Skip to main content
SHARE
Publication

Analysis of Tight Junction Formation and Integrity...

by Mahmut Karakaya, Ryan A Kerekes, Jennifer L Morrell-falvey, Carmen M Foster, Scott T Retterer
Publication Type
Conference Paper
Book Title
2012 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC),
Publication Date
Page Numbers
3724 to 3727
Conference Name
The 34th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society
Conference Location
San Diego, California, United States of America
Conference Sponsor
IEEE
Conference Date
-

In this paper, we study segmentation of tight junctions and analyze the formation and integrity of tight junctions in large-scale confocal image stacks, a challenging biological problem because of the low spatial resolution images and the presence of breaks in tight junction structure. We present an automated, three-step processing approach for tight junction analysis. In our approach, we first localize each individual nucleus in the image by using thresholding, morphological filters and active contours. By using each nucleus position as a seed point, we automatically segment the cell body based on the active contour. We then use an intensity-based skeletonization algorithm to generate the boundary regions for each cell, and features are extracted from tight junctions associated with each cell to assess tight junction continuity. Based on qualitative results and quantitative comparisons, we show that we are able to automatically segment tight junctions and compute relevant features that provide a quantitative measure of tight junction formation to which the permeability of the cell monolayer can ultimately be correlated.