Reconstruction of Cellular Biological Structures from Optical Microscopy Data

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 2008-07, Vol.14 (4), p.863-876
• Main Authors: Mosaliganti, K., Cooper, L., Sharp, R., Machiraju, R., Leone, G., Kun Huang, Saltz, J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biomedical imaging; Biomedical optical imaging; Cancer; Cellular; Computer Graphics; Diseases; High-resolution imaging; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted - methods; Image Processing and Computer Vision; Image reconstruction; Image Representation; Image segmentation; Image-based rendering; Medical; Microscopy, Confocal - methods; Optical imaging; Optical microscopy; partitioning; Pattern Recognition, Automated - methods; Reconstruction; Region growing; Segmentation; Shape; Size and shape; Studies; Subcellular Fractions - ultrastructure; Three dimensional
• ISSN: 1077-2626; 1941-0506
• DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2008.30

Developments in optical microscopy imaging have generated large high-resolution data sets that have spurred medical researchers to conduct investigations into mechanisms of disease, including cancer at cellular and subcellular levels. The work reported here demonstrates that a suitable methodology can be conceived that isolates modality-dependent effects from the larger segmentation task and that 3D reconstructions can be cognizant of shapes as evident in the available 2D planar images. In the current realization, a method based on active geodesic contours is first deployed to counter the ambiguity that exists in separating overlapping cells on the image plane. Later, another segmentation effort based on a variant of Voronoi tessellations improves the delineation of the cell boundaries using a Bayesian formulation. In the next stage, the cells are interpolated across the third dimension thereby mitigating the poor structural correlation that exists in that dimension. We deploy our methods on three separate data sets obtained from light, confocal, and phase-contrast microscopy and validate the results appropriately.