Analysis of Bending Energy of the Nuclei Object in the Fluorescence Images for the Assessment of Drug Induced Changes in Lung Cancer Cells.

Characterization of drug-induced changes in the cancerous cells is important in improving the efficacy of chemotherapeutic drugs and for personalized medicine. This study analyzes the morphological changes in the nuclei objects of cells treated with the drugs targeting Aurora Kinase (AURK) gene family. For this, fluorescence images of lung cancer cell line treated with AMG900 are obtained from a publicly available database. The images are pre-processed and segmented to separate the nuclei objects from the background. Nuclear boundaries are detected, and various shape descriptors, including eccentricity, circularity, convexity, bending energy, and area are computed to comprehensively analyze the drug-induced changes in nuclear morphology. The obtained results show that the bending energy demonstrated high consistency and sensitivity in capturing nuclei irregularities compared to other shape-based metrics, with the highest mean value of 6.71. Nuclei object with a maximum value of bending energy 8.69 exhibit significant boundary variations with increased area and a minimum value of 2 with smooth curvatures. The statistical analysis of the bending energy variations across four replicates resulted in mean bending energies of 6.7, 6.8, 6.5, and 6.5 which indicates the replicate matching morphologies with confirmed reproducibility. Thus, bending energy has proved to be an effective and reliable parameter for measuring the nuclear membrane irregularities in lung cancer cell lines due to chemical or genetic perturbations.Clinical relevance- This irregularity measure can be employed for biocompatibility testing in the standardization of biomedical devices.