Started: Fall 2021; Completed: Spring 2021
Cerebral Ischemia is most common in newborns and adults where not enough blood reaches the brain. This can lead to death and there is currently no cure.
The Nance lab decided to research brain cells that have gone through oxygen-glucose deprivation (OGD) to model this injury to look at how the nanoparticles can interact with microglia (immune cells). By doing this, the lab is able to compare the OGD exposures to treatment effectiveness.
Hawley (my mentor) assigned me to analyze the cell morphology of these cells by taking a sample size of cell images to count and manually segment. My work was used to train and make sure that the automatic segmentation done by packages was mostly accurate. It was also used to understand the heterogeneity (diversity of the shapes), circularity, and abundance microglia.
Using software called FIJI, I counted and manually segmented (traced) the microglia of each image. Although it was a long process, my lab got a handful of images that they can be used to train packages to segment more effectively in the future.
Project 1: Analyzing Effects of Cerebral Ischemia Project 2: Quantitative Microglia Branching Analysis Project 3: VAMPIRE Preprocessing Package