Spot detection

Quote: "The GDSC ImageJ plugins are a collection of analysis programs for microscopy images including colocalisation analysis and peak finding (FindFoci)."

Many types of analysis besides simply finding foci detection (spot detection) is bundled in this plugin. One prominent function is "FindFoci Optimizer". This allows feeding images with spot annotation by the user (multi-point selection tool) and scans through various parameter combinations to find the best parameter set that gives the results similar to the annotation. This is almost like machine learning... but with well-established parameter types that allows you to fully understand what is going on.

This is an example workflow of how to perform automatic registration by

- first detecting spots in both images using wavelet segmentation (with different scale according to the image scale)

- second using Ec-Clem autofinder to register both images

Click on a block to know more about a tool. Non referenced tools are non clickable.

Spot detector detects and counts spots, based on wavelet transform.

- Detects spots in noisy images 2D/3D.
- Depending on objective, spots can be nuclei, nucleus or cell
- Versatile input: sequence or batch of file.
- Detects spot in specific band/channel.
- Multi band labeling: automaticaly creates ROIs from one band and count in the same or an other band.
- Filters detection by size.
- Sort detection by ROIs
- Output data in XLS Excel files: number of detection by ROIs, and each detection location and size.
- Outputs withness image with ROIs and detection painted on it.
- Outputs binary detection image.
- Displays detections
- Displays tags

Image-processing algorithms developed at the MOSAIC Group for fluorescence microscopy. Tools included:

• 2D/3D single-particle tracking tool which can be used to track bright spots in 2D/3D movies over time.
• Optimal filament segmentation of 2D images. 
• Curvature filters for image filtering, denoising, and restoration. 
• Image naturalization for image enhancement based on gradient statistics of natural-scence images. 
• Tool for automatically send and distribute jobs on clusters and get back the results.
• Multi-region image segmentation of 2D and 3D images without needing to know the number of regions beforehand. 
• Squassh for globally optimal segmentation of piecewise constant regions in 2D and 3D images and for object-based co-localization analysis. 
• Tool for inferring spatial interactions between patterns of objects in images or between coordinates read from a file.
• Tool for robust, histogram-based background subtraction well suited to correct for inhomogeneous illumination artifacts.
• A tool to estimate the Point-Spread Function of the microscopy out of 2D fluorescence images.
• A tool to measure the 3D Point-Spread Function of a confocal microscope from an image stack.
• Addition of synthetic Poisson-distributed noise to an image in order to simulate shot noise of various signal-to-noise ratios. 
• Convolution of an image with a Bessel function in order to simulate imaging with a microscope. 
• A utility to detect bright spots in images and estimate their center. 
• A utility to create manual segmentations to be used as ground truth to test and benchmark automatic segmentation algorithms.
• A tool for replacing one color in an image with another color.

The FindFoci plugins allow the identification of peak intensity regions within 2D and 3D images. The algorithm is highly configurable and parameters can be optimised using reference images and then applied to multiple images using the batch mode. Details of the benefits of training an algorithm on multiple images can be found in the FindFoci paper: 2591