A visual navigation system for querying neural stem cell imaging data

Cellular biology deals with studying the behavior of cells. Current time-lapse imaging microscopes help us capture the progress of experiments at intervals that allow for understanding of the dynamic and kinematic behavior of the cells. On the other hand, these devices generate such massive amounts of data (250GB of data per experiment) that manual sieving of data to identify interesting patterns becomes virtually impossible. In this paper we propose an end-to-end system to analyze time-lapse images of the cultures of human neural stem cells (hNSC), that includes an image processing system to analyze the images to extract all the relevant geometric and statistical features within and between images, a database management system to manage and handle queries on the data, a visual analytic system to navigate through the data, and a visual query system to explore different relationships and correlations between the parameters. In each stage of the pipeline we make novel algorithmic and conceptual contributions, and the entire system design is motivated by many different yet unanswered exploratory questions pursued by our neurobiologist collaborators. With a few examples we show how such abstract biological queries can be analyzed and answered by our system.