High throughput quantification system for egg populations in Caenorhabditis elegans

C.elegans offers the promise of understanding the mechanisms underlying animal behavior at the molecular and cellular levels. This paper presents an application-specific, complete quantification system to obtain population statistics of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) eggs that is accurate and fast compared to currently used manual techniques. The system uses a custom-built acquisition stage and processing stage. The proposed algorithm performs egg counts and cluster classifications. Experimental results show 96.1% average accuracy and an average acquisition and processing time of 8090 seconds.