Section: New Results

Ascidian embryo cell lineage registration in 3D+$t$ image sequences

Participants : Gaël Michelin, Grégoire Malandain.

This work is made in collaboration with Julien Laussu, Patrick Lemaire (CRBM, CNRS, Montpellier 1 & 2 university) and Christophe Godin (Inria Virtual Plants team, Montpellier).

Until gastrulation, ascidian embryos have a very stereotyped and invariant development, so that it is possible to establish a cell-to-cell mapping between two developing embryos at a same developing stage. We proposed in a previous work a method for geometric registration that determines a linear (affine) transformation superimposing a test embryo into a reference one and that draws a cell-to-cell mapping up  [20].

In the current work, we extend this framework for the determination of cell lineage mapping between two developing ascidian embryos by propagating an initial cell-to-cell mapping to the cell descendants since the cell correspondences are inherited for the ascidian embryo (figure 12 (top)). To do so, we use the information provided by the 3D+$t$ sequences segmentation and lineage such as cell volume, life-span and relative position in the embryos. We experimented on real data the proposed cell lineage registration framework (figure 12 (bottom)).

Figure 12. Ascidian embryo cell lineage registration. Top: sub-lineages from embryos $E$ and $F$ showing labels $c$ and $c^{\text{'}}$ in correspondence with their birth ($t_b$) and death ($t_d$) (respectively $t_b^{\text{'}}$ and $t_d^{\text{'}}$) time-points, mother cells ($b$ and $b^{\text{'}}$) and daughters ($(d,e)$ and $(d^{\text{'}},e^{\text{'}})$) along embryo lifespans ${\tau }_E$ and ${\tau }_F$. Bottom: result of lineages registration between two developing embryos. Mapped cells appear with the same color. Cells in white are those for whom no corresponding cell was found in the other embryo. First column: cell-to-cell initial mapping.