Segmentation of neural stem cells/neurospheres in high content brightfield microscopy images using localized level sets

Abstract

Neural stem cells and neural progenitors are early nervous system cells that form neurospheres when propagated in vitro. We study changes in growth using brightfield images to understand the effects of drugs. The image quality is generally poor, imposing challenges for automatic analysis. Level-set segmentation methods are able to handle topology changes but require close initializations for accurate and efficient results. Global level-set methods using single image-wide optimization objective functions are difficult to cope with large illumination and shading changes. We propose to adopt Hough transform to initialize localized level-sets for cell segmentation. Experimental results on 480 images with 738 neurospheres show that our proposed method performs best over existing level-set methods without appropriate initial contours.