Developmental Cell
Volume 36, Issue 1, 11 January 2016, Pages 103-116
Journal home page for Developmental Cell

Technology
EpiTools: An Open-Source Image Analysis Toolkit for Quantifying Epithelial Growth Dynamics

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2015.12.012Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Increasing time-lapse data increases the demand for automated image quantification

  • EpiTools, an open-source image analysis toolkit, addresses this need

  • EpiTools segments, tracks, and quantifies cell contours from 4D imaging data

  • EpiTools application provides insight into cell dynamics in the Drosophila wing disc

Summary

Epithelia grow and undergo extensive rearrangements to achieve their final size and shape. Imaging the dynamics of tissue growth and morphogenesis is now possible with advances in time-lapse microscopy, but a true understanding of their complexities is limited by automated image analysis tools to extract quantitative data. To overcome such limitations, we have designed a new open-source image analysis toolkit called EpiTools. It provides user-friendly graphical user interfaces for accurately segmenting and tracking the contours of cell membrane signals obtained from 4D confocal imaging. It is designed for a broad audience, especially biologists with no computer-science background. Quantitative data extraction is integrated into a larger bioimaging platform, Icy, to increase the visibility and usability of our tools. We demonstrate the usefulness of EpiTools by analyzing Drosophila wing imaginal disc growth, revealing previously overlooked properties of this dynamic tissue, such as the patterns of cellular rearrangements.

Key words

image analysis
epithelial dynamics
network description

Cited by (0)

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Co-first author