New computer vision system designed to analyze cells in microscope videos

Researchers at the University of Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) have developed a system based on computer vision technology that can automatically analyze biomedical videos captured by microscopes to describe the behavior of cells appearing in the images
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These new technologies, developed by the UC3M engineering team, have been used for measurements in living tissue and in studies with scientists from the National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC for short in Spanish)
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As a result, the team found that neutrophils, a type of immune cell, behave differently in the blood during inflammation, and determined that one of the behaviors caused by the Fgr molecule is associated with the development of cardiovascular disease

"Our contributions include the design and development of a fully automated system, based on computer vision techniques, which allows us to describe the study of cells by analyzing videos by biologists using in vivo microscopy techniques", said one of the authors of the work, Fernando ·Professor Diaz de Maria, head of the Multimedia Processing Group at UC3M
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Contrast that with traditional biological research, which is often supported by analysis of hundreds of manually identified cells, compared to thousands of cells whose shape, size, motion and relative The position of the blood vessels was automatically measured

The new system has several advantages in terms of time and precision, the researchers said
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In general, "it is not feasible to have a biologist segment and track cells with video for months on

The deep neural network tools these engineers rely on for cell segmentation and detection are basically algorithms that learn from examples, so in order to deploy the system in a new environment, it is necessary to generate enough examples to support their training
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These networks are part of the technology of machine learning, which in turn is a discipline in the field of artificial intelligence (AI)

The software implementing the system is generic and can be adapted to other problems within a few weeks
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"In fact, we have applied it to other different scenarios to study the immune behavior of T cells and dendritic cells in cancer tissues

In any case, when studying this field, researchers stress the importance of interdisciplinary team work
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Fernando Díaz de María concludes: "In this case, before real progress is made, it is important to recognize the communication effort between biologists, mathematicians and engineers, which is necessary to understand the basic concepts of other disciplines.

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