title: Clustered nuclei splitting via curvature information and gray-scale distance transform.
abstract: Clusters or clumps of cells or nuclei are frequently observed in two dimensional images of thick tissue sections. Correct and accurate segmentation of overlapping cells and nuclei is important for many biological and biomedical applications. Many existing algorithms split clumps through the binarization of the input images; therefore, the intensity information of the original image is lost during this process. In this paper, we present a curvature information, gray scale distance transform, and shortest path splitting line-based algorithm which can make full use of the concavity and image intensity information to find out markers, each of which represents an individual object, and detect accurate splitting lines between objects using shortest path and junction adjustment. The proposed algorithm is tested on both synthetic and real nuclei images. Experiment results show that the performance of the proposed method is better than that of marker-controlled watershed method and ellipse fitting method.
authors: School of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of New South Wales, Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia.|CSIRO Computational Informatics, Locked Bag 17, North Ryde, NSW 2113, Australia.
authors: Chao
authors: C
authors: Zhang
authors: CSIRO Computational Informatics, Locked Bag 17, North Ryde, NSW 2113, Australia.
authors: Changming
authors: C
authors: Sun
authors: Bioinformatics Institute, 30 Biopolis Street, #07-01, Matrix, 138671, Singapore.
authors: Ran
authors: R
authors: Su
authors: Aizu Research Cluster for Medical Engineering and Informatics, Research Center for Advanced Information Science and Technology, The University of Aizu, Fukushima, Japan.
authors: Tuan D
authors: TD
authors: Pham
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002467:Cell Nucleus / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D002477:Cells / Q000166:cytology / Q000648:ultrastructure; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods
keywords: Cell nuclei; clump splitting; curvature information based weighting; curvature weighting; grey-scale distance transform based on summation; image segmentation; shortest path