Automatic Segmentation of High-Throughput RNAi Fluorescent Cellular Images

High throughput genome-wide RNAi screening is emerging as an essential tool to assist biologists in understanding complex cellular processes. The large number of images produced in each study make manual analysis intractable, hence automatic cellular image analysis becomes an urgent need, where segmentation is the first and one of the most important steps. In this paper, a fully automatic method for segmentation of cells from genome-wide RNAi screening images is proposed. Nuclei are first extracted from the DNA channel by using a modified watershed algorithm. Cells are then extracted by modeling the interaction between them as well as combining both gradient and region information in the Actin and Rac channels. A new energy functional is formulated based on a novel interaction model for segmenting tightly clustered cells with significant intensity variance and specific phenotypes. The energy functional is minimized by using a multiphase level set method, which leads to a highly effecti...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TITB
• Authors: Pingkun Yan, Xiaobo Zhou, Mubarak Shah, Stephen T. C. Wong
• Keywords: Cell Segmentation Method, Energy Functional, Genome-wide Rnai, TITB 2008