Tissue level segmentation and tracking of biological structures in microscopic images based on density maps

During embryogenesis, cells coordinate to form geometric arrangements. These arrangements are initially noticed as stereotypic clumps of cells that further divide to form a rigorous structure with a high density of cells. In this work, we explore density-based segmentation and tracking of cellular structures as observed in microscopy images. Using a new modified form of the Mumford-Shah energy functional, we derived a variational level-set for density-based segmentation. The novelty of the work lies in evolving an initialized contour that represents a salient structure on density maps to automatically generate novel cell structures upon convergence. We validate our methods and show results on confocal ear images of the zebrafish embryo.