title: Structure enhancement diffusion and contour extraction for electron tomography of mitochondria.
abstract: The interpretation and measurement of the architectural organization of mitochondria depend heavily upon the availability of good software tools for filtering, segmenting, extracting, measuring, and classifying the features of interest. Images of mitochondria contain many flow-like patterns and they are usually corrupted by large amounts of noise. Thus, it is necessary to enhance them by denoising and closing interrupted structures. We introduce a new approach based on anisotropic nonlinear diffusion and bilateral filtering for electron tomography of mitochondria. It allows noise removal and structure closure at certain scales, while preserving both the orientation and magnitude of discontinuities without the need for threshold switches. This technique facilitates image enhancement for subsequent segmentation, contour extraction, and improved visualization of the complex and intricate mitochondrial morphology. We perform the extraction of the structure-defining contours by employing a variational level set formulation. The propagating front for this approach is an approximate signed distance function which does not require expensive re-initialization. The behavior of the combined approach is tested for visualizing the structure of a HeLa cell mitochondrion and the results we obtain are very promising.
authors.affiliation: Computational Science Research Center, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-1245, USA. carlos.bazan@sdsu.edu
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bazán
authors.forename: Michelle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Miller
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Blomgren
mesh_terms: D004058:Diffusion; D055032:Electron Microscope Tomography / Q000379:methods*; D006367:HeLa Cells; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008928:Mitochondria / Q000737:chemistry*