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Detection and Quantification of Neuron’s Cellular Bodies in C. elegans

Jorge M. Santos 1,2 and Daniel Dias 1
1. ISEP, School of Engineering, Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal
2. INEB, Biomedical Engineering Institute, Porto, Portugal

Abstract—Parkinson’s disease is a neuronal degenerative disease characterized by problems on movement ability originated by the presence of mutant forms of leucine-rich repeat kinase in neurons causing its degradation and death. Studying the mechanisms involved in this process is fundamental to find a desirable therapeutical treatment. On way this is being done is to use the Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a simple nematode, to model this disease and to simulate the influence of certain proteins and dysfunctions in the way the disease evolves. Laboratory experiments are being carried out to study this influence by submitting C. elegans to different conditions and analyzing how the degradation evolves. Images of C. elegans are taken in several stages of the process and several characteristics are extracted to quantify the degradation. In this work, we implement a pipeline using Matlab and CellProfiler to automatize and speedup this process and to alleviate the burden of doing it manually. Preliminary results are very promising and motivate us to continue with this work.

Index Terms—detection, cellular bodies, C. elegans, Parkinson’s disease

Cite: Jorge M. Santos and Daniel Dias, "Detection and Quantification of Neuron’s Cellular Bodies in C. elegans," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 99-104, December 2016. doi: 10.18178/joig.4.2.99-104