Fractal Dimensions of Subviral Particle Movement

Abstract

The development of new medicines against virus infections like the Marburg virus disease requires an accurate knowledge of the respective pathogens. Conventionally, this process is very time expensive. In cooperation with the Virology of the Philipps-University in Marburg an automatic tracking algorithm for subviral particles in fluorescence image sequences was developed and programmed. To expand the benefit for the pharmaceutical researchers, also the trackevaluations need to be widely automated. In this work, a new parameterizing-method facing the fractal dimensions of spline interpolated subviral particle tracks is presented and tested with simulated and real data. The results reveal a good potential to classify tracks and, thus, types of subviral particles in infected cells.

Sliding Fractal Dimensions of Subviral Particles in Fluorescence Image Sequences

“…Thus, the fractal dimension of a subviral track at any time is naively expected to lie in the interval between 1 (a straight, one-dimensional line) and 2 (a highly chaotic, plane-filling track). The range of fractal dimensions of real subviral particles is often a bit larger than one [5]. The particles' fractal dimensions are measured using box-counting [6], described with , while N is the amount of boxes, laid onto the image and passed by the track and ε is the current edge length of boxes.…”