Abstract

HERRERA-NAVARRO, A.M. et al. Intracellular Calcium Variation Analysis of Follicular Cells. Rev. mex. ing. bioméd [online]. 2013, vol.34, n.1, pp.71-87. ISSN 2395-9126.

This paper presents a method for the measurement of the variation of intracellular calcium in follicular cells. This proposal consists in two stages: (i) The detection of the cell's nuclei, and (ii) the analysis of the fluorescence variations. The first stage is performed with the modified-watershed transformation, where the marker process is controlled by establishing own criterion. The detection process homogenizes the luminance conditions through a morphological filter and uses as descriptors the edges of the cells. In the second stage, the variations of fluorescence are associated with changes in intracellular Ca²⁺, which are modeled as an exponential decay function. Then, we present a new morphological process called medium reconstruction process, that smoothes the data in the process of model creation. This process uses the information of under and over model of the signal, through the properties of reconstruction operators, keeping the internal structure of the original signal. Finally, using amphibian cells in an experimental process, the results obtained are showed after applying the proposal to a group of cells.

Keywords : cells; markers; segmentation; filtering.