剪切力环境下的血管平滑肌细胞图像分割技术研究(英文)

Cell segmentation of vascular smooth muscle cells under shear stress using image processing

定量分析血管平滑肌细胞VSMCs(Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells)在剪切力作用下的形态变化有助于理解VSMCs的生长机制以及病理学研究.图像分割在图像分析中扮演着重要角色,但同时也是图像处理流程中最困难的步骤.针对培养在平板流室中的VSMCs相互交叠的细胞图像,作者首先分析了这类细胞图像的特征,随后提出了一种具有四个步骤的图像分割方法,分别是图像预处理、照明校正、数学形态学重建和分水岭转换.实验结果证明,按照这种方法分割细胞图像,取得了较好的效果.

Quantitatively analysis of the morphological response to shear stress on vascular smooth muscle cells （VSMCs） will facilitate understanding the growth mechanism and pathology of VSMCs. Image segmentation plays a key role in image analysis and is also the most difficult step in image processing pipeline. In this paper, firstly, the characteristics of the images of VSMCs cultured in the parallel plate chamber is analyzed in detail, then one segmentation strategy which has four steps based on watershed operators is proposed. Image preprocessing, illumination correcting, mathematical morphological reconstruction, watershed transformation are implemented according to the set sequence. The result shows a better separation cells from background can be achieved by using this method. At the end the result of image segmentation is analyzed and discussed.