title: Cell segmentation by multi-resolution analysis and maximum likelihood estimation (MAMLE).
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Cell imaging is becoming an indispensable tool for cell and molecular biology research. However, most processes studied are stochastic in nature, and require the observation of many cells and events. Ideally, extraction of information from these images ought to rely on automatic methods. Here, we propose a novel segmentation method, MAMLE, for detecting cells within dense clusters.
  
  
  METHODS
  MAMLE executes cell segmentation in two stages. The first relies on state of the art filtering technique, edge detection in multi-resolution with morphological operator and threshold decomposition for adaptive thresholding. From this result, a correction procedure is applied that exploits maximum likelihood estimate as an objective function. Also, it acquires morphological features from the initial segmentation for constructing the likelihood parameter, after which the final segmentation is obtained.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We performed an empirical evaluation that includes sample images from different imaging modalities and diverse cell types. The new method attained very high (above 90%) cell segmentation accuracy in all cases. Finally, its accuracy was compared to several existing methods, and in all tests, MAMLE outperformed them in segmentation accuracy.
authors.forename: Sharif
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Chowdhury
authors.forename: Meenakshisundaram
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kandhavelu
authors.forename: Olli
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Yli-Harja
authors.forename: Andre S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Ribeiro
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002455:Cell Division / Q000502:physiology*; D004926:Escherichia coli / Q000235:genetics; D005822:Genetic Vectors; D049452:Green Fluorescent Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D018613:Microscopy, Confocal; D008858:Microscopy, Phase-Contrast; D012984:Software; D013211:Staphylococcus aureus / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D049452:Green Fluorescent Proteins