Robust quantitative scratch assay

The wound healing assay (or scratch assay) is a technique frequently used to quantify the dependence of cell motility—a central process in tissue repair and evolution of disease—subject to various treatments conditions. However processing the resulting data is a laborious task due its high throughput and variability across images. This Robust Quantitative Scratch Assay algorithm introduced statistical outputs where migration rates are estimated, cellular behaviour is distinguished and outliers are identified among groups of unique experimental conditions. Furthermore, the RQSA decreased measurement errors and increased accuracy in the wound boundary at comparable processing times compared to previously developed method (TScratch). Availability and implementation: The RQSA is freely available at: http://ophid.utoronto.ca/RQSA/RQSA_Scripts.zip. The image sets used for training and validation and results are available at: (http://ophid.utoronto.ca/RQSA/trainingSet.zip, http://ophid.utoronto.ca/RQSA/validationSet.zip, http://ophid.utoronto.ca/RQSA/ValidationSetResults.zip, http://ophid.utoronto.ca/RQSA/ValidationSet_H1975.zip, http://ophid.utoronto.ca/RQSA/ValidationSet_H1975Results.zip, http://ophid.utoronto.ca/RQSA/RobustnessSet.zip, http://ophid.utoronto.ca/RQSA/RobustnessSet.zip). Supplementary Material is provided for detailed description of the development of the RQSA. Contact: juris@ai.utoronto.ca Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.