Automated Wormscan

Abstract

There has been a recent surge of interest in computer-aided rapid data acquisition to increase the potential throughput and reduce the labour costs of large scale studies. We present Automated Caenorhabditis elegans WormScan, a low-cost, high-throughput automated system using commercial photo scanners, which is extremely easy to implement and use, capable of scoring tens of thousands of organisms per hour with minimal operator input, and is scalable. The method does not rely on software training for image recognition, but uses the generation of difference images from sequential scans to identify moving objects. This approach results in robust identification of worms with little computational demand. We demonstrate the utility of the system by conducting toxicity, growth and fecundity assays, which demonstrate the consistency of our automated system, the quality of the data relative to manual scoring methods and congruity with previously published results.

Automated Wormscan

“…The required software for Automated WormScan can be downloaded as an easy to install complete software package available at doi, 10.5256/f1000research.10767.d152697 19 . Installation and running of the software are fairly intuitive, but detailed instructions can be found in the comprehensive user guide ( Supplementary File 1).…”

Development and Evaluation of New Methods for Automating Experiments with C. Elegans Based on Active Vision

“…There are a number of researcher groups worldwide that are developing new technologies to automate C. elegans monitoring tasks. Each technology uses a different methodology, but the common subject is to detect worm movement by imaging at the mesoscale level when monitoring standard Petri plates completely [14]- [17].…”

“…There are different methods to automate C. elegans inspection tasks. The most widespread method is to measure worm movement by acquiring images while fully monitoring standard Petri dishes [15]- [17], [41].…”

“…Some of the automated systems rely on taking image sequences of the whole Petri plate area [15]- [17], [21], which cannot capture highresolution images of C. elegans. Most of healthspan automated systems require restricted worm movement (e.g.…”