Spatiotemporal modeling of host-pathogen interactions using level-set method.

Abstract

Phenotyping host-pathogen interactions is crucial for understanding infectious diseases in plants. Traditionally, this process has relied on visual assessments or manual measurements, which can be subjective and labor-intensive. Recent advances in image processing and mathematical modeling enable the precise and high-throughput phenotyping of plant symptoms. Among many challenges, considering local deformations of symptoms and host tissues is difficult in plant pathology. In this study, we address this question using a level-set method. We propose an innovative approach in plant pathology that allows one to reconstruct the continuous deformation of leaf and lesion contours from daily image sequences of inoculated leaves. We consider pea stipules inoculated by the fungal pathogen Peyronellaea pinodes as an example pathosystem. After extracting lesion and stipule contours from daily visible images, we use the level-set method to track their deformations within image sequences. The visual assessment of model adequacy, along with the Jaccard Index and relative error metrics, demonstrated strong overall performance. Results showed a gradual decrease in model accuracy over time for leaf contours, while lesion contours exhibited a higher relative error on the first targeted date. These findings highlight the robustness of our method while identifying specific challenges in early lesion detection. We finish by discussing the interest in this method based on partial differential equations for the study of host-pathogen interactions, especially the development of original phenotyping methods in plant pathology.

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