Center for Biofilm Engineering
Abstract:
"Quantifying Biofilm Structure Using Image Analysis"
00-001 We have developed and implemented methods of extracting
morphological features from images of biofilms in order to quantify the
characteristics of the inherent heterogeneity. This is a first step
towards quantifying the relationship between biofilm heterogeneity and the
underlying procesess, such as mass-transport dynamics, substrate concentrations,
and species variations. We have examined two categories of features, areal,
which quantify the relative magnitude of the heterogeneity and textural, which
quantify the microscale structure of the heterogeneous elements. The
feature set is not exhaustive and has been restricted to two-dimensional images
to this point. Included in this paper are the methods used to extract the
structural information and the algorithms used to quantify the data. The
features discussed are porosity, fractal dimension, diffusional length, angular
second moment, inverse difference moment and textural entropy. We have
found that some features are better predictors of biofilm behavior than others
and we discuss possible future directions for research in this area.
Yang, X., H. Beyenal, G. Harkin, and Z. Lewandowski, "Quantifying
Biofilm Structure using Image Analysis," J. Microbiological Methods,
39(2000):109-119 (1999).
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