An automated assay for the assessment of cardiac arrest in fish embryo

Élodie Puybareau (1) , Diane Genest (2, 1) , Emilie Barbeau (2) , Marc Léonard (2) , Hugues Talbot (1)

1 LIGM - Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard-Monge
2 L’Oréal Recherche & Innovation

Studies on fish embryo models are widely developed in research. They are used in several research field such as drug discovery or environmental toxicology. In this article, we propose an entirely automated assay to detect cardiac arrest in Medaka (Oryzias latipes) based on image analysis. We propose a multi-scale pipeline based on mathematical morphology. Starting from video sequences of entire wells in 24-well plates, we focus on the embryo, detect its heart, and ascertain whether or not the heart is beating based on intensity variation analysis. Our image analysis pipeline only uses commonly available operators. It has a low computational cost, allowing analysis at the same rate as acquisition. From an initial dataset of 3,192 videos, 660 were discarded as unusable (20.7%), 655 of them correctly so (99.25%) and only 5 incorrectly so (0.75%). The 2,532 remaining videos were used for our test. On these, 45 errors were made, leading to a success rate of 98.23%.

Mots clés: connected filtering; change detection; segmentation; image stabilization; Toxicology; medaka

Domaines: Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]; Ecotoxicologie

Élodie Puybareau, Diane Genest, Emilie Barbeau, Marc Léonard, Hugues Talbot. An automated assay for the assessment of cardiac arrest in fish embryo. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2017, 81, pp.32-44. ⟨10.1016/j.compbiomed.2016.12.007⟩. ⟨hal-01421156v2⟩