Detecting The 3D Morphology Of Cell Cytonemes Using Skeletonization (1 Page)

The characterization of three dimensional (3D) cell morphology is a complex task due the the high variability in cell appearance and the lack of tools for 3D analysis. This ends up in time consuming visual analysis which obtains subjective results. In this paper, we explore the use of image processing methods such as deconvolution, labelling and skeletonization to automatize the collection of metrics about cell cytonemes in volumetric data. This pipeline revealed that skeletonizing an entire cell works well for bigger cytonemes, but still misses most of the shorter ones. This could inspire future works on the skeletonization of 3D objects such as cells to achieve more accurate results and offer new tools for research on cell morphology.