Quantitative Analysis of Inter-object Spatial Relationships in Biological Images

Study of spatial relations between biological objects is crucial for understanding biological processes. Monitoring drug or particle delivery inside cells and studying the dynamics of subcellular proteins are some of the examples. Biological applications have varying demands in terms of speed and accuracy. While accuracy may be the most important factor for small-scale biology, speed is also a concern for high-content/high-throughput screening applications. In this paper we present a variety of algorithms for inter-object spatial relations in two-and three-dimensional space. These algorithms provide trade-off between speed and accuracy, depending on the requirements of the application. Results for speed and accuracy are reported for real as well as synthetic data sets.