Software Processing of Confocal Microscope Image Data

Office Of The Director, Nih

Investigators

Abstract

The sonic muscle of the Midshipman fish swimbladder has extraordinary capability to stretch and expand, thus serves as a good candidate for studying the elastic behavior of muscles in general. Basically, the intricate structure of the building blocks of the muscle provides its various functionalities. The muscle filament (sarcomere) consists of matrices of elastic titin (a huge protein molecule) filaments complemented with inextensible nebulin filaments. Various physical and chemical methods have been employed to study the properties and structures of these filaments. One way to study the physical structure is by visualizing 3D images of the relevant components. 3D images of fluorescence-tagged titin molecules in the muscle samples are obtainable from confocal or non-confocal (thick slice) light microscopic studies. The aim of this project is to use computer display and visualization techniques to provide information on the physical structural level of the protein matrices. What we needed for the initial phase of this project was to identify suitable software that would allow us: 1) to transfer data efficiently from the microscope to computer workstations; (2) to be able to process the images, including filtering, enhancement and segmentation; (3) to make measurements, including distance, and calculate statistics; (4) to be able to render and visualize data in 2D and 3D; (5) to be able to modify the software with relative ease; and (6) to work as interactively in real-time as possible. Several sets of image processing software have been tested under two popular operating systems, namely, Microsoft Windows and Linux. Under Windows98 we have tested the commercial package IDL (Research Systems,Inc.). Under Linux we have tested 3DViewnix (Medical Image Processing Group, University of Pennsylvania), ImageMagick (ImageMagick Studio), and OpenDX (IBM).