The Goal: Improve analysis of actin
fiber direction in mouse heart cells

Innovative Analysis

David Moore immediately had a "Good Idea." The solution was to use brightness gradients, shown as vectors in the image to the left, to measure individual fiber directions. That would give Dr. Yoshigi even more detail than he was hoping for.

But how do you measure gradients efficiently in an image? The LabVIEW IMAQ library contains all the functions you need. The Convolute function, used with a Sobel filter kernel, can be used to measure either the horizontal or vertical component of the gradient.

Combine the horizontal and vertical components and you have the full gradient vector. In IMAQ, you can store horizontal and vertical as the real and imaginary components of a complex number image. Below is the example code in LabVIEW.