Information Technology for Quantitative Bio-Image Analysis
Abstract: Development of bioimaging enables us to obtain various image and movie data on the dynamics of biological phenomena. However, the evaluation of these data largely depends on the visual inspection by our eyes, and therefore the quantitative information that these data contain has not yet been maximally exploited. In addition, the growing amount of image data makes visual inspection unfeasible. Bioimage information provides us with technology to overcome these problems by enabling quantitative analysis of image data and automated screening of huge amount of image data. In this article, I review the background and basic information on the bioimage informatics with a plenty of the latest references. More specific problems on object detection, boundary identification, and quantification of molecule abundance are illustrated. Finally, I discuss a couple of yet-to-be-solved issues in this field.
Key words: bioimage informatics, image analysis, quantitative biology, systems biology