An algorithm is developed to determine the significant junction points of branching tubules during embryonic lung development. This algorithm involves a multidisciplinary approach to preprocessing the input data so that it is ready for such analysis. In addition to specific biochemical techniques employed (such as fluorescent staining), a number of image processing methods are utilized to remove noise and insignificant structures in the image. The final junction analysis is performed on the skeleton of the major branches using a variation of the medial axis transform. The significance of this research is both to enable searches in digital libraries of such biological data for branching during lung development as well as indicating to the biologist the important sites to consider for further investigation.

Date Published: 6 October 1998
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 3521, Machine Vision Systems for Inspection and Metrology VII, (6 October 1998); doi: 10.1117/12.326981

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3521:
Machine Vision Systems for Inspection and Metrology VII
Bruce G. Batchelor; John W. V. Miller; Susan Snell Solomon, Editor(s)