IVS4NSC - Intelligent Vision for Neural Stem Cells

The Neural Stem Cells can be observe during their development and during their diffentiation into specialized cells (Neurones, Astrocytes or Oligodentrocytes).
During their development, one stem cell will proliferate to form a spherical agglomerate of cells call Neurosphere. The two main observations modalities are confocal microscopy and fluorescence markers that allow us to observe in details the neuroshere structure and the cell's membrane and nucleus but none of the cells will survive to the process and the neurosphere will be dead. 

Confocal slices of a neurosphere, with green markers on cell's membrane and blue markers on cell's nucleus

And the phase contrast microscopy,  that provide a 2D time lapse images but based on the volumic nature of the observed structures. Using this modality, it is possible to continue to observe the neurosphere, once it reach a requiered size, during the differentiation phase, where, using differentiation factors, the cells are forced to morphe into specialized cells of the stem cell lineage, here neural cells.

  
A 5 days obersvation of one neural cell forming a neurosphere in phase contrast at 40x and Neurosphere cells on contact with differentiation factors starting to morphe into specialised cells.

During the neurosphere development phase, we aim to improve the understanding of the neurosphere development, to develope visualisation tools and to identify neural stem cell before the formation of neurosphere.
Once the cells a differentiated, we aim to develop detection and classification tools to identify and count the different type of cells using none or only one fluoresence biological marker.

Research Team