Automated Analysis of Muscle X-ray Diffraction Imaging with MCMC.

High-speed X-ray diffraction is the state-of-the-art approach to understanding protein structure and dynamics in living tissues, especially muscles. Existing analytic approaches, however, require expert hand-digitization to extract parameters of interest. This produces repeatable measurements, but remains subjective and does not offer information on the precision of the measured parameters or strict reproducibility of analyzed data. We developed a processing tool chain, which first segments the diffraction image into regions of interest using highly conserved features and then samples the possible parameter values with a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. Our approach produces an automated, reproducible, objective estimate of relevant image parameters.