Automated Analysis of Muscle X-ray Diffraction Imaging with MCMC

Abstract. High-speed X-ray diffraction is the state-of-the-art approach to understanding protein structure and dynamics in living tissues, es-pecially muscles. Existing analytic approaches, however, require expert hand-digitization to extract parameters of interest. This produces repeat-able measurements, but remains subjective and does not offer informa-tion on the precision of the measured parameters or strict reproducibility of analyzed data. We developed a processing tool chain, which first seg-ments the diffraction image into regions of interest using highly conserved features and then samples the possible parameter values with a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. Our approach produces an automated, re-producible, objective estimate of relevant image parameters