Response of cytoskeletal microtubule organization to a xenobiotic estimated from image classification

These authors have been developing for some years a variety of morphological classifiers, which analyse images, extract descriptors by FOURIER analysis, fractal analysis and spatial differentiation, fuse these descriptors by means of multivariate statistics. Classifiers have been trained, validated and applied to recognizing patterns belonging to new classes. One of the most relevant application has been the quantitative morphology of microtubule organisation. Results, which have been described in a number of publications, have consisted of: a) the quantitative assessment of structural damage caused by xenobiotics and the ensueing recovery, and b) the estimation of dose- and time- response relations. This paper, in addition to presenting a survey of the classification methods and the related results, will focus on some instructive class-wide and cell-wise statistical properties deduced from the first principal component only. These properties lead to three questions about the dose-response behaviour of microtubules which are still open.