Segmentation and tracking of mitochondrial motion in neural cultures

Abstract

The manual analysis of mitochondria travelling along the neural is a very time consuming and prone to human error task. That’s why in the recent years there have been many attempts at systems that can automatically do so. However, none of these attempts have offered programs that are valid for any type of mitochondrial trafficking images. This project aims to create a program that is able to do automated analysis of mitochondrial movement on neural cultures, more precisely for 2D images with a low framerate that have been obtained during a research carried out in Fundació Sant Joan de Déu. The project’s main goal is to take an already existing automated system that wasn’t working properly enough, identify its flaws and modify it in order to obtain a robust method that can offer reliable results. Moreover, the algorithm’s validation against an expert knowledge and an already existing and published software have been included in order to guarantee the quality of the program and its results.