Soltisz receives first copyright on analysis tool for quantifying spatial attraction of imaged objects

Congratulations to Andrew Soltisz, a graduate student in Rengasayee Veeraraghavan’s research group, recently picked up his first copyright on his new image analysis tool, Morphological Object Localization (MOL). MOL is an image analysis tool that uses spatial statistics to quantify the degree of attraction between objects in images. These objects can be anything from fluorescently labeled proteins seen in microscope images to different species of trees seen in ariel photos of the rain forest.

“This tool provides scientists the ability to determine whether the positions of different things depend on one another, and in the Veeraraghavan lab, we use it to investigate heart muscle cells and how changing the spatial distributions of their proteins can lead to diseases such as heart failure and arrhythmias. This information can be quite useful because it gives us an idea of what exactly a potential drug would need to fix for it to be an effective treatment against cardiac disease," Soltisz said.