TITLE:

IMAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES FOR ASSESSING CONTRACTILITY IN ISOLATED ADULT AND NEONATAL CARDIAC MYOCYTES

DATE:

Friday, September 11th, 2009

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS 214

SPEAKER:

Carlos Bazan, Computational Science Research Center, San Diego State University

ABSTRACT:

We describe two computational frameworks for the assessment of contractile responses of enzymatically dissociated adult and neonatal cardiac myocytes. The proposed methodologies are variants of mathematically sound and computationally robust algorithms very well established in the image processing community. The physiologic applications of the methodologies are evaluated by assessing the contraction in enzymatically dissociated adult and neonatal rat cardiocytes. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in characterizing the true ‘shortening’ in the contraction process of the cardiocytes. The proposed method not only provides a more comprehensive assessment of the myocyte contraction process, but can potentially eliminate historical concerns and sources of errors caused by myocyte rotation or translation during contraction. Furthermore, the versatility of the image processing techniques makes the methods suitable for determining myocyte shortening in cells that usually bend or move during contraction. The proposed method can be utilized to evaluate changes in contractile behavior resulting from drug intervention, disease modeling, transgeneity, or other common applications to mammalian cardiocytes. This is research is in collaboration with David Torres, Paul Paolini, and Peter Blomgren

HOST:

Paul Paolini

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