Segmentation of Time-Lapse Images with Focus on Microscopic Images of Cells

Abstract

Phase contrast is a noninvasive microscopy imaging technique that is widely used in time-lapse imaging of cells. Resulting images however contain some optical artifacts, which makes automated processing by computer difficult. We developed a novel algorithm for cell segmentation. It is based on processing of time differences between images and combination of thresholding, blurring and morphological operations. We tested the algorithm on four different cell types acquired by two different microscopes. We evaluated the precision of segmentation against the manual segmentation by human operator and compared also with other methods. Our algorithm is simple, fast and shows accuracy that is comparable to manual segmentation. In addition it can correctly separate the dead from living cells.

Segmentation Method of Time-Lapse Microscopy Images with the Focus on Biocompatibility Assessment

“…The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section describes in detail our segmentation algorithm, which was previously outlined in Soukup et al (2013). The following sections provide evaluation of the accuracy of our algorithm (Numerical Evaluation and Evaluation by Human Experts sections) and offer application in biotoxicity assessment (Single Cell Case and Estimation of LT 50 sections).…”