Department of Electrical Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
BMC Bioinformatics. 2013 May 16;14:162. doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-14-162.
Calcium (Ca2+) propagates within tissues serving as an important information carrier. In particular, cilia beat frequency in oviduct cells is partially regulated by Ca2+ changes. Thus, measuring the calcium density and characterizing the traveling wave plays a key role in understanding biological phenomena. However, current methods to measure propagation velocities and other wave characteristics involve several manual or time-consuming procedures. This limits the amount of information that can be extracted, and the statistical quality of the analysis.
Our work provides a framework based on image processing procedures that enables a fast, automatic and robust characterization of data from two-filter fluorescence Ca2+ experiments. We calculate the mean velocity of the wave-front, and use theoretical models to extract meaningful parameters like wave amplitude, decay rate and time of excitation.
Measurements done by different operators showed a high degree of reproducibility. This framework is also extended to a single filter fluorescence experiments, allowing higher sampling rates, and thus an increased accuracy in velocity measurements.
钙 (Ca2+) 在组织内传播，充当重要的信息载体。特别是，输卵管细胞纤毛的拍打频率部分受 Ca2+ 变化的调节。因此，测量钙密度并描述传播波在理解生物现象方面起着关键作用。然而，目前测量传播速度和其他波特征的方法涉及多个手动或耗时的步骤。这限制了可以提取的信息量和分析的统计质量。
我们的工作提供了一个基于图像处理程序的框架，可快速、自动和稳健地对来自两个滤波器荧光 Ca2+ 实验的数据进行特征描述。我们计算波前的平均速度，并使用理论模型提取有意义的参数，如波幅、衰减率和激发时间。
不同操作员的测量结果显示出高度的可重复性。该框架还扩展到单滤波器荧光实验，允许更高的采样率，从而提高速度测量的准确性。
