Quantifying Newly Appearing Replication Foci In Cell Nuclei Based On 3D Non-Rigid Registration

Studying the dynamics of replication foci (RFi) in live cell microscopy images is important to understand the principles of DNA replication during the cell cycle. Whether new RFi appear in proximity to existing ones or randomly remains unclear. We propose two new methods to quantify newly appearing RFi which represent global and local spatial information. One method is based on proportion curves and a proximity score, and the second method is based on proximity distribution maps. In addition, to align the 3D temporal microscopy image sequences and improve quantification, we introduce a 3D elasticity model-based image registration method. Experiments using synthetic image data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. We also show analysis results of appearing RFi in real confocal microscopy images.