Abstract
Atomic force acoustic microscopy (AFAM) can provide surface morphology and internal structures of the samples simultaneously, with broad potential in non-destructive imaging of cells. As the output of AFAM, morphology and acoustic images reflect different features of the cells, respectively. However, there are few studies about the fusion of these images. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to fuse these two types of images based on grayscale inversion and selection of best-fit intensity. First, grayscale inversion is used to transform the morphology image into a series of inverted images with different average intensities. Then, the max rule is applied to fuse those inverted images and acoustic images, and a group of pre-fused images is obtained. Finally, a selector is employed to extract and export the expected image with the best-fit intensity among those pre-fused images. The expected image can preserve both the acoustic details of the cells and the background’s gradient information well, which benefits the analysis of the cell’s subcellular structure. The experiments’ results demonstrated that our method could provide the clearest boundaries between the cells and background, and preserve most details from the morphology and acoustic images according to quantitative comparisons, including standard deviation, mutual information, Xydeas and Petrovic metric, feature mutual information, and visual information fidelity fusion.
Highlights
High-resolution and nondestructive subcellular imaging instruments ensure that observing the activities of cells accessible is always on demand in biology development
As the outputs of Atomic force acoustic microscope (AFAM), morphology images and acoustic images provide different information: morphology image provides the topography features of the cell by detecting the adhesive between probe and cell, i.e., the atomic force microscope (AFM) image, while the acoustic image shows the phase of the acoustic waves at the same position, which reflects all contributions in the path to make the
Our method’s fusion result is much different from the others, which is the result of grayscale inversion applied to morphology images
Summary
High-resolution and nondestructive subcellular imaging instruments ensure that observing the activities of cells accessible is always on demand in biology development. In the 1990s, the introduction of an atomic force microscope (AFM) [1] provided a high-resolution and non-destructive measurement tool at macroscopic levels [2], which is a powerful platform for biological samples, from single molecules to living cells, to be visualized and manipulated [3]. As a near-field microscope, AFM has high resolution in the near field, but it is difficult to detect the inner structures [4]. Atomic force acoustic microscope (AFAM) is a nanoscale microscope that provides ultra-high-resolution images of the sample without destroying the intracellular structures [5]. It is developed by combining AFM with an ultrasound imaging module. As the outputs of AFAM, morphology images and acoustic images provide different information: morphology image provides the topography features of the cell by detecting the adhesive between probe and cell, i.e., the AFM image, while the acoustic image shows the phase of the acoustic waves at the same position, which reflects all contributions in the path to make the
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