Myofibril image processing for studying sarcomere dynamics

An image processing method is presented for automatic measurement of sarcomere length from microscopic images of myofibrils in striated muscle. A consistent measurement of populations of sarcomeres is important to the quantitative understanding of the dynamics of sarcomere shortening in response to changes in physicochemical environment. The method developed is a knowledge-based approach consisting of segmentation of individual A-bands and extraction of myofibrils based on the structural alignment of A-bands. Experimental results are given to illustrate its performance