PLoS Computational Biology (Jan 2012)

Visualization and analysis of 3D microscopic images.

  • Fuhui Long,
  • Jianlong Zhou,
  • Hanchuan Peng

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002519
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8, no. 6
p. e1002519

Abstract

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In a wide range of biological studies, it is highly desirable to visualize and analyze three-dimensional (3D) microscopic images. In this primer, we first introduce several major methods for visualizing typical 3D images and related multi-scale, multi-time-point, multi-color data sets. Then, we discuss three key categories of image analysis tasks, namely segmentation, registration, and annotation. We demonstrate how to pipeline these visualization and analysis modules using examples of profiling the single-cell gene-expression of C. elegans and constructing a map of stereotyped neurite tracts in a fruit fly brain.