A Program for Computer-Assisted Analysis for Creeping Behaviour of Ciliates and Similar Two Dimensional Movements Patterns

Locomotion represents quite a complex phenomenon even in very simple forms like the ciliated protozoa. To improve the efficiency and the reliability of the already available semiautomatic program for the analysis of the tracks of creeping ciliates, the Interactive Computer Assisted Track Analysis (ICATA) program was written: it has a series of advantageous features: (A) the algorithms, specifically designed for the analysis of the tracks, ensure an extremely fast elaboration; (B) the "fitting error" of each step of the analysis is shown on the display: the operator can interact with ICATA in real time and choose to operate manually, if the biological meaning of the track is not appropriately interpreted by the automatic analysis; (C) it has been conceived as a modular program: new blocks can be added easily; (D) the output of the analysis (i.e. a series of files), processed by the utilities of ICATA itself, is also ready for analysis by commercial statistical software packages. Finally, ICATA, although conceived for originally analysing the locomotion of ciliates, has been shown to be a powerful tool also for the analysis of any bidimensional locomotion, from bacteria (E. coli) and metazoan cells (granulocytes) to simple metazoa (Gastrotricha)