Detection of cell nuclei on sequences of confocal microscopy images

Abstract

This paper presents a method to perform automated detection of cell nuclei. The method starts with a filtering operation aiming at enhancing the image areas that may correspond to nuclei. The enhanced image local maxima can be associated with the potential locations of cell nuclei, but the filter responses also give additional positional information that can be related with nucleus borders, thus allowing the approximation of each nucleus contour by an ellipse. Afterwards, an analysis of the detected areas allows their validation or removal, as well as the adjustment of the final contours in order to facilitate the splitting of some nuclei that were overlapped because they belong to different cell layers.