Quantification of fluorescent spots in time series of 3D confocal microscopy images of endoplasmic reticulum exit sites based on the HMAX transform

We present an approach for the quantification of fluorescent spots in time series of 3-D confocal microscopy images of endoplasmic reticulum exit sites of dividing cells. Fluorescent spots are detected based on extracted image regions of highest response using the HMAX transform and prior convolution of the 3-D images with a Gaussian kernel. The sensitivity of the involved parameters was studied and a quantitative evaluation using both 3-D synthetic and 3-D real data was performed. The approach was successfully applied to more than one thousand 3-D confocal microscopy images.