Abstract. In recent years, life-cell imaging techniques and their software applications have become powerful tools to investigate complex biological mechanisms such as calcium signalling. In this paper, we propose an automated framework to detect areas inside cells that show changes in their calcium concentration i.e. the regions of interests or hotspots, based on videos taken after loading living mouse cardiomyocytes with fluorescent calcium reporter dyes. The proposed system allows an objective and efficient analysis through the following four key stages: 1) Pre-processing to enhance video quality, 2) First level segmentation to detect candidate hotspots based on adaptive thresholding on the frame level, 3) Second-level segmentation to fuse and identify the best hotspots from the entire video by proposing the concept of calcium fluorescence hit-ratio, and 4) Extraction of the changes of calcium fluorescence over time per hotspot. From the extracted signals, different measurements are calculated such as maximum peak amplitude, area under the curve, peak frequency, and inter-spike interval of calcium changes. The system was tested using calcium imaging data collected from Heart muscle cells. The paper argues that the automated proposal offers biologists a tool to speed up the processing time and mitigate the consequences of inter-intra observer variability.

In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth. Now the Earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said: "Let there be light," and there was light. HIP 41378 is a star located at ~380 light years away in the constellation of cancer , with an apparent magnitude of 8.92. It has a mass of 1.15 M and a radius of 1.4 R . It's surface temperature is about 6199 k. As of today it is known to host five potential exo-planetary candidates. The system was discovered in Kepler's K2 data in 2016. Below is a plot of the K2 light curve of HIP 41378. There are several dips throughout caused by transiting planets.