Computing phagocytosis index for high-throughput applications

Phagocytes defend us against infection by ingesting invading microorganisms. This process is called phagocytosis. Specific assays have been developed to monitor, for example, the effect of immunomodulatory drugs on phagocytosis. High-throughput microscopy is used to analyze entire studies. As it is simply infeasible to evaluate such large data sets, as usually produced by high-throughput microscopes, robust image analysis algorithms are needed. The proposed method is used to compute the phagocytosis index, a quantitative measurement which allows to analyze entire concentration studies. The focus of this paper is the development of an automatic approach that does not require any user-interactive parameter settings. In addition the method is capable of dealing with a wide range of image contrasts since the quality of the assay itself can vary. Both manual scoring and consistency with biological data are used to validate the results