An extraction method for apoptotic cells from videomicroscopy images

An automatic extraction method for apoptotic cells from videomicroscopy images is proposed. The edges of the apoptotic cells in the microscopy images are gentle and thick because of the fluorescence enzyme used for the observation; their shapes are distorted circles; the apoptotic cells also neighbor on the other cells. Since the apoptotic cells cannot be easily extracted, they are generally extracted by visual recognition. Therefore, we propose a method to automatically extract only apoptotic cells based on shape features. The proposed method, in the first stage, extracts areas with strong possibilities that apoptotic cells are included. In the second stage, the method applies shape‐feature analysis to the extracted areas. By using these two stages, the proposed method can accurately extract the apoptotic cells without increasing computational costs. Further, when videomicroscopy images are acquired as an image sequence, the proposed method can extract the cells more accurately by comparing the extraction results in neighboring frames. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 37(3): 32–40, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.20410