New Automated Single-Cell Technique for Segmentation and Quantitation of Lipid Droplets

Lipid droplets are the major organelle for intracellular storage of triglycerides and cholesterol esters. Various methods have been attempted for automated quantitation of fluorescently stained lipid droplets using either thresholding or watershed methods. We find that thresholding methods deal poorly with clusters of lipid droplets, whereas watershed methods require a smoothing step that must be optimized to remove image noise. We describe here a novel three-stage hybrid method for automated segmentation and quantitation of lipid droplets. In this method, objects are initially identified by thresholding. They are then tested for circularity to distinguish single lipid droplets from clusters. Clusters are subjected to a secondary watershed segmentation. We provide a characterization of this method in simulated images. Additionally, we apply this method to images of fixed cells containing stained lipid droplets and GFP-tagged proteins to provide a proof-of-principle that this method can be used for colocalization studies. The circularity measure can additionally prove useful for the identification of inappropriate segmentation in an automated way; for example, of non-cellular material. We will make the programs and source code available to the community under the Gnu Public License. We believe this technique will be of interest to cell biologists for light microscopic studies of lipid droplet biology.