title: Coupled Segmentation of Nuclear and Membrane-bound Macromolecules through Voting and Multiphase Level Set.
abstract: Membrane-bound macromolecules play an important role in tissue architecture and cell-cell communication, and is regulated by almost one-third of the genome. At the optical scale, one group of membrane proteins expresses themselves as linear structures along the cell surface boundaries, while others are sequestered; and this paper targets the former group. Segmentation of these membrane proteins on a cell-by-cell basis enables the quantitative assessment of localization for comparative analysis. However, such membrane proteins typically lack continuity, and their intensity distributions are often very heterogeneous; moreover, nuclei can form large clump, which further impedes the quantification of membrane signals on a cell-by-cell basis. To tackle these problems, we introduce a three-step process to (i) regularize the membrane signal through iterative tangential voting, (ii) constrain the location of surface proteins by nuclear features, where clumps of nuclei are segmented through a delaunay triangulation approach, and (iii) assign membrane-bound macromolecules to individual cells through an application of multi-phase geodesic level-set. We have validated our method using both synthetic data and a dataset of 200 images, and are able to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with superior performance.
authors.affiliation: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720.
authors.forename: Hang
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Electronic Science & Technology of China.
authors.forename: Quan
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Wen
authors.affiliation: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720 ; Biomedical Engineering Department, University of Nevada, Reno 89557.
authors.forename: Bahram
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Parvin
keywords: Segmentation of membrane-bound macromolecules; multi-phase level set; nuclear segmentation; perceptual grouping; tissue architecture