Space-time maps & tracking colony size with OpenCV in Python

One of the things that the Department of Integrated Mathematical Oncology at the Moffitt Cancer Center is doing very well, is creating an atmosphere that combines mathematics and experiment in cancer. Fellow TheEGG blogger, Robert Vander Velde is one of the new generation of cancer researchers who are combining mathematics and experiment. Since I left Tampa, I’ve had less opportunity to keep up with the work at the IMO, but occasionally I catch up on Slack.

A couple of years ago, Robert had a computer science question. One at the data analysis and visualization stage of the relationship between computer science and cancer. Given that I haven’t posted code on TheEGG in a long time, I thought I’d share some visualizations I wrote to address Robert’s question.

There are many ways to measure the size of populations in biology. Given that we use it in our game assay, I’ve written a lot about using time-lapse microscopy of evolving populations. But this isn’t the only — or most popular — approach. It is much more common to dillute populations heavily and then count colony forming units (CFUs). I’ve discussed this briefly in the context of measuring stag-hunting bacteria.

But you can also combine both approaches. And do time-lapse microscopy of the colonies as they form.

A couple of years ago, Robert Vander Velde Andriy Marusyk were working on experiments that use colony forming units (CFUs) as a measure of populations. However, they wanted to dig deeper into the heterogeneous dynamics of CFUs by tracking the formation process through time-lapsed microscopy. Robert asked me if I could help out with a bit of the computer vision, so I wrote a Python script for them to identify and track individual colonies through time. I thought that the code might be useful to others — or me in the future — so I wanted to write a quick post explaining my approach.

This post ended up trapped in the drafts box of TheEGG for a while, but I thought now is as good a time as any to share it. I don’t know where Robert’s work on this has gone since, or if the space-time visualizations I developed were of any use. Maybe he can fill us in in the comments or with a new guest post.

Quick introduction: Evolutionary game assay in Python

It’s been a while since I’ve shared or discussed code on TheEGG. So to avoid always being too vague and theoretical, I want to use this post to explain how one would write some Python code to measure evolutionary games. This will be an annotated sketch of the game assay from our recent work on measuring evolutionary games in non-small cell lung cancer (Kaznatcheev et al., 2019).

The motivation for this post came about a month ago when Nathan Farrokhian was asking for some advice on how to repeat our game assay with a new experimental system. He has since done so (I think) by measuring the game between Gefitinib-sensitive and Gefitinib-resistant cell types. And I thought it would make a nice post in the quick introductions series.

Of course, the details of the system don’t matter. As long as you have an array of growth rates (call them yR and yG with corresponding errors yR_e and yG_e) and initial proportions of cell types (call them xR and xG) then you could repeat the assay. To see how to get to this array from more primitive measurements, see my old post on population dynamics from time-lapse microscopy. It also has Python code for your enjoyment.

In this post, I’ll go through the two final steps of the game assay. First, I’ll show how to fit and visualize fitness functions (Figure 3 in Kaznatcheev et al., 2019). Second, I’ll transform those fitness functions into game points and plot (Figure 4b in Kaznatcheev et al., 2019). I’ll save discussions of the non-linear game assay (see Appendix F in Kaznatcheev et al., 2019) for a future post.

Drug holidays and losing resistance with replicator dynamics

A couple of weeks ago, before we all left Tampa, Pranav Warman, David Basanta and I frantically worked on refinements of our model of prostate cancer in the bone. One of the things that David and Pranav hoped to see from the model was conditions under which adaptive therapy (or just treatment interrupted with non-treatment holidays) performs better than solid blocks of treatment. As we struggled to find parameters that might achieve this result, my frustration drove me to embrace the advice of George Pólya: “If you can’t solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it.”

In this case, I opted to remove all mentions of the bone and cancer. Instead, I asked a simpler but more abstract question: what qualitative features must a minimal model of the evolution of resistance have in order for drug holidays to be superior to a single treatment block? In this post, I want to set up this question precisely, show why drug holidays are difficult in evolutionary models, and propose a feature that makes drug holidays viable. If you find this topic exciting then you should consider registering for the 6th annual Integrated Mathematical Oncology workshop at the Moffitt Cancer Center.^[1] This year’s theme is drug resistance.

Population dynamics from time-lapse microscopy

Half a month ago, I introduced you to automated time-lapse microscopy, but I showed the analysis of only a single static image. I didn’t take advantage of the rich time-series that the microscope provides for us. A richness that becomes clearest with video:

Above, you can see two types of non-small cell lung cancer cells growing in the presence of 512 nmol of Alectinib. The cells fluorescing green are parental cells that are susceptible to the drug, and the ones in red have an evolved resistance. In the 3 days of the video, you can see the cells growing and expanding. It is the size of these populations that we want to quantify.

In this post, I will remedy last week’s omission and share some empirical population dynamics. As before, I will include some of the Python code I built for these purposes. This time the code is specific to how our microscope exports its data, and so probably not as generalizable as one might want. But hopefully it will still give you some ideas on how to code analysis for your own experiments, dear reader. As always, the code is on my github.

Although the opening video considers two types of cancer cells competing, for the rest of the post I will consider last week’s system: coculturing Alectinib-sensitive (parental) non-small cell lung cancer and fibroblasts in varying concentrations of Alectinib. Finally, this will be another tools post so the only conclusions are of interest as sanity checks. Next week I will move on to more interesting observations using this sort of pipeline.

Counting cancer cells with computer vision for time-lapse microscopy

Some people characterize TheEGG as a computer science blog. And although (theoretical) computer science almost always informs my thought, I feel like it has been a while since I have directly dealt with the programming aspects of computer science here. Today, I want to remedy that. In the process, I will share some Python code and discuss some new empirical data collected by Jeff Peacock and Andriy Marusyk.^[1]

Together with David Basanta and Jacob Scott, the five of us are looking at the in vitro dynamics of resistance to Alectinib in non-small cell lung cancer. Alectinib is a new ALK-inhibitor developed by the Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. that was approved for clinical use in Japan in 2014, and in the USA at the end of 2015. Currently, it is intended for tough lung cancer cases that have failed to respond to crizotinib. Although we are primarily interested in how alectinib resistance develops and unfolds, we realize the importance of the tumour’s microenvironment, so one of our first goals — and the focus here — is to see how the Alectinib sensitive cancer cells interact with healthy fibroblasts. Since I’ve been wanting to learn basic computer vision skills and refresh my long lapsed Python knowledge, I decided to hack together some cell counting algorithms to analyze our microscopy data.^[2]

In this post, I want to discuss some of our preliminary work although due to length constraints there won’t be any results of interest to clinical oncologist in this entry. Instead, I will introduce automated microscopy to computer science readers, so that they know another domain where their programming skills can come in useful; and discuss some basic computer vision so that non-computational biologists know how (some of) their cell counters (might) work on the inside. Thus, the post will be methods heavy and part tutorial, part background, with a tiny sprinkle of experimental images.^[3] I am also eager for some feedback and tips from readers that are more familiar than I am with these methods. So, dear reader, leave your insights in the comments.