A new registration approach for dynamic analysis of calcium signals in organs

Wing disc pouches of fruit flies are a powerful genetic model for studying physiological intercellular calcium (Ca
²⁺
) signals for dynamic analysis of cell signaling in organ development and disease studies. A key to analyzing spatial-temporal patterns of Ca
²⁺
signal waves is to accurately align the pouches across image sequences. However, pouches in different image frames may exhibit extensive intensity oscillations due to Ca
²⁺
signaling dynamics, and commonly used multimodal non-rigid registration methods may fail to achieve satisfactory results. In this paper, we develop a new two-phase non-rigid registration approach to register pouches in image sequences. First, we conduct segmentation of the region of interest. (i.e., pouches) using a deep neural network model. Second, we use a B-spline based registration to obtain an optimal transformation and align pouches across the image sequences. Evaluated using both synthetic data and real pouch data, our method considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art non-rigid registration methods.