Image analysis in light sheet fluorescence microscopy images of transgenic zebrafish vascular development

Abstract

The zebrafish has become an established model to study vascular development and disease in vivo. However, despite it now being possible to acquire high-resolution data with state-of-the-art fluorescence microscopy, such as lightsheet microscopy, most data interpretation in pre-clinical neurovascular research relies on visual subjective judgement, rather than objective quantification. Therefore, we describe the development of an image analysis workflow towards the quantification and description of zebrafish neurovascular development. In this paper we focus on data acquisition by lightsheet fluorescence microscopy, data properties, image pre-processing, and vasculature segmentation, and propose future work to derive quantifications of zebrafish neurovasculature development.