Epithelia grow and undergo extensive rearrangements to achieve their final size and shape. Imaging the dynamics of tissue growth and morphogenesis is now possible with advances in time-lapse microscopy, but a true understanding of their complexities is limited by automated image analysis tools to extract quantitative data. To overcome such limitations, we have designed a new open-source image analysis toolkit called EpiTools. It provides user-friendly graphical user interfaces for accurately segmenting and tracking the contours of cell membrane signals obtained from 4D confocal imaging. It is designed for a broad audience, especially biologists with no computer-science background. Quantitative data extraction is integrated into a larger bioimaging platform, Icy, to increase the visibility and usability of our tools. We demonstrate the usefulness of EpiTools by analyzing Drosophila wing imaginal disc growth, revealing previously overlooked properties of this dynamic tissue, such as the patterns of cellular rearrangements.
Pubmed ID: 26766446 RIS Download
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An open community platform for bioimage informatics providing the software resources to visualize, annotate and quantify bioimaging data. To bridge the gap between developers and users, it combines: a) an open-source image analysis software, offering a powerful and flexible environment for developers such as applied mathematicians to write algorithms fast and efficiently; b) a common set of tools to view and manipulate data, and a set of plugins to perform specific quantification or analysis on images; c) a community-based website centralizing all plugins and resources to facilitate their management and maximize their visibility towards users. Workspaces are virtual groups of plugins dedicated to a specific application or image processing domain. By downloading a workspace, ICY automatically installs all corresponding plugins. The workspaces are enabled, but the editing section is not ready yet. If you want to publish a plugin on this website, its code has to be GPL. Source code is available and provided in each application download.
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