Section: Overall Objectives

Challenges in biological image processing and quantitative microscopy

In most cases, modern microscopy in biology is characterized by a large number of dimensions that fit perfectly with the complexity of biological features: two or three spatial dimensions, at macro to nano-scales, and one temporal dimension, sometimes spectrally defined and often corresponding to one particular biomolecular species. Dynamic microscopy is also characterized by the nature of the observable objects (cells, organelles, single molecules, ...), by the large number of small size and mobile elements (chromosomes, vesicles, ...), by the complexity of the dynamic processes involving many entities or group of entities sometimes interacting, by particular phenomena of coalescence often linked to image resolution problems, finally by the association, dissociation, recomposition or constitution of those entities (such as membrane fusion and budding). Thus, the corpus of data to be considered for any analysis involving multiple image series acquisitions is massive (up to few GigaBytes per hour). Therefore, it becomes necessary to facilitate and rationalize the production of those multidimensional data, to improve post acquisition analysis, and to favor the organization and the interpretation of the information extracted from this data corpus. It motivates innovative methods and concepts for data fusion, image registration, super-resolution, data mining... More importantly, modern microscopy has led to recent breakthroughs, related to the potential interactions between molecules in the cell. A long-term research consists now in inferring the relationships between the dynamics of macromolecules and their functions. Research on computational biology and quantitative bioimaging lies at the core of the activities of Serpico team.