title: A differential structure approach to membrane segmentation in electron tomography.
abstract: Electron tomography allows three-dimensional visualization of cellular landscapes in molecular detail. Segmentation is a paramount stage for the interpretation of the reconstructed tomograms. Although several computational approaches have been proposed, none has prevailed as a generic method and thus segmentation through manual annotation is still a common choice. In this work we introduce a segmentation method targeted at membranes, which define the natural limits of compartments within biological specimens. Our method is based on local differential structure and on a Gaussian-like membrane model. First, it isolates information through scale-space and finds potential membrane-like points at a local scale. Then, the structural information is integrated at a global scale to yield the definite segmentation. We show and validate the performance of the algorithm on a number of tomograms under different experimental conditions.
authors: Supercomputing and Algorithms Group, Associated Unit CSIC-UAL, University of Almeria, 04120 Almeria, Spain.
authors: Antonio
authors: A
authors: Martinez-Sanchez
authors: Inmaculada
authors: I
authors: Garcia
authors: Jose-Jesus
authors: JJ
authors: Fernandez