Spatiotemporal Image Analysis for the Study of Cardiac Activity in Zebrafish Embryos

We address the problem of the quantitative cardiac activity analysis at early development stages. For this purpose, we have assembled an experimental setup for bright field microscopic imaging and analyzed Zebrafish embryos before hatching. We have developed and validated an image processing technique for the spatiotemporal analysis of the obtained data. We demonstrate that the proposed technique provides quantitative information about the cardiac activity including heartbeat rate and heart shape.