We at Webvision would like to wish you the very best this holiday season. As in past years, we like to post an image from retinal science that is somehow evocative of the Holiday Season and this year, Gabe Luna from the Steve Fisher / Geoff Lewis laboratory delivers a stunning image of astrocytes in a retinal flat mount, but with a twist… We think you’ll be seeing more of Gabe’s beautiful imagery, but for now, here is his description of how he made this image:
“I used a GFAP-GFP mouse to identify all the astrocytes in the retina and manually (at the time it was manual) annotate their coordinates, then we used a probabilistic random-walk algorithm to go to each “cell center” and perform a segmentation result of that one astrocyte. Once all the 5,000 or so cells are segmented as a greyscale image of the individual cell, then they are assigned various hues that are spectrally distinct and the montage is re-assembled into one large image. The image there is a grossly down-sized image of the original. The original was a seamless mosaic of 412 individual z-stacks of about 15 planes at 1 micron intervals, using a 40x oil immersion lens.”
