Automated quantification of cell endocytosis using active contours and wavelets

Cellular endocytosis is a mechanism of great interest in biology, for it regulates the communication between the cell and the external medium. With recent advances in fluorescence microscopy, endocytosis has become a popular candidate for image-based high content screening campains. In this context, we have developed an automated framework comprising robust cell segmentation using coupled shape-constrained active contours and efficient endosome extraction using an isotropic undecimated wavelet transform. The resulting method has few parameters and is able to analyze tens of cells per image in the order of seconds. Validation is performed by experimentally confirming previously published results obtained through manual analysis.