The progress in image acquisition technique provides life sciences with an abundance of data. Image analysis facilitates the assessment. The actin cytoskeleton plays a crucial role in understanding the behavior of osteoblastic cells on biomaterials. It can be visualized by confocal laser scanning microscopy. In these images it appears as a dense network of bright ridges which is so far only qualitatively assessed. For quantification there is a need for ridge detection techniques which provide a geometrical description of this graph-like feature. The state of the art methods do not cope with the systematical degradation of the brightness information. This paper presents the key part of a ridge tracking technique, which makes more efficient use of context information. Two random models confirm the accuracy and highlight the area for further improvement of the method.

Date Published: 12 July 2011
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8000, Tenth International Conference on Quality Control by Artificial Vision, 800006 (12 July 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.895269

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8000:
Tenth International Conference on Quality Control by Artificial Vision
Jean-Charles Pinoli; Johan Debayle; Yann Gavet; Frédéric Gruy; Claude Lambert, Editor(s)