Image processing for
molecular systems
The lectures will be structured according to the following
topics: Inside the cell ? the biophysics of mitosis; Basic image processing
techniques; Systems of cells ? building atlases of worms and fly brains. In the
last decade there has been a large advance in microscopy spurred by the advent
of high-speed CCD detectors, inexpensive lasers, and advances in staining
protocols. With regard to the last of these, one could argue that the major
advance provided by whole genome shotgun sequencing is that we can now
effectively light up particular proteins in particular cells with GFP and other
recombinant constructs precisely because the entire genome of the underlying
organism is known. It is my conviction that most of the meso-scale functioning
of the cell and many organism-level processes, such a neural functioning, will
be unraveled primarily with what is essentially direct observation using new
microscopy techniques. I believe microscopes are becoming high-throughput
instruments and an essential factor in the success of such a transition will be
the existence of algorithms and software that can reliably and automatically
extract information from tens of thousands of captured images. I will give
several lectures on current investigations in my group that should illustrate
the point made above and hopefully convince you that very interesting science
can be done in this way and that the computational problems involved are
interesting. Entertwined will be a basic tutorial on some of the myriad image
processing techniques that we have found to be useful in this context.