Segmentation of cellular structures in actin tagged fluorescence confocal microscopy images

Abstract

The paper reports on a novel method for reconstruction of cellular features including cell nuclei and cellular boundaries from actin tagged fluorescence confocal microscopy images. Such reconstruction can provide spatial context for subsequent quantitative analysis of changes to actin organisation and cell morphology in both controlled and stressed cell cultures. The proposed method is fully automatic and is formulated within active contour multiphase level set framework. The derived level set evolution PDEs combine previously proposed curvature and advection flows with propagation flow defined by specially designed set of geodesic distance maps. Additionally the proposed PDEs include additional components to impose known inclusion/exclusion topological constraints between cellular structures. The paper gives an overview of the proposed methodology as well as reports on initial results obtained for monolayer of human prostate cells (PNT2) culture visualised using acting tagged fluorescence confocal microscopy.