Quantification and segmentation of progenitor cells in time-lapse microscopy

Abstract

The analysis of progenitor cell proliferation in image sequences helps in understanding the formation of organ, identifying reason for decease and cell based therapies. We introduce a technique using morphological techniques for cell segmentation and extended h-maxima transformation for finding position of the cell in the frame. The over segmentation problem of watershed algorithms is reduced by morphologic erosion, allowing for more accurate quantification, even in low contrast images. The number of cells and the average cell size could be determined in the image. Application of this method to a difficult dataset allowed us to identify 96% of the cells in the image.