Tissue Corrections

Removing autofluorescence

In addition to the bright spots (signal) that we want to detect, microscopy experiments on tissue slices often have a non-zero amount of auto-fluorescence from the cell bodies. This can be mitigated by “clearing” strategies whereby tissue lipids and proteins are digested, or computationally by estimating and subtracting the background values.

We use the same test image from the previous section to demonstrate how this can work.

Clipping

The simplest way to remove background is to set a global, (linear) cut-off and clip out the background values.

import starfish
import starfish.data
from starfish.image import Filter
from starfish.types import Axes

experiment: starfish.Experiment = starfish.data.ISS(use_test_data=True)
field_of_view: starfish.FieldOfView = experiment["fov_001"]
image: starfish.ImageStack = field_of_view.get_image("primary")

Next, create the clip filter. Here we clip at the 50th percentile, optimally separates the spots from the background

clip_50 = Filter.Clip(p_min=97)
clipped: starfish.ImageStack = clip_50.run(image)

Out:

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plot both images

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import xarray as xr

# get the images
orig_plot: xr.DataArray = image.sel({Axes.CH: 0, Axes.ROUND: 0}).xarray.squeeze()
clip_plot: xr.DataArray = clipped.sel({Axes.CH: 0, Axes.ROUND: 0}).xarray.squeeze()

f, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(ncols=2)
ax1.imshow(orig_plot)
ax1.set_title("original")
ax2.imshow(clip_plot)
ax2.set_title("clipped")
../_images/sphx_glr_plot_tissue_specific_corrections_001.png

Out:

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Text(0.5, 1.0, 'clipped')

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