Radial profile detection of multiple spherical particles in contact with interacting surfaces

PLoS One. 2019 Apr 2;14(4):e0214815. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0214815. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Adhesive interactions of soft materials play an important role in nature and technology. Interaction energies can be quantified by determining contact areas of deformable microparticles with the help of reflection interference contrast microscopy (RICM). For high throughput screening of adhesive interactions, a method to automatically evaluate large amounts of interacting microparticles was developed. An image is taken which contains circular interference patterns with visual characteristics that depend on the probe's shape due to its surface interaction. We propose to automatically detect radial profiles in images, and to measure the contact radius and size of the spherical probe, allowing the determination of particle-surface interaction energy in a simple and fast imaging and image analysis setup. To achieve this, we analyze the image gradient and we perform template matching that utilizes the physical foundations of reflection interference contrast microscopy.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adhesiveness
  • Algorithms
  • Colloids
  • Elastic Modulus
  • Microscopy, Interference / methods*
  • Microscopy, Interference / statistics & numerical data
  • Particle Size
  • Polymers
  • Software
  • Surface Properties

Substances

  • Colloids
  • Polymers

Grants and funding

J.W. received funding from the International Max Planck Research School on Neuroscience of Communication: Function, Structure, and Plasticity (Leipzig, Germany; https://imprs-neurocom.mpg.de). T.P. and D.R. acknowledge the support by a grant from Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) within the program "Photonics in Life Sciences" (no. 13N13799). The remaining authors received no specific funding for this work. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.