Topological analysis of 3D cell nuclei using finite element template-based spherical mapping.

Topological analysis of cells and subcellular structures on the basis of image data is one of the major trends in modern quantitative biology. However, due to the dynamic nature of cell biology, the optical appearance of different cells or even time series of the same cell is undergoing substantial variations in shape and texture which makes the analysis of image data a non-trivial task. In the absence of canonical invariances, a natural approach to the normalization of cell images consists in dimension reduction of the 3D problem by means of spherical mapping which enables the analysis of targeted regions in terms of radial distances. In this work, we present a finite element template-based approach for physically-base spherical mapping which has been applied for topological analysis of confocal laser scanning microscopy images of cell nuclei.