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Facilitating Analysis Of Toxoplasma Gondii Bradyzoite Metabolic Activity Via Image Processing And Multivariate Logistic Regression For High Throughput Classification Of Mitochondrial Morphologies, Brooke Place

Theses and Dissertations--Biomedical Engineering

Approximately a third of the population worldwide is chronically infected by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. During chronic infection the parasite resides within tissue cysts as the poorly understood bradyzoite form. Observation of these bradyzoites via microscopic imaging within tissue cyst purified from infected mouse brains has shown metabolic activity with heterogeneous replication potential. With fluorescence microscopy imaging targeting the parasite’s actively respiring mitochondria, the parasite’s metabolic state can be further investigated as the morphology of mitochondria can be associated with specific physiologic states. However, manually classifying mitochondrial morphologies from these images can be tedious and prone to error as …