Synthesis and analysis of 3D-images generated from contiguous slice-images obtained by confocal laser scanning microscopy

An approach is described which consists of a combination of molecular probes and associated detection systems, confocal laser scanning microscopy, special segmentation and visualization techniques, and a workstation based on a transputer network for the synthesis and analysis of 3D images from a stack of contiguous slice images. Based on a slice-by-slice approach the proposed technique identifies 3D objects and transforms them into abstract data structures such as medial axis representations (MARs) or surface net representations. Solid modeling procedures then permit the visualization and quantification of the cell components described by such data structures. The main advantage of this setup is that each 3D object in the image volume is described by a unique MAR