Abstract
An increasingly common component of molecular diagnostics is the analysis of protein localization at the single-cell level using fluorescent microscopy. Manually extracting quantitative data from a large population of cells is unreasonably time-consuming and existing automatic systems are rather limited.
Here we present an integrated image analysis software system for high-throughput segmentation of cells and corresponding nuclei. The system is composed of robust image enhancement, followed by multispectral identification of putative cells using a statistical model (Gaussian Mixture Model) approach, followed by cross-spectral watershed that effectively segments clustered cells, and finally, a rule based refinement using statistical morphological attributes of the cells.
The robustness and accuracy of the system have been tested on artificial fluorescent beads, as well as on hand segmented and visually inspected images. Lastly, we compare our algorithm to state-of-the-art systems and show it does better on most performance parameters.
To date, the system has been used to accumulate data from over 300 million segmented cells each expressing specific set of genomic alterations.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the entire NovellusDx team which run the biological experiments and the deep discussions with regards to biological parameters to exclude cells. The authors would also like to thank Prof Zohar Yakhini for his careful review and insightful comments.
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Golbstein, J., Tocker, Y., Sharivkin, R., Tarcic, G., Vidne, M. (2017). A Novel High-Throughput Multispectral Cell Segmentation Algorithm. In: Valdés Hernández, M., González-Castro, V. (eds) Medical Image Understanding and Analysis. MIUA 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 723. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60964-5_66
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60964-5_66
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