%0 Journal Article
%T Local cell metrics: a novel method for analysis of cell-cell interactions
%A Jing Su
%A Pedro J Zapata
%A Chien-Chiang Chen
%A J Carson Meredith
%J BMC Bioinformatics
%D 2009
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2105-10-350
%X The new LCM method is demonstrated via a study of contact inhibition of proliferation of MC3T3-E1 osteoblasts. We describe how LCMs can be used to quantify the local environment of cells and how LCMs are decomposed mathematically into metrics specific to each cell type in a culture, e.g., differently-labelled cells in fluorescence imaging. Using this approach, a quantitative, probabilistic description of the contact inhibition effects in MC3T3-E1 cultures has been achieved. We also show how LCMs are related to the na£żve Bayes model. Namely, LCMs are Bayes class-conditional probability functions, suggesting their use for data mining and classification.LCMs are successful in robust detection of cell contact inhibition in situations where conventional global statistics fail to do so. The noise due to the random features of cell behavior was suppressed significantly as a result of the focus on local distances, providing sensitive detection of cell-cell contact effects. The methodology can be extended to any quantifiable feature that can be obtained from imaging of cell cultures or tissue samples, including optical, fluorescent, and confocal microscopy. This approach may prove useful in interpreting culture and histological data in fields where cell-cell interactions play a critical role in determining cell fate, e.g., cancer, developmental biology, and tissue regeneration.Cell-cell recognition is critical to a wide range of problems in biology and medicine [1-16]. The development of experimental approaches associated with cell-cell recognition has promoted advances in understanding these effects, e.g., biochemical assays for protein binding and transcription,. However, less attention has been focused on developing algorithms for the detection of cell-cell recognition from the structure and spatial distribution of cells. Such methods would offer complimentary benefits to biochemical assays, due to the relative ease of collecting microscopy data from cell cultures and tis
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/350