title: Improving segmentation of 3D touching cell nuclei using flow tracking on surface meshes.
abstract: Automatic segmentation of touching cell nuclei in 3D microscopy images is of great importance in bioimage informatics and computational biology. This paper presents a novel method for improving 3D touching cell nuclei segmentation. Given binary touching nuclei by the method in Li et al. (2007), our method herein consists of several steps: surface mesh reconstruction and curvature information estimation; direction field diffusion on surface meshes; flow tracking on surface meshes; and projection of surface mesh segmentation to volumetric images. The method is validated on both synthesised and real 3D touching cell nuclei images, demonstrating its validity and effectiveness.
authors.affiliation: School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China. gli@mail.nwpu.edu.cn
authors.forename: Gang
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Guo
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D002467:Cell Nucleus / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D004058:Diffusion; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D015027:Zebrafish