title: TISSUE LEVEL SEGMENTATION AND TRACKING OF BIOLOGICAL STRUCTURES IN MICROSCOPIC IMAGES BASED ON DENSITY MAPS.
abstract: During embryogenesis, cells coordinate to form geometric arrangements. These arrangements are initially noticed as stereotypical clumps of cells that further divide to form a rigorous structure with a high density of cells. In this work, we explore density-based segmentation and tracking of cellular structures as observed in microscopy images. Using a new modified form of the Mumford-Shah energy functional, we derived a variational level-set for density-based segmentation. The novelty of the work lies in evolving an initialized contour that represents a salient structure on density maps to automatically generate novel cell structures upon convergence. We validate our methods and show results on confocal ear images of the zebrafish embryo.
authors.affiliation: Harvard Medical School, Department of Systems Biology, 200 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA - 02115, USA.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mosaliganti
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gelas
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gouaillard
authors.forename: Sean G
authors.initials: SG
authors.lastname: Megason