Section: Overall Objectives

Objectives of Serpico in cell imaging

In order to tackle the aforementioned challenges, the Serpico team aims to develop innovative approaches and paradigms for image reconstruction, 3D molecule tracking and motion estimation, and biophysical parameter estimation to face the huge data volumes acquired with cutting-edge microscopy set-ups. To this end, applied mathematics, image processing and analysis have to be considered in association with biophysics and biology. To be successful, a sustained synergy between all these scientific domains is necessary. To improve state-of-the-art methods and solve important problems in computational bioimaging, the members of Serpico especially address the following topics:

• Image restoration/reconstruction motivated by preserving cell integrity (photo-toxicity versus exposure time) and image analysis in multidimensional microscopy;

• Motion analysis and computation of molecule trajectories in live-cell imaging to study molecular interactions in space and time;

• Computational simulation, modelling and estimation of molecule trafficking and interactions at different spatial and temporal scales.

The resulting mathematical models and algorithms will help biologists to decipher molecular processes in fundamental biology and will be exploited for health applications: disease diagnosis, detection of genomic instabilities, deterioration of cell cycle, cancer prevention.

We have successfully developed statistical and variational aggregation methods for image denoising and optical flow, and elaborated powerful methods for image colocalization, diffusion estimation, trajectory estimation-classification, and multimodal registration. An additional issue was the design and distribution of software tools for the biological image analysis and microscopy communities. Finally, the team has focused on the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in molecule and protein transport and trafficking at the scale of a single cell. Our contributions are detailed in the next sections along three research axes.