CESAM / Running Ant / Merging Bee / Walking Turtle

Several software programs have been developed for scientific projects, in particular data management, data analysis and image analysis.

The names, giving a clue on the used algorithm, follow a tradition that bases on Dr. Tom Quinn’s spider bins.

Walking Turtle is an algorithm to generate a virtual scatter and to give me step by step instructions for the sampling with a microscope in a randomized systematic manner, which is important for morphometrics / stereology.

CESAM (Cell-length-scale Spatial Analysis and Morphometry; pronounced like “open sesame”) performs morphometric and stereologic analysis of microscopy images of cells to establish volume density of cells and extracellular matrix, cell volume, cellular density, and intra- & extracellular spatial density distribution of autoradiography granula to study the synthesis patterns of matrix mulecules in chondrocyte agarose cultures.

I wrote both for my doctoral thesis using IPLab script language (Mac), THINK Pascal (Mac), VisualBasic for Excel (Windows).

Several iterations of Running Ant and Merging Bee were built to group data according to specific criteria in Excel spreadsheets for downstream analysis.