Time-lapse microscopy is the only method that can directly capture the dynamics and heterogeneity of fundamental cellular processes at the single-cell level with high temporal resolution. Successful application of single-cell time-lapse microscopy requires automated segmentation and tracking of hundreds of individual cells over several time points....
Quantitative phase microscopy (QPM) enables studies of living biological systems without exogenous labels. To increase the utility of QPM, machine-learning methods have been adapted to extract additional information from the quantitative phase data. Previous QPM approaches focused on fluid flow systems or time-lapse images that provide high through...
Phase imaging techniques are an invaluable tool in microscopy for quickly examining thin transparent specimens. Existing methods are limited to either simple and inexpensive methods that produce only qualitative phase information (e.g. phase contrast microscopy, DIC), or significantly more elaborate and expensive quantitative methods. Here we demon...
Sporulation in Bacillus subtilis is a paradigm of bacterial development, which involves the interaction between a larger mother cell and a smaller forespore. The mother cell and the forespore activate different genetic programs, leading to the production of sporulation-specific proteins. A critical gap in our understanding of sporulation is how veg...
Relapsing fever agents like Borrelia hermsii undergo multiphasic antigenic variation that is attributable to spontaneous DNA non-reciprocal transpositions at a particular locus in the genome. This genetic switch results in a new protein being expressed on the cell surface, allowing cells with that phenotype to escape prevailing immunity. But the sw...
We present a new technique for quantitative phase and amplitude microscopy from a single color image with coded illumination. Our system consists of a commercial brightfield microscope with one hardware modification-an inexpensive 3D printed condenser insert. The method, color-multiplexed Differential Phase Contrast (cDPC), is a single-shot variant...
The ability to distinguish macrophage subtypes noninvasively could have diagnostic potential in cancer, atherosclerosis, and diabetes, where polarized M1 and M2 macrophages play critical and often opposing roles. Current methods to distinguish macrophage subtypes rely on tissue biopsy. Optical imaging techniques based on light scattering are of int...
It remains extremely challenging to dissect the cooperative influence of multiple extracellular matrix (ECM) parameters on cell behaviour. This stems in part from a lack of easily deployable strategies for the combinatorial variation of matrix biochemical and biophysical properties. Here we describe a simple, high-throughput platform based on light...
Published in Light and Video Microscopy
This paper proposes a bio-driven algorithm that detects cell regions automatically in the human embryonic stem cell (hESC) images obtained using a phase contrast microscope. The algorithm uses both statistical intensity distributions of foreground/hESCs and background/substrate as well as cell property for cell region detection. The intensity distr...
