An overview of image analysis in multidimensional biological microscopy

Following an overview of image analysis applications in 2D and 3D dynamic biological microscopy, we present work developed in our laboratory dedicated to two central aspects of cell biology of infection, cell shape and motility analysis and particle tracking. We describe a fully automatic segmentation and tracking method designed to enable quantitative analyses of cellular shape and motion from 4D (3D+t) microscopy data. To get at a better understanding of pathogens/host cell interactions and to document infectious disease processes in living systems, it is necessary to characterise the dynamic properties of pathogens. We describe a method to detect and track multiple moving biological spot-like particles showing different kind of dynamics in image sequences acquired through multidimensional fluorescence microscopy.