Creation Of Algorithms For Quantitation Of Ex Vivo Organ Development Over Time
Date
2022-05
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Regenerative medicine is a promising field that would help overcome frequent issues of
donor supply shortages as well as immune complications in direct transplantations
through the generation of functional tissues and organs as replacements instead. The key
to this is to understand cell assembly and the mechanisms responsible for driving organ
and tissue morphogenesis. In order to do this, one of the first steps is the 3D spatial
identification of proliferating cells and quantitation of patterns and locations of growth
in the developing kidney over time in culture. However, the most immediate barrier to
being able to identify the proliferating sites is being able to effectively and efficiently
segment the individual images in the z-stack from the background for reconstruction.
Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to develop a variety of semi-automated algorithms
to address the complications of segmentation (AIM 1) and then proliferation (AIM 2)
for temporally acquired image stacks. Ultimately, the segmentation algorithm achieved
a fast and reliable semi-automated method for segmentation in comparison to original
hand segmentation, and the proliferation algorithm achieved an initial identification of
all proliferating cells in a z-stack and an initial plot of all of them in 3D space. Although
there are improvements that could be made, these algorithms are a great first step
towards truly understanding the mechanisms for proliferation within the developing
kidney and eventually cell assembly and regenerative medicine.
Description
Keywords
Regenerative medicine, Cell assembly, Kidney