Segmentation of densely populated cell nuclei from confocal image stacks using 3D non-parametric shape priors

An approach to jointly estimate 3D shapes and poses of stained nuclei from confocal microscopy images, using statistical prior information, is presented. Extracting nuclei boundaries from our experimental images of cell migration is challenging due to clustered nuclei and variations in their shapes. This issue is formulated as a maximum a posteriori estimation problem. By incorporating statistical prior models of 3D nuclei shapes into level set functions, the active contour evolutions applied on the images is constrained. A 3D alignment algorithm is developed to build the training databases and to match contours obtained from the images to them. To address the issue of aligning the model over multiple clustered nuclei, a watershed-like technique is used to detect and separate clustered regions prior to active contour evolution. Our method is tested on confocal images of endothelial cells in microfluidic devices, compared with existing approaches.