Microfluidic environment and tracking analysis for the observation of Artemia Franciscana

The movement of small animals in well-defined environments is increasingly used in ecotoxicology as a sensitive indicator of water contamination with toxicants. This work describes a framework for the analysis of Artermia franciscana within miniaturised chambers. This work combines: (a) a proof-ofconcept miniaturised Lab-on-a-Chip (LOC) platform where any changes in swimming patterns exhibited by Artemia franciscana can be related to the toxicity of the environment with (b) a pipeline of image processing steps for the movement analysis of video sequences of test specimens. The analysis pipeline is semiautomatic as it allows a user to define a region of interest and confirm intensity levels that are used for two-level hysteresis segmentation. Tracking is automatic, and a large number of statistical measurements and visualisation tools are provided. In addition, proofreading tools for validation of tracks are provided to link, break or delete tracks. The software consists of Matlab® m-files and is available in the website http://www.objecttrack.org.uk/.