Variational level-set with gaussian shape model for cell segmentation

In analysis of microscopy based images, a major challenge lies in splitting apart cells that appear to overlap because they are too densely packed. This task is complicated by the physics of the image acquisition that causes large variations in pixel intensities. Each image typically contains thousands of cells with each cell having a different orientation, size and intensity histogram. In this paper, a spatial intensity model of a nucleus is incorporated into to aid cell segmentation from microscopy datasets. An energy functional is defined and with it the spatial intensity distribution of a nuclei is modeled as a Gaussian distribution with constant intensity background. Experimental results on a variety of microscopic data validate its effectiveness.