Morphological evaluation of embryo viability

Abstract

Determining the viability of livestock-embryos is an important procedure in minimizing the economic risk arising in case of transplantation of ‘engineered’ embryos into recipient animals. This evaluation is carried out at various segmentation phases of the embryos. In this paper we present a possible way to ease and/or automate the evaluation of embryo-viability for embryos being in their 8-cell stadium. We mention some grayscale morphological filtering techniques that has proved to be useful for the image segmentation in this stadium of the embryo segmentation. Meaningful circles (or circle-arcs) are fitted to the silhouette of the embryo and that of its constituent cells. Based on these circles morphological indices are calculated which are reported to be useful for the viability check.