The zebrafish is a vertebrate model compatible with the paradigms of drug discovery. The small size and transparency of zebrafish embryos make them amenable for the automation necessary in high-throughput screenings. We have developed an automated high-throughput platform for in vivo chemical screenings on zebrafish embryos that includes automated methods for embryo dispensation, compound delivery, incubation, imaging and analysis of the results. At present, two different assays to detect cardiotoxic compounds and angiogenesis inhibitors can be automatically run in the platform, showing the versatility of the system. A validation of these two assays with known positive and negative compounds, as well as a screening for the detection of unknown anti-angiogenic compounds, have been successfully carried out in the system developed. We present a totally automated platform that allows for high-throughput screenings in a vertebrate organism.

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Embryos of animal models are becoming widely used to study cardiac development and genetics. However, the analysis of the embryonic heart is still mostly done manually. This is a very laborious and expensive task as each embryo has to be inspected visually by a biologist. We therefore propose to automatically segment the embryonic heart from high-speed fluorescence microscopy image sequences, allowing morphological and functional quantitative features of cardiac activity to be extracted. Several methods are presented and compared within a large range of images, varying in quality, acquisition parameters, and embryos position. Although manual control and visual assessment would still be necessary, the best of our methods has the potential to drastically reduce biologist workload by automating manual segmentation.