Mestrado em Tecnologias de Informação aplicadas às

All biological phenomena are dynamic and movement is an essential function in cellular systems but their regulation, characteristics and physiological meaning are not fully known. Measurement of the cell movements provides quantitative information that is inevitable for understanding the cellular system. Cell migration is a field of intense current research generating high amounts of image data that need to be quantitatively analyzed with efficiency, consistency and completeness. To accomplish, computerized motion analysis is rapidly becoming a requisite. Since all the existing algorithms for these purposes are often not robust, effective and optimal enough to yield satisfactory results, new and alternative methods must be developed. The aim of this work is to find and develop an alternative to the tracking of individual cells in order to, visualize, characterize and quantify the migration characteristics of cell population. This alternative comprises the implementation of a simple and automated algorithm to obtain qualitative and quantitative information fro