Follow this Beat: Dynamic Imaging and Analysis of the Developing Embryonic Heart
Michael Liebling
Biological Imaging Center, Beckman Institute
2:00 PM -- 3:00 PM
Oct. 26, 2006 (Thursday)
Beckman Inst. Auditorium
Studying the influence on embryonic development of fast biomechanical processes, such as those induced by blood flow in the embryonic heart, requires the ability to acquire dynamic, three-dimensional data with high temporal and spatial resolution. We devised novel strategies for collecting and synchronizing cyclic image sequences to build volumes over the entire depth of the beating embryonic zebrafish heart. Our data analysis and reduction protocols allow for the systematic extraction of quantitative information to describe phenotype and function. We have used this approach to characterize blood flow and heart efficiency by imaging fluorescent protein-expressing blood and cardiac cells as the heart develops from a tube to a multichambered organ. These (partly wavelet-based) methods are sufficiently robust to image tissues within the heart at cellular resolution over a wide range of ages and are generalizable to imaging and analyzing other fast moving structures at microscopic scales. This is joint work with Arian S. Forouhar, Mory Gharib, Mary E. Dickinson, and Scott E. Fraser.
About the Speaker
Michael Liebling is a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and studied physics at EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne) and received the MS in 2000, with a diploma thesis on computerized tomography reconstruction. He was granted the PhD degree (Dr.ès sc.) from the same institution in 2004 for a dissertation on digital holography and image processing that he completed under the advisory of Prof. Michael Unser at the Biomedical Imaging Group, EPFL. In 2004, he joined the “Biological Imaging Center”http://bioimaging.caltech.edu/, Beckman Institute, at the California Institute of Technology for postdoctoral training. There he currently works in the lab of Prof. Scott E. Fraser on projects involving biological image acquisition, reconstruction, processing, and analysis. His research is focused around inverse problems in optics, biomedical image processing, and wavelets. Michael Liebling is the recipient of the 2004 Research Award of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering. He was awarded prospective (2004) and advanced (2006) researcher fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation.