Outline-etching image segmentation reveals enhanced cell chirality through intercellular alignment.

ABSTRACT: Cells cultured on micropatterns exhibit a chiral orientation, which may underlie the development of left-right asymmetry in tissue microarchitectures. To investigate this phenomenon, fluorescence staining of nuclei has been used to reveal such orientation. However, for images with high cell density, analysis is difficult because of the overlapping nuclei. Here, we report an image processing method that can acquire cell orientations within dense cell populations. After initial separation based on Boolean addition of binarized images using global and adaptive thresholds, the overlapping nucleus contours in the binarized images were segmented by iteratively etching the outlines of nuclei, which allowed the orientations of each cell to be extracted from densely packed cell clusters. In applyin

SUBMITTER: Huang Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6220999 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature