Authors:
Pedro L. Rodrigues
1
;
Sara Granja
2
;
António Moreira
1
;
Nuno Rodrigues
3
and
João L. Vilaça
4
Affiliations:
1
University of Minho and PT Government Associate Laboratory, Portugal
;
2
PT Government Associate Laboratory, Portugal
;
3
Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave and University of Minho, Portugal
;
4
University of Minho and Polytechnic Institute of Cávado and Ave, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Branching Morphogenesis, Lung Development, Image Segmentation, Region-based Algorithms.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Applications and Services
;
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Features Extraction
;
Image and Video Analysis
;
Medical Image Applications
;
Segmentation and Grouping
Abstract:
Recently, regulating mechanisms of branching morphogenesis of fetal lung rat explants have been an essential tool for molecular research. The development of accurate and reliable segmentation techniques may be essential to improve research outcomes. This work presents an image processing method to measure the perimeter and area of lung branches on fetal rat explants. The algorithm starts by reducing the noise corrupting the image with a pre-processing stage. The outcome is input to a watershed operation that automatically segments the image into primitive regions. Then, an image pixel is selected within the lung explant epithelial, allowing a region growing between neighbouring watershed regions. This growing process is controlled by a statistical distribution of each region. When compared with manual segmentation, the results show the same tendency for lung development. High similarities were harder to obtain in the last two days of culture, due to the increased number of peripheral
airway buds and complexity of lung architecture. However, using semiautomatic measurements, the standard deviation was lower and the results between independent researchers were more coherent.
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