Effective apoptotic cell extraction from video microscopy images

The paper presents an automatic extraction method for apoptotic cells from video microscopy images. Apoptosis, which is also called programmed cell death, is well-known to be closely related to various diseases. Detection of apoptotic cells can help scientists to study apoptosis and to reveal its mechanism, so that new medical technologies can be exploited. Scientists often analyze the images acquired by video microscopes with some sort of image analysis tools. However, it is usual that the performance of the tools is not enough to detect thoroughly the apoptotic cells, thus researchers have to detect apoptotic cells in the images manually. The paper proposes a method, based on their inherent shape features, to detect apoptotic cells automatically. The proposed method is applied to real world video microscopy images containing apoptotic cells and the results demonstrate its high performance to extract the cells successfully.