Live Imaging and Lineage Tracing of Mouse Embryo Development ex-utero

Understanding the developmental processes leading to the formation of tissues and organs from a fertilized egg, represents one of the most fundamental questions in developmental biology. Although the advances in microscopy and imaging systems have made imaging of mammalian from embryos possible, there is a major gap between the data collection and data analysis of the developing live cells. In this project, our objective at MBZUAI is to develop novel computer vision algorithms suitable for the automatic analysis of embryos.

For effective analysis of embryos, it is important to perform recognition, segmentation, counting, and lineage tracking of embryo cells in videos captured at different time frames. Compared to the conventional image or video analysis algorithms, live-cell analysis introduces several additional challenges such as cell division, continuous variation in the cell appearance, background clutter, and movement of cells/clutter within and outside the camera field-of-view. Further, capturing the embryo development generates a massive amount of data. Therefore, studying, mining, and analyzing such a huge amount of data further increases the complexity.