Real-Time Image Analysis of Living Cellular-Biology Measurements of Intelligent Chemistry

This paper reports on the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) DOE Initiative in Image Science and Technology (ISAT) research, which is developing algorithms and software tool sets for remote sensing and biological applications. In particular, the PNNL ISAT work is applying these research results to the automated analysis of real-time cellular biology imagery to assist the biologist in determining the correct data collection region for the current state of a conglomerate of living cells in three-dimensional motion. The real-time computation of the typical 120 MB/sec multi-spectral data sets is executed in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology, which has very high processing rates due to large-scale parallelism. The outcome of this artificial vision work will allow the biologist to work with imagery as a creditable set of dye-tagged chemistry measurements in formats for individual cell tracking through regional feature extraction, and animation visualization through individual object isolation/characterization of the microscopy imagery