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

Innovative Presentation

Although an "image" consisting of complex numbers is handy for storing the gradient data, it's not something you can actually look at. David next created a color image, where the brightness was determined by the magnitude of the gradient vector and the hue was determined by the direction. As you go around the circle of directions, every hue shows up twice, so that the two sides of a fiber will both be the same color as represented by gradient vectors and their corresponding colors to the right.

Below is a sample of the raw image, and the result after the "directional stain" has been applied. As you can see, each fiber is colored according to its direction. Click the image to view a close-up of stained fibers.