Measuring length of sperm cells of fruit flies Mollie Manier Background The longest sperm ever recorded comes from the fruit fly Drosophila bifurca, which is a total of 5.8 cm long 20 times longer than the fly itself. Females after mating store these giant sperm within an even longer sperm storage organ, which is 8 cm long Background Dr. Maniers research studies the genetic basis of sperm length in males and sperm storage organ length in females Knock out individual genes and look at their effect on sperm length or sperm storage organ length Statistically longer, or shorter? Problem Measure the length of sperms from images (easier cases) Problem Measure the length of sperms from images (hardercases) Tasks An interactive tool for cell length measurement A GUI interface (or a plug-in to ImageJ) Input: image Output: cell length Allows moderate user interaction Examples: draw region-of-interest; click on two/multiple points on the cell; rough sketch over the cell; etc. In harder cases, more interaction is ok Robust Passes all easy examples and most hard examples