A Subjective Surfaces Based Segmentation for the Reconstruction of Biological Cell Shape

Abstract

Confocal laser scanning microscopy provides nondestructive in vivo imaging to capture specific structures that have been fluorescently labeled, such as cell nuclei and membranes, throughout early Zebrafish embryogenesis. With this strategy we aim at reconstruct in time and space the biological structures of the embryo during the organogenesis. In this paper we propose a method to extract bounding surfaces at the cellular-organization level from microscopy images. The shape reconstruction of membranes and nuclei is obtained first with an automatic identification of the cell center and then a subjective surfaces based segmentation is used to extract the bounding surfaces. 2 IMAGE ACQUISITION AND PREPROCESSING High resolution time-lapse microscopy imaging of living organisms is best achieved by multiphoton laser microscopy (MLSM) (Gratton et al., 2001). It allows