Adquant; an image analysis toolbox for the automated, quantitative investigation of cell adhesion

Cell adhesion and cell migration are of great importance to development, the immune system and several processes that occur throughout the life of an organism. Deregulation of adhesion and cell migration processes underlie many pathological developments, including tumor metastasis. Live-cell imaging allows highly detailed observations of the processes of adhesion and migration. Manual analysis of this kind of images is time consuming and can be prone to bias. A more systematic approach for the quantitative analysis requires automated methods to detect the structures of interest in the images. This thesis contains the description of a custom developed cell adhesion image analysis toolbox, Adquant, and the analyses for which it was used.