Achievement

IGERT fellow Dave Xu Dong of the Yarmush and Brewer labs has developed a graphical user interface (GUI) to analyze the images of spinal cord tissue after the implantation of encapsulated mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). He stained tissue slides for ED-1 and CD206, indicative markers for rat macrophage/monocytes and dendritic cells respectively, which were batch processed and gave results on the amount of different cell populations as the result of MSC implantation. His image analysis algorithm was specifically designed for the morphology of the tissue, effectively segmenting positively-stained areas of interest, and provided statistics on cell counts and tissue areas of each stain.