In the field of lipid research, the measurement of adipocyte size is an important but difficult problem. We describe an imaging-based solution that combines precise investigator control with semi-automated quantitation. By using unfixed live cells, we avoid many complications that arise in trying to isolate individual adipocytes. Instead, we image a small drop of live adipocyte suspension under a microscope, and then quantitate the image using an open-source software tool called FatFind. Since we have developed FatFind on the open-source Diamond distributed search platform, it inherits the scaling, parallelism and remote access attributes of Diamond. This paper reports on the design, implementation, and evaluation of FatFind. This research was partly supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant number CNS-0614679. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of...
Adam Goode, Mei Chen, Anil Tarachandani, Lily B. M