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Concept
Bioimage informatics
Summary
Bioimage informatics is a subfield of bioinformatics and computational biology. It focuses on the use of computational techniques to analyze bioimages, especially cellular and molecular images, at large scale and high throughput. The goal is to obtain useful knowledge out of complicated and heterogeneous image and related metadata.
Automated microscopes are able to collect large numbers of images with minimal intervention. This has led to a data explosion, which absolutely requires automatic processing. Additionally, and surprisingly, for several of these tasks, there is evidence that automated systems can perform better than humans. In addition, automated systems are unbiased, unlike human based analysis whose evaluation may (even unconsciously) be influenced by the desired outcome.
There has been an increasing focus on developing novel , computer vision, data mining, database and visualization techniques to extract, compare, search and manage the biological knowledge in these data-intensive problems.
Several data collection systems and platforms are used, which require different methods to be handled optimally.
Fluorescent microscopy
Fluorescent microscopy allows the direct visualization of molecules at the subcellular level, in both live and fixed cells. Molecules of interest are marked with either green fluorescent protein (GFP), another fluorescent protein, or a fluorescently-labeled antibody. Several types of microscope are regularly used: widefield, confocal, or two-photon. Most microscopy system will also support the collection of time-series (movies).
In general, filters are used so that each dye is imaged separately (for example, a blue filter is used to image Hoechst, then rapidly switched to a green filter to image GFP). For consumption, the images are often displayed in false color by showing each channel in a different color, but these may not even be related to the original wavelengths used. In some cases, the original image could even have been acquired in non-visible wavelengths (infrared is common).
Official source
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