MorphoDynamicsPipe

A library that uses snakemake to run a morphodynamics analysis on images of cells or nuclei. It includes segmentation via cellpose and tracking via btrack. MorphoDynamics features are calculated with scikit-image, CPDA chord measurement and other custom functions. MorphoDynamicsPipe can be run with Docker, Singularity, mamba, conda or pip. MorphoDynamicsPipe works on Linux, macOS Apple Silicon and Windows (using Windows Subsystem for Linux). MorphoDynamicsPipe requires an NVIDIA GPU or Apple Silicon to run the segmentation. If you have another segmention method you can provide the segmentations in the format shown in the example to skip this step.

Download the repository

Clone this github repository using git clone https://github.com/uhlmanngroup/MorphoDynamicsPipe

or alternatively click the 'Download Zip' button on this github page:

<img src="conda_envs_yaml/download_image.png" width="50%" alt="Download Image">

and then unzip the folder.

Either method will create a folder called MorphoDynamicsPipe. This is where you will perform your analysis.

Data setup

To run this for the first time, it is recommended to start with the example data. An example dataset can be found in MorphoDynamicsPipe/example/. To run the example data, copy the folder MorphoDynamicsPipe/example/1_data to MorphoDynamicsPipe/1_data, including the subfolders and files.

To run on your own data, create a folder called 1_data inside the main MorphoDynamicsPipe folder. Put data in the in the format 1_data/folder1/filename1_T=000.tif, 1_data/folder1/filename1_T=001.tif, 1_data/folder1/filename1_T=002.tif, 1_data/folder2/filename2_T=000.tif, 1_data/folder2/filename2_T=001.tif, 1_data/folder2/filename2_T=002.tif, etc...

where the folder1, folder2, filename1 and filename2 (etc...) can be anything, and filename1 and filename2 (etc...) do not have to be consistent within each subfolder. The files must be tiffs with T=[NUMBER].tiff or T=[NUMBER].tif at the end. The T= number must run from 0 and increment by one across all the files in each folder. There is no limit on the number of folders or files.

Set up your snakemake file

For the example data, no changes need to be made in the snakemake file run_example.smk. For your own data you may wish to make changes:

To use nuclei for tracking whole cells, first segment and track nuclei in a separate folder. Then put whole cells in a new MorphoDynamicsPipe folder. Comment out rule segment_with_cellpose_nucs and comment in rule segment_with_cellpose_celltracker_with_nucs. Comment out rule track_with_btrack and comment in rule symlink_to_btrack_info and comment in either the ln -s line or the cp line (but not both). Then run as normal.

Option 1: Execution using conda (or mamba) on Linux / macOS Apple Silicon

1. Install conda (or mamba) using the instructions here: https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge
2. Then open a terminal and navigate to the MorphoDynamicsPipe folder that you have downloaded. After opening this folder, run chmod +x run_conda.sh (or chmod +x run_mamba.sh) to make the shell script executable. Then run source run_conda.sh (or source run_mamba.sh) to create a conda environment (named morphodyXX) and run the pipeline on the data.

You can change the conditions for running the snakemake (for example to run with different numbers of cores) by opening the run_conda.sh (or run_mamba.sh) script in a text editor such as Notepad or VSCode, and editing the command after snakemake. Also, you may want to run the bash command before running the run_conda.sh (or run_mamba.sh) script so that you can view output even if it crashes. This method does not currently work on Windows due to the lack of C++ compilers that are derived from build-essentials in the other operating systems.

Option 2: Execution using Docker on Linux with an NVIDIA GPU

(Assuming NVIDIA drivers already installed, some notes on macOS also included in this section)

1. Install docker. One option that is good for licences and is free is Rancher Desktop: https://rancherdesktop.io/ or follow the instructions here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/
2. Then open a terminal and navigate to the MorphoDynamicsPipe folder that you have downloaded. After opening this folder, run chmod +x run_docker.sh to make the shell script executable. Then run source run_docker.sh to run the pipeline on the data.
3. It is not recommended to run Docker on Apple Silicon as it cannot access the Metal Performance Shader capabilities, meaning that Cellpose 4 runs too slowly. This is also true on machines without a GPU. If you do want to run the pipeline on Apple Silicon (if you already have segmentation through cellpose online, for example), you need to enable Rosetta. In Rancher Desktop this is in Preferences > Virtual Machine > VZ Option > Enable Rosetta Support.

Option 3: NVIDIA drivers not already installed on Linux (but NVIDIA GPU exists)

See 'Docker installation' at the end of this page.

Option 4: Execution using conda (or mamba) on Windows Subsystem for Linux inside Windows

1. Install Windows Subsystem for Linux following the instructions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
2. Launch wsl from the start menu to have a terminal that is running on Linux
3. Install conda (and/or mamba), using the instructions for WSL so that conda (or mamba) will exist inside your Linux subsystem. Note that if you have conda (or mamba installed on Windows, this cannot be accessed by WSL) https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge
4. Run sudo apt-get update then sudo apt-get upgrade -y then sudo apt-get install build-essential -y
5. Then open a terminal and navigate to the MorphoDynamicsPipe folder that you have downloaded. After opening this folder, run chmod +x run_conda.sh (or chmod +x run_mamba.sh) to make the shell script executable. Then run source run_conda.sh (or source run_mamba.sh) to run the pipeline on the data.

Also, you may want to run the bash command before running the run_conda.sh (or run_mamba.sh) script so that you can view output even if it crashes.

If files appear ending in :Zone.Identifier, delete these files before progressing using the following command: find . -name "*:Zone.Identifier" -type f -delete

Option 5: Execution using Singularity on Linux

(assuming Singularity is already installed, or the module is loaded)

1. Open a terminal and navigate to the MorphoDynamicsPipe folder that you have downloaded. After opening this folder, run chmod +x run_singularity.sh to make the shell script executable. Then run source run_singularity.sh to run the pipeline on the data.
2. Alternatively, if using a SLURM High Performance Computing system, use the command: sbatch -t 24:00:00 --mem=128G -c 16 --gres=gpu:1 --wrap="source ./run_singularity.sh". It should be possible to use equivalent commands on other job scheduling systems. Note that this option cannot use linked files without altering the script to include the additional mount points.

Option 6: Execution using pip on Linux/macOS

1. Create a virtual environment with python=3.11.13 and pip=25.1.1 (or similar)
2. Activate the environment
3. Run pip install -r requirements-base.txt
4. Run snakemake -s run_example.smk --cores 4 --keep-going

<!-- ## Option not available yet: Execution using conda (or mamba) on Windows 1) Install conda (or mamba) using the instructions here: https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge 2) Then navigate in to the MorphoDynamicsPipe folder in a commmand prompt that has conda activated (such as miniforge prompt, which can be normally found on the start menu). 3) Then run `conda create -c conda-forge -c nodefaults -n morphody50 python==3.11.11 pip==25.3 -y` (or `mamba create -c conda-forge -c nodefaults -n morphody50 python==3.11.11 pip==25.3 -y`). This only needs to be run for the first time using the pipeline. 4) Run `conda activate morphody50` (or `conda activate morphody50`) 5) Run `pip install -r requirements-base.txt` 6) Run `snakemake -s run_example.smk --cores 4 --keep-going` This currently does not work because it has trouble installing centomere) ## Option not available yet: Execution using Docker on Windows with NVIDIA GPU (NVIDIA drivers already installed) 1) Install Docker. One option that is good for licences and free is using: https://rancherdesktop.io/ or using the instructions here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ 2) Then double click on batch script to run it (does not exist yet)) -->

Other notes

If you would like to run the pipeline on another project, simply copy the .smk file, the run_*.sh file and the scripts/ folder (including its files) next to another 1_data e.g. project2/1_data/ , project2/run_example.smk, project2/run_mamba.smk and project2/scripts. Then at the command line, navigate to the project2 folder and run the shell (.sh) command as above.

Parameters can be changed in the python files themselves.

Results

Segmentation and tracking results can be viewed in napari (installed with the conda environment) from folder 5_tracking_images_outlines/.

Morphodynamics results can be found in the folders 4a_instantaneous_cell_morphodynamics/ and 4b_time_averaged_cell_morphodynamics/.

Example results can be found in the folder MorphoDynamicsPipe/example/

macOS seems to produce slightly different segmentation results.

Other notes

Citations

This library relies on:
Cellpose https://github.com/MouseLand/cellpose
btrack https://github.com/quantumjot/btrack
Scikit-image https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image
CPDA curvature measurement https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4657455
among other commonly used packages.

Example data is taken from Broad Bioimage Benchmark Collection (Broad Institute), simulated HL60 cells (from the Cell Tracking Challenge), Accession number BBBC035, Version 1