Fruit Fly Morphogenesis

Timeline

2016

Description

BME major Neel Prabhu, along with CompSci and ECE majors Virginia Cheng and Cheng Lu, spent ten weeks studying how cells from embryos of the common fruit fly move and change in shape during development. They worked with Cell-Sheet-Tracker (CST), an algorithm develped by former Data+ student Roger Zou and faculty lead Carlo Tomasi. This algorithm uses computer vision to model and track a dynamic network of cells using a deformable graph.

Project Results

The team produced a graphical user interface, called GraphGUI (https://github.com/neelprabhu/FlyGUI), that enables rapid data exchange with the CST and allows subject matter experts to edit in real time, increasing the accuracy of the tracking.

Download the Executive Summary (PDF)

Faculty Sponsors

• Dan Kiehart, Biology


• Carlo Tomasi, Computer Science

• Swarna Ravindran Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science


• Richard Mortensen, Ph.D. Candidate, Biology

• Neel Prabhu, Duke University Biomedical Engineering


• Cheng Lu, Duke University Computer Science & Electrical and Computer Engineering


• Virginia Cheng, Duke University Computer Science & Electrical and Computer Engineering