Bionanoimaging analysis in cell behavior study

The two emerging bionanotechnologies in biomolecular imaging, ´quantum dots´ (QD) and ´molecular beacon´ (MB), have made it possible to detect molecular markers in a cell for disease early detection, diagnosis, and treatment. The success of these techniques depends on the accurate and efficient analysis of the imaging data produced by these techniques. The processing involves - segmentation of the QD or MB particles, their 2-D tracking on cell membrane using multiple frames, colocalization, and 3-D tracking in cell plasm. In this paper, we use topologically adaptive snakes for segmentation of QD and MB. We use the centroid-based method to do 2D tracking of QD. Based on the 2-D tracking framework, the 3-D tracking in cell plasm involves 3-D graphical rendering methods such as voxel growing. In addition, we incorporate light emission property of nanoparticles to improve the accuracy of 2-D and 3-D tracking or in vivo cell study.