Detection of mitotic cell fraction in neural stem cells in cultures

Abstract

Automation of monitoring and analysis of cell culture condition is crucial for fast and reliable optimization of culturing methods e.g. in the regenerative medicine. So the method of automatic cells counting during culture monitoring and analysis of cells population, according to the model of cell culture development, is needed. To solve this general problem several separated problems should be investigated. One of them is the detection of cells which are soon going to divide, the moment when in the new frame two daughter cells could be expected in the place occupied by a single cell in the previous image. A method of localization of cells, which potentially would divide, is proposed in the paper. The mathematical morphology operations are used to detect small, rounded and converged cells which in potentia could be mitotic in a single frame from the sequence of images. The proposed method is applied to images of neural stem cells, made with the laser scanner confocal microscope. Results of the experiments are also presented in the paper. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.