Thursday, October 25, 2018

Bioinformatics Ph.D. Thesis Defense

10:30 AM

Forum Hall, 4th Fl. Palmer Commons Bldg. 

by Ph.D. Candidate Alexandr Kalinin 

Advisors: Brian Athey, Ivo Dinov

"3D Cell Nuclear Morphology Analysis"

Abstract

Quantitative analysis of morphological changes in a cell nucleus is important for the understanding of nuclear architecture and its relationship with cell differentiation, development, proliferation, and disease. Changes in the nuclear form are associated with reorganization of chromatin architecture related to altered functional properties such as gene regulation and expression. Furthermore, understanding these processes through quantitative analysis of morphological changes also has many medical implications, for example, in detection, understanding, and treatment of pathological conditions such as cancer. Thus, quantitative analysis of changes in size and shape of nuclear structures is important not only for investigating nuclear organization, but also for detecting and treating pathological conditions such as cancer.

While efforts have been made to develop cell and nuclear shape characteristics in 2D or pseudo-3D, several studies have demonstrated that 3D morphometric measures provide better results for nuclear shape description and discrimination, in part due to the high variability of nuclear morphologies. 3D shape descriptors that permit robust morphological analysis and facilitate human interpretation are still under active investigation. A few methods have been proposed to classify cell and nuclear morphological phenotypes in 3D, however, there is a lack of publicly available 3D data for the evaluation and comparison of such algorithms. There is a compelling need for robust 3D nuclear morphometric techniques to carry out population-wide analyses.