Journal Article

Esmraldi: efficient methods for the fusion of mass spectrometry and magnetic resonance images

Foucat, Loïc, Rogniaux, Hélène, Fanuel, Mathieu, Arnaud, Bastien, Grélard, Florent, Legland, David

2021

Overview

Background Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is a family of acquisition techniques producing images of the distribution of molecules in a sample, without any prior tagging of the molecules. This makes it a very interesting technique for exploratory research. However, the images are difficult to analyze because the enclosed data has high dimensionality, and their content does not necessarily reflect the shape of the object of interest. Conversely, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans reflect the anatomy of the tissue. MRI also provides complementary information to MSI, such as the content and distribution of water. Results We propose a new workflow to merge the information from 2D MALDI–MSI and MRI images. Our workflow can be applied to large MSI datasets in a limited amount of time. Moreover, the workflow is fully automated and based on deterministic methods which ensures the reproducibility of the results. Our methods were evaluated and compared with state-of-the-art methods. Results show that the images are combined precisely and in a time-efficient manner. Conclusion Our workflow reveals molecules which co-localize with water in biological images. It can be applied on any MSI and MRI datasets which satisfy a few conditions: same regions of the shape enclosed in the images and similar intensity distributions.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: Algorithms / Bioinformatics / Biomedical and Life Sciences / Chemical Sciences / Computational Biology/Bioinformatics / Computer Appl. in Life Sciences / Computer Science / Datasets / Grain / Image acquisition / Image fusion / Image Processing / Image registration / Imaging and image analysis / Life Sciences / Localization / Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Marking and tracking techniques / Mass spectrometry / Mass spectrometry imaging / Mass spectroscopy / Metabolism / Methods / Microarrays / Principal components analysis / Radiochemistry / Registration / Reproducibility of Results / Research Article / Scientific imaging / Spectra processing / Spectrometry, Mass, Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption-Ionization / Spectroscopy / Workflow