is an appropriate tool for the investigation of the quality of platelet concentrates. It can efficiently support results on the functional state of platelets obtained by other methods such as flow cytometry and aggregometry

Process monitoring and control using live cell imaging for the manufacturing of cell therapies

Regenerative medicine (RM) represents a promising enabling technology to revolutionize healthcare. This said there are still major gaps between the commercial promise and the reality of the cell therapy sector of regenerative medicine. There is consensus to develop high through-put, automated technologies for the manufacture of RM products. Imaging methods will have the capacity to contribute to this technological gap for cell therapies and are particularly attractive to provide non-destructive monitoring with high spatial and temporal resolution. This work applied an automated, non-invasive phase contrast imaging platform (Cell-IQ) to measure, analyse and ultimately quantify image derived metrics for human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) as part of the colony forming unit (CFU) assay. This work has shown through thresholding and machine vision identification technology, imaging has the ability to improve the precision of current evaluation methods for cell culture, providing novel information regarding culture state and show image derived metrics to be predictive of future culture state. Building on this, differentiation through the addition of a growth factor cocktail highlighted how in-process monitoring enables protocol optimisation. After equilibrating the Cell-IQ incubator to a standard incubator, the progress of the CFU assay was monitored and image metrics representative of colony phenotype were analysed. Cell count, distance between cells and cell migration within individual colonies were identified to be informative and provide a degree of colony phenotype separation. Quantitative, novel, image derived metrics were identified that improve reliability through computer automation, cost by removing user verification and time by reducing the assay time from 14 days to 7 days. Non-invasive imaging provides a fantastic opportunity to create bespoke sampling frequencies to achieve desired precision for manufacturing cell therapies, this work has developed and shown improvement and a level of control to current culture process for ESCs and HSCs