Section: New Software and Platforms

GcoPS

Keywords: Photonic imaging - Fluorescence microscopy - Image processing - Statistic analysis

Functional Description: The GcoPS (Geo-Co-Positioning System) software is dedicated to the co-localization of fluorescence image pairs for both conventional and super-resolution microscopy. The procedure is only controlled by a p-value and tests whether the Pearson correlation between two binary images is significantly positive. Colocalization amounts here to quantifying the interaction strength by the area/volume of the intersection between the two binary images viewed as random distributions of geometrical objects. Under mild assumptions, it turns out that the appropriately normalized Pearson correlation follows a standard normal distribution under the null hypothesis if the number of image pixels is large. Unlike previous methods, GcoPS handles 2D and 3D images, variable SNRs and any kind of cell shapes. It is able to co-localize large regions with small dots, as it is the case in TIRF-PALM experiments and to detect negative co-localization. The typical processing time is two milliseconds per image pair in 2D and a few seconds in 3D, with no dependence on the number of objects per image. In addition, the method provides maps to geo-co-localize molecule interactions in specific image regions.

• Participants: Thierry Pécot, Frédéric Lavancier, Charles Kervrann and Liu Zengzhen

• Partners: Université de Nantes - UMR 144 CNRS - Institut Curie - Hollings Cancer Center at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston SC, USA

• Contact: Charles Kervrann

• Publication: Testing independence between two random sets for the analysis of colocalization in bioimaging

• URL: http://icy.bioimageanalysis.org/plugin/GcoPS