MetaFluor Image Analysis & Processing

 
Regions of interest can be generated automatically or manually placed on your image to monitor intensity, ratio value or ion concentration. Measurements are then made simultaneously on all the regions of interest and update continuously on a scrolling graph, allowing you to follow dynamic changes as they occur in your living samples.

CHO cells loaded with Fura-2. Experiment from the Optical Microscopy and Imaging at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA. Courtesy of Lynda Pierini, PhD, Cornell Medical Center, Ken Dunn, PhD, Indiana University-Purdue University, and Professor Colin Izzard, SUNY University of Albany. A simultaneous display of multiple wavelength images and various customizable graphs provide an easy point-and-click interface. When playing back an experiment, clicking on the graph will rewind or fast-forward the experiment to show the images that correspond to that location on the graph.

Interactive Graphs

A display of multiple graphs gives flexibility in the presentation of your experiment's data. MetaFluor enables you to click on graph traces to display a readout of the time and data value for the region nearest to the click.

The Event Mark function is useful to record when drugs or solutions were added, experimental conditions changed, triggers were received or sent or other events occurred. You have the option to associate a timer and an alarm bell to each event. Additionally, for perfused samples, ambient conditions can be logged and tracked.

Each image has an annotation that is saved within the TIFF file format. The annotation will record wavelength-dependent settings. Additional information can be stored in a protocol file.

Export for Data Analysis

If needed, MetaFluor can log and export all measurements to either a text file or to a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft® Excel.

Compatible with MetaMorph

Because MetaFluor saves images in TIFF file format, you can import them into MetaMorph for further processing and analysis.

Presentation and Publication

Images in MetaFluor can be displayed in monochrome, pseudocolor, or using a variety of user-defined set of values. Ratio images can also be displayed using a special display mode called Intensity Modulated Display, or IMD.

With the IMD mode, color is used to represent the relative ratio value, while the intensity or brightness of the color is used to represent whether the brightness of the source images. This technique helps automate the process of extracting spatial information from the background, by automatically eliminating background fluorescence from the scene.